Consider who is speaking and to whom. Isaiah 1 is not gentle. The chapter is a catalogue of what the nation has done, laid out plainly and without softening.
And then, in the middle of it, this. Come now, let us reason together, says the LORD.
It is an invitation to a conversation. Not a sentence being passed, not a demand for grovelling. The tone shifts from indictment to something almost domestic, a chair being pulled out.
What follows is the image everyone remembers. Though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be as white as snow. Scarlet was a fixed dye. It did not come out. That is the point of choosing it.
So the offer is not that the stain was smaller than it looked. It is that something can be done about a stain that does not come out.
The invitation still stands and it is still phrased as a conversation.
