Wash Me Savior, or I Die

The above is a very memorable line from a great hymn, Rock of Ages. The full verse reads as follows:

Nothing in my hand I bring,
Simply to Thy cross I cling;
Naked, come to Thee for dress;
Helpless, look to Thee for grace;
Foul, I to the fountain fly,--
Wash me, Savior, or I die!

The verse is very powerful (as is the rest of the song) because of its imagery--a person acknowledging that he has nothing to bring to salvation and knows that he must cling to the Cross and that Christ must clothe him with His righteousness. But before this is obtained, a washing must take place in the fountain which is Christ's blood that was shed for us.

I have been meaning to post on this topic for a while, only because in C.S. Lewis' The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (a book in the Chronicles of Narnia series) there is a amazing illustration of this. To set the background, in this book, Edmund and Lucy, two of the original Pevensie children who visited Narnia in The Lion, Witch and the Wardrobe have returned to Narnia with their cousin, Eustace, who is most certainly a brat in the kindest sense of the word. He is self-centered and only concerned about what he can get out of Narnia. In this scene, Eustace has wandered off from the landing party and to a cave.

But as he got to the mouth of the cave, he saw what we would know as a dragon, which came to the edge of the lake to drink, twitched, giving one last breath and died. Edmund almost laughed out loud in relief, and went inside the cave when it began to rain. When he went in the cave, what did he find but loads of treasure--in fact he had found a bracelet which was too big for his wrist but slid it up past his elbow (since he thought he could take some of this treasure for himself). Then he went to sleep and a strange thing happened....

He awoke to a great pain in his arm, and he noticed that the pain had become strangely tight. He moved to take it off and was shocked at what he saw coming from his right and his left: dragon arms moved across his sight line as he moved his arms. Of course, he thought that he was now between two dragons that surrounded him as he slept, but he saw that smoke was coming out of his own nostrils: he had turned into a dragon.

Eustace, after realizing this, only now wanted his friends and felt bad for how he had treated them, resigning himself to the life of a dragon. And then one night he was visited by a lion (those reading the books would know him to be Aslan), and the lion prompted Eustace to follow him to a well:

But the lion told me that I must undress first...I was just going to say that I couldn't undress because I hadn't any clothes on when I suddenly thought that dragons are the snaky sort of things and snakes can cast their skins...So I started scratching myself and my scales began coming off all over the place...my whole skin peeled off beautifully...it was lying beside me, looking rather nasty.

Eustace tried this several times, but discovered each time as he went down to bathe in the well that each attempt to scratch the skin off had been unsuccessful. The lion soon spoke:

"You will have to let me undress you."

Fear ran fast through Eustace as the lion approached him with his claws, but Eustace's desperation won over his fear:

I was pretty afraid of his claws, I can tell you, but the I was pretty nearly desperate now. The very first tear he (the lion) made was so deep that I thought it had gone right through my heart. And when he began pulling the skin off, it hurt worse than anything I've ever felt...He peeled the beastly stuff off just as I thought I had done it myself the other three times, only it hadn't hurt--and there it was lying on the grass: only ever so much thicker, and darker, and knobbly-looking than the others had been.

The lion then grabbed Eustace and threw him into the water, waiting a few moments, then dressing Eustace in new clothes.
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What a great illustration this is of the concept of our rebirth in Christ! Before we come to Christ, we may be prompted by some sense of our own self-righteousness or morality to reform ourselves and then think ourselves better (such as Eustace trying to scrape his dragon skin off). But when we come to Christ, we realize that we are no different than we were in the innermost depths of our soul, and there is a washing that only Christ can do when he washes our hearts (in regeneration and justification), replacing a heart of stone with a heart of flesh. Christ sees our inner wickedness that must be redeemed that we cannot see (or choose not to see) in the mirror.

Without this washing by Christ, we are still under God's wrath and are justly condemned to die for our sins, just as the other dragon died in the story above that Eustace met before he became a dragon.

Christian, rejoice today in the new creation that you are and the new clothes that Christ has given you in the salvation that He has called you to!