Dreaming of Cleaning a House: No Meaning in Scripture

The Bible gives no meaning for a dream about cleaning a house. It keeps no dictionary of dreams, and none of the dreamers in its pages sweeps a floor or scrubs a wall. What Scripture does have is houses being cleaned, and Jesus himself describes two of them.

In the first, a woman has lost one of her ten silver coins. She does what anyone would do: she lights a candle, sweeps the house, and searches “diligently till she find it” (Luke 15:8). In the second, an unclean spirit leaves a man, wanders, and comes back to find the house he left “empty, swept, and garnished” (Matthew 12:44). One house is swept because something precious is missing. The other is swept and then left with nobody living in it. Jesus tells both stories about people, and he leaves us to ask which house is ours.

Is a dream about cleaning a house a message from God?

Scripture does not let us say so. God can speak in a dream when he chooses. He tells Aaron and Miriam that to a prophet “I the LORD will make myself known unto him in a vision, and will speak unto him in a dream” (Numbers 12:6). But the Bible never hands us a key for turning a broom, a bucket or a dusty room into a message. Where a dream in Scripture did carry a word from God, God often spoke plainly in it, or gave its meaning through someone he had gifted, as he did through Joseph and Daniel.

Scripture is also frank about the rest of our dreams. “A dream cometh through the multitude of business,” says the Preacher (Ecclesiastes 5:3): the house we clean in our sleep may simply be the house we clean by day, carried into the night with everything else. Sirach, a book in Catholic and Orthodox Bibles that most Protestant churches do not count as Scripture, adds a warning. Unless it be “a vision sent forth from the most High,” it says, set not your heart on dreams, “For dreams have deceived many, and they have failed that put their trust in them” (Sirach 34:6–7).

So we can hold such a dream lightly. If it stirs something, pray about that. Measure any thought it leaves against Scripture, talk it over with a pastor or a wise friend if it stays with you, and do not build a decision on it. Other religions have their own ways of reading dreams; here we give only what the Bible says.

What did Jesus mean by the house swept clean?

He told it after healing a man possessed by a devil, blind and mute, while the Pharisees said he did it “by Beelzebub the prince of the devils” and asked him for a sign (Matthew 12:22–24, 38). The spirit, he says, “walketh through dry places, seeking rest, and findeth none.” Then it says, “I will return into my house from whence I came out,” and finds it “empty, swept, and garnished.” So it fetches “seven other spirits more wicked than himself, and they enter in and dwell there: and the last state of that man is worse than the first” (Matthew 12:43–45).

Nothing is wrong with the sweeping. The trouble is the emptiness. A life cleared of one evil and given to nothing else is a tidy room with the door open. Paul prays for the opposite, that “Christ may dwell in your hearts by faith” (Ephesians 3:17). The word is dwell: to live there, to stay. The clean house Jesus wants is a lived-in one.

Why did the woman sweep her house?

Because she had lost something she valued. She has ten coins and one is gone, and she will not rest until it is found. She lights a candle, sweeps, and keeps at it. When she finds it, she calls her friends and neighbours together to rejoice with her (Luke 15:9).

Jesus says what her joy is like. “Likewise, I say unto you, there is joy in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner that repenteth” (Luke 15:10). In this story the one who sweeps is the one who seeks the lost, and we are the coin under the dust. Whatever our dream was about, brothers and sisters, it is good to wake into that one: we are searched for, and heaven is glad when we are found.

What if the house in the dream is very dirty?

Scripture gives no meaning to a filthy room in a dream, any more than to a clean one. It does have a law about a house that was truly unclean, and it reads with a surprising patience. If a stain like leprosy, “greenish or reddish,” spread in the walls of a house in Israel, the owner was to tell the priest. The priest had the house emptied first, “that all that is in the house be not made unclean,” and then looked, and waited seven days (Leviticus 14:35–38).

If the stain had spread, the infected stones were taken out, the house was “scraped within round about,” new stones were set in, and the walls were plastered again (Leviticus 14:40–42). If the stain came back after all that, the house was pulled down (14:43–45). But if the priest came after the repair and found that it had not spread, “then the priest shall pronounce the house clean, because the plague is healed” (Leviticus 14:48). That stained house was not abandoned at the first sight of damage. It was emptied, scraped, mended and, when it was healed, declared clean.

We pray for the same thing in our own lives. “Create in me a clean heart, O God; and renew a right spirit within me” (Psalm 51:10). David asks God to make his heart new.

Does the Bible command cleaning a house before a holy day?

Yes, before the Passover. “Even the first day ye shall put away leaven out of your houses,” God tells Israel, for the seven days of unleavened bread (Exodus 12:15). Observant Jewish families keep the command to this day. On the evening before Passover, “as soon as night has fallen,” the house is searched for any last crumbs of leavened bread, “traditionally conducted with a beeswax candle, using a feather, wooden spoon, and a paper bag,” and what is found is burned the next morning, as Chabad’s guide describes it.

A candle, a careful search of every corner: it is the same picture as the woman with her coin. Paul takes the Passover cleaning and turns it toward the church in Corinth. “Purge out therefore the old leaven, that ye may be a new lump, as ye are unleavened. For even Christ our passover is sacrificed for us” (1 Corinthians 5:7). For Christians the house is cleaned because the feast has already been given.

Who cleaned God’s house in the Bible?

The temple itself was cleaned more than once. In the first year of King Hezekiah’s reign, the priests “went into the inner part of the house of the LORD, to cleanse it, and brought out all the uncleanness that they found in the temple,” and the Levites carried it out “into the brook Kidron” (2 Chronicles 29:16). It took them sixteen days (29:17), and then the worship of Israel began again in a cleared house.

Centuries later, in the temple that stood on the same ground, Jesus made a whip of cords, drove out the traders and overturned the money tables. “Make not my Father’s house an house of merchandise,” he said, and his disciples remembered the psalm: “The zeal of thine house hath eaten me up” (John 2:16–17). There is more on what that day meant in Jesus cleansing the temple. Both cleanings had one aim: to make room again for God to be worshipped.

What about sweeping a floor or cleaning someone else’s house?

The Bible gives no meaning to mopping a floor in a dream, or to cleaning a house that belongs to someone else. The floor that John the Baptist speaks of is a threshing floor, where wheat was separated from its chaff. Of the one coming after him he says, “he will throughly purge his floor, and gather his wheat into the garner” (Matthew 3:12). That cleaning belongs to Christ, and it is a picture of judgment.

Cleaning for someone else, though, has a place of honour in the Gospels. On the night before he died Jesus knelt and washed his disciples’ dirty feet, the work of a servant, and said, “If I then, your Lord and Master, have washed your feet; ye also ought to wash one another’s feet” (John 13:14). We do not need a dream to tell us that. We need only a neighbour with a house too big for her, or a friend too tired to face the dishes.

When the woman found her coin, she did not keep the joy to herself. She opened her clean house and called in the neighbours: “Rejoice with me; for I have found the piece which I had lost” (Luke 15:9).

Related reading

• 13 Bible Verses About Cleaning Your House
• What Can We Learn From Jesus Cleansing The Temple?
• Prayers for Spiritual Cleansing: Psalm 51, Confession and a Clean Heart
• Dreaming of Dirty Water: The Bible Gives It No Meaning
• 22 Bible Verses About Dreams