Jeremiah 13:23

There is a question tucked inside the book of Jeremiah that is easy to read past. It sounds almost like a riddle. “Can the Ethiopian change his skin or the leopard his spots?” (Jeremiah 13:23). Jeremiah was speaking to a people who had drifted so far from God that their rebellion had become second nature. They weren’t just breaking rules; they had broken their covenant, the deep, binding promise they had made with the Lord Himself. And the honest answer to the question was no. You can’t change what you’ve become.

That is hard to hear. And if we’re being honest with ourselves, most of us have felt it. I don’t mean this in any racial sense, but in the spiritual weight of the picture Jeremiah is using. The habit we cannot seem to break. The pattern we keep falling back into. The version of ourselves we’re ashamed of but can’t seem to leave behind. There are moments when change feels genuinely impossible, not just difficult, impossible.

Jeremiah understood that. So did Jesus. When His disciples asked who then could be saved, He looked at them and said, “With man it is impossible, but not with God. For all things are possible with God” (Mark 10:27). That is where the riddle breaks open.

Here is what God said through Isaiah, not far from where Jeremiah was writing: “Come now, let us reason together, says the Lord: though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be as white as snow” (Isaiah 1:18). The leopard cannot change its spots. But God can change the leopard.

This is the essence of the gospel. Before we were born, before we had sinned a single sin, God had already planned a way to restore us. In the Old Testament, it was the sacrifice of an animal, a picture pointing forward. In the New Testament, it is the sacrifice of Christ Himself. Paul put it plainly in Ephesians 1:7: “In him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses, according to the riches of his grace.” And in Galatians 2:20 he described what that kind of forgiveness actually does to a person: “It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me.”

That is not self-improvement. That is transformation from the inside out. No willpower, no program, no amount of trying harder produces it. But in Christ, by His power, something genuinely new becomes possible. The sinner can change. Can be forgiven. Can learn to be different.

A beautiful thing happens when we accept the gift of Christ and His forgiveness. We are not just pardoned; we are made new. The spots don’t just get covered over. They are washed clean.

So, if you are carrying something you believe cannot change, bring it to Him. He has been in that business a long time.