Life Is A Highway
When is the best time to clean a car: before a road trip or after? It’s an easy answer: both. But car folks of all stripes know the feeling of carefully cleaning a car inside and out before a long drive, and the pure rage when the first mosquito loses its lunch (and everything else) on the windshield. Or when a puddle comes out of nowhere and leaves its filth in and around the fender liner. You knew the car would get dirty. But it feels personal.
Wouldn’t it be great if cars could stay clean? Imagine washing your car using some special technique, or with some fizzy new soap, that actually protects it from anything – absolutely anything – the road throws at it.
The Bible promises such a cleaning, but unfortunately not for your car. It’s for something a lot more important: you. In a prophecy describing God’s promise to exert the fullness of his power to save, repair, restore, and polish people, Isaiah describes the highway God would build to return these restored people back to him:
“And a highway will be there; it will be called the Way of Holiness. The unclean will not journey on it; it will be for those who walk in that Way; wicked fools will not go about on it. No lion will be there, nor will any ferocious beast get up on it; they will not be found there. But only the redeemed will walk there, and the ransomed of the Lord will return.” (Isaiah 35:8-10a)
Whenever the Bible talks about people who are “unclean” or “wicked fools,” guilt pierces the heart and says “It’s talking about you. You aren’t clean enough.” Nothing could be further from the truth. Redemption and cleanliness were given to you 2,000 years before you were even born. Jesus earned it by dying and rising again for you. You’re spotless, inside and out. Every single day, God is carrying you along his highway straight toward him.
The cleanliness God gave you is sufficient for the journey. Sure, there’s plenty of filth in the world, but none of it sticks to you now. When you return to God – when you breathe your last breath or when God returns and draws you to him – you’ll be completely spotless. No bug guts on the bumper or mud caked in the wheel wells. No rock chips kicked up from someone ahead of you. No streaked windshield from morning dew. No punctured sidewalls from nails and screws that seem to sprout up like weeds in parking lots and alleys. No dust or pollen (or snow) on the roof. No scraped running boards from a section of rutted gravel road.
You have everything you need to be drawn to God along this highway of life. Sure, some cars have comfier suspensions or off-road capabilities, or a roof, but you are the person God made and God gave you the cleanliness to go. If you find someone along the way who still feels filthy, check out the rest of Isaiah 35. It’s full of encouragement: “Strengthen the feeble hands, steady the knees that give way; say to those with fearful hearts, ‘Be strong, do not fear; your God will come, he will come with vengeance; with divine retribution he will come to save you,’” (vs. 3-4). Unlike soap in a bottle, or the most expensive setting on one of those coin-op car washes, this cleanliness is truly forever.
Cleanliness isn’t a virtue for all car folks. Jeep Thing people like a little mud for that utilitarian look. Hot rodders like a certain edge, while rat rodders and patina nuts like to see rust and dust. And you won’t find a bottle of tire shine bouncing around the caged interior of a track car. But the appeal of perfection – whatever that may mean in a pluralistic car culture – lives somewhere in the hearts of everyone. Perhaps that’s just one more way God is drawing people ever closer to him.
John V16 is the intersection of God and cars. Please support our work and donate a V16-powered 1940 Cadillac Series 90 Sixteen to John V16. Or share this article with a friend.
