Behold the Lamb of God #2

Behold the Lamb of God #2

“Christ Our Guilt Offering”

Leviticus 5:14-6:7; 7:1-10

The name Edgar Allen Poe brings memories of high school English classes to many of us. Poe was a peculiar writer, who with great skill exposed the darker side of the human personality in a haunting fashion. Unlike the horror industry in entertainment today, which instills fear with physical violence and gore, Poe was able to communicate by intense emotional struggles and suspense. Rather than depending upon external actions to carry the effect, he utilized the drama of the heart and mind in his writing.

Perhaps no product of his pen illustrates this better than The Tell-Tale Heart. In this epic the narrator is a paranoid individual who becomes so disturbed by what he interprets as his landlord’s menacing stare that he murders the man. His planning of the murder is intricate and foolproof; its execution goes exactly as calculated, and he morbidly disposes the body underneath the floor of his living room. He devises an alibi for any suspecting neighbors, and convinces himself that no one will ever know his deed.

With such confidence he invites two police officers who come to his door into the living room—the very room under which the corpse of the murdered man was buried. He places his chair directly over the place where the body was concealed. But as time passes, and the officers politely converse, the man begins hearing a thumping in his ears. At first he is unaware of its origin, but as it grows in intensity he concludes that it must be the heart of the murdered man! In disbelief he looks to the officers who act as though they hear nothing. He begins to perspire and then speak in an agitated manner. Finally he erupts and admits to his atrocious deed as he crosses the border into madness.

Of course the murderer was not hearing a dead man’s heart beat, but rather the throb of a guilt-ridden conscience driving him past the brink of sanity. Poe was saying though this story, “Even if no one knows of your crime, your conscience will never let you forget.” The main character of The Tell-Tale Heart was guilt.

Guilt is like that. We sin, and we try to hide our sin from others, from God, and from ourselves. We become a slave to guilt. It damages relationships and destroys joy.[1]

From the pages of Poe to the pages of Scripture we see similar symptoms of guilt resulting from sin. David wrote in Psalm 32:3, “When I kept silent, my bones wasted away through my groaning all day long.” Later, in Psalm 38:1-4, he writes,

O Lord, do not rebuke me in your anger or discipline me in your wrath. For your arrows have pierced me, and your hand has come down upon me. Because of your wrath there is no health in my body; my bones have no soundness because of my sin. My guilt has overwhelmed me like a burden too heavy to bear.

A London psychologist once told Billy Graham that 70 percent of the people in mental hospitals in England could be released if they could find forgiveness. Their problem was the guilt and pressure of a bad conscience.[2]

Does this mean David, like the character in The Tell-Tale Heart, was insane? Many today would probably say yes. Secular psychology has discounted feelings of guilt as at least the product of an overbearing upbringing or, at worst, mental illness. Theories and practices have been devised to eliminate the feelings of guilt from mankind. As one song puts it, there is “no guilt if we take away the rules.” Some blame environment, others genetics—anything that points the accusing finger away from oneself.

The Bible takes a very different perspective on guilt. Rather than relegating the stab of a guilty conscience to outdated or misinformed psychosis, Scripture addresses guilt as real and provides a meaningful method to deal with it. As one author put it,

Guilt in the biblical sense is not just a feeling but a condition. There may be known transgressions that bring feelings of guilt, but there is also a condition of guilt before God, caused by sins known or unknown. Sometimes a hardened sinner has few feelings of guilt when he is the most guilty.[3]

Guilt is more than a feeling; it is a fact. And the guilt offering was God’s prescribed way to deal with that fact.

1. The Function of the Guilt Offering

Can guilty feelings ever be considered good? I believe it can be. Sin is real and God in His holiness will deal with it severely. He will not leave the guilty unpunished. Jesus taught His disciples that the Holy Spirit would “convict the world of guilt in regard to sin and righteousness and judgment.” (John 16:8). The sting of guilt we feel when we step over God’s boundaries is actually the voice of God the Holy Spirit calling attention to our sin. He prompts us to deal with the root of the problem—the sin—in order to be rid of the symptom—the guilt—and to avoid the ultimate result of sin—eternity in Hell.

In the Old Testament God provided His people with the guilt offering, and it is described in Leviticus 5:14-19 and 6:2-7,

The Lord said to Moses: “When a person commits a violation and sins unintentionally in regard to any of the Lord’s holy things, he is to bring to the Lord as a penalty a ram from the flock, one without defect and of the proper value in silver, according to the sanctuary shekel. It is a guilt offering. He must make restitution for what he has failed to do in regard to the holy things, add a fifth of the value to that and give it all to the priest, who will make atonement for him with the ram as a guilt offering, and he will be forgiven. “If a person sins and does what is forbidden in any of the Lord’s commands, even though he does not know it, he is guilty and will be held responsible. He is to bring to the priest as a guilt offering a ram from the flock, one without defect and of the proper value. In this way the priest will make atonement for him for the wrong he has committed unintentionally, and he will be forgiven. It is a guilt offering; he has been guilty of wrongdoing against the Lord.”

“If anyone sins and is unfaithful to the Lord by deceiving his neighbor about something entrusted to him or left in his care or stolen, or if he cheats him, or if he finds lost property and lies about it, or if he swears falsely, or if he commits any such sin that people may do— when he thus sins and becomes guilty, he must return what he has stolen or taken by extortion, or what was entrusted to him, or the lost property he found, or whatever it was he swore falsely about. He must make restitution in full, add a fifth of the value to it and give it all to the owner on the day he presents his guilt offering. And as a penalty he must bring to the priest, that is, to the Lord, his guilt offering, a ram from the flock, one without defect and of the proper value. In this way the priest will make atonement for him before the Lord, and he will be forgiven for any of these things he did that made him guilty.”

Notice the differences between sin and guilt offerings: the guilt offering was always a male sheep, whereas sin offerings varied; the guilt offering was consistent regardless of type of sin or person; and the guilt offering was only presented by and for individuals.[4]The guilt offering was not a carbon copy of the sin offering; it had a different function. “The neglected Book of Leviticus is a long study”, writes Walter Brueggemann, “on the good news that God has indeed provided ways through the paralysis of guilt.”[5]

The guilt offering was to be sacrificed whether the injured party was God directly or another person. “Infringement on the rights of another person also represented an offense against God.”[6] We would do well to remember that in our relationships with people today.

An important component of the guilt offering was restitution. In cases where the sin involved money or anything measurable in monetary terms (such as holding back tithes from God, defrauding other people, or even purposely not returning a lost item to its rightful owner), one-fifth of the value was to be added to the restitution.[7] Admission and asking forgiveness did not suffice. The wrong needed to be made right. In doing so, “this costly sacrifice made [the offender] conscious of the price of sin.”[8]That forgiveness is free does not mean that it is free of obligation.[9]

In the New Testament, Zacchaeus, the dishonest tax-collector of Jericho, stands out as one of the most striking examples of restitution, as seen in Luke 19:1-10. When Jesus brought salvation to his house, he was not content to add to the stolen money which he resolved to return the one-fifth that the law required. He promised the Lord that he would restore fourfold the money of which he had defrauded people.[10]

At times we may be tempted to view God’s grace as an easy way out. “I’ll just confess my sin to God,” we may tell ourselves, “and that will take care of it. Such thinking may be bolstered if the offended person is a Christian, since “Christians ought to forgive one another whether they’re asked or not,” right?

The commands of God to the Israelites regarding the guilt offering prove such is not the case. Notice the order: first restitution was made to the person wronged, then God’s honor was vindicated by the offering of the ram.[11]Putting matters right with one’s neighbors was as essential as putting matters right with God. Indeed, the debt that sin had incurred before God would not be removed until the debt to the neighbor had been paid in full.[12]Furthermore, Jesus reiterated the importance of being reconciled to a wronged brother in Matthew 5:23-24, “Therefore, if you are offering your gift at the altar and there remember that your brother has something against you, leave your gift there in front of the altar. First go and be reconciled to your brother; then come and offer your gift.” The order of events is echoed in Jesus’ words. We are to make things right with our brother and then approach God for His forgiveness. “True repentance will always bring with it a desire for restitution. We will want to make things right with God and with those whom we’ve sinned against.”[13] Yet offenders were not forgiven their guilt simply by making amends with their neighbors. On its own, making things right with one’s neighbors was not sufficient, because to sin against them was also to sin against God, and so the matter needed to be cleared with him.[14]

Throughout the Old Testament, “guilt” is closely identified with the concept “debt.”[15] While some may see the guidelines in Leviticus for the guilt offering—or perhaps all of the sacrificial system— as severe or stiffly mechanical, in fact God is graciously offering His people an opportunity to ease a tender conscience in a tangible way.[16] Sin is not only recognized for what it was, an offense against God and possibly fellow man, but it was rectified in such a way that reconciliation could take place. Restitution put the issue to rest and silenced the throb of guilt.

The debt of sin is found not on an impersonal balance sheet but in the profoundly personal effect it has in disrupting our relationship with the living God and, indeed, with our neighbour. It is in the giving of himself, through his Son, that the relationship is restored and the barrier of debt removed.[17]

There is an interesting sequence in Isaiah where the Lord makes the nephesh of the Servant ‘a guilt offering’, and the passage goes on to say that the Servant ‘poured out his nephesh unto death’ (Isa. 53: 10-12). The guilt offering and death are closely linked.[18]

2. The Fulfillment of the Guilt Offering

One problem remained with this sacrifice, though: It didn’t work. Not to say that God’s plan was ineffective or misguided, but it was only a temporary provision until the complete fulfillment took place.[19]

Hebrews 10:1-4 points out the ultimate inadequacy of the old system to forgive sins and eliminate guilt:

The law is only a shadow of the good things that are coming—not the realities themselves. For this reason it can never, by the same sacrifices repeated endlessly year after year, make perfect those who draw near to worship. If it could, would they not have stopped being offered? For the worshipers would have been cleansed once for all, and would no longer have felt guilty for their sins. But those sacrifices are an annual reminder of sins, because it is impossible for the blood of bulls and goats to take away sins.

Leon Morris notes that the Greek in this passage literally reads, “the conscience would have been cleansed” in verse two; the classic translation “felt guilty” does not sufficiently bring out the meaning of the original text.[20]

The removal of guilt, then, is not found in psychological mind games that shift blame or redefine morality. Nor is God’s forgiveness as one comedian put it, “some sort of spiritual white-out” which costs neither God nor the sinner nothing. No, dealing with guilt requires concrete and costly measures. The guilt offering “illustrates the solemn fact that it is a very costly thing for people to commit sin and for God to cleanse sin.”[21]The guilt offering guards the Israelites from falling into the error of believing that grace is cheap. Like the sin offering it was a blood sacrifice that obtained pardon for sinners, but it differed from the sin offering in that it was concerned with specific sins and included a unique element of reparation as part of the ritual.[22]

Isaiah predicted the fulfillment of the guilt offering in Isaiah 53:10,

Yet it was the Lord’s will to crush him and cause him to suffer, and though the Lord makes his life a guilt offering, he will see his offspring and prolong his days, and the will of the Lord will prosper in his hand.

The penalty we should have paid, He paid for us![23]

Jeremiah adds in Jeremiah 50:20,

“In those days, at that time,” declares the Lord, “search will be made for Israel’s guilt, but there will be none, and for the sins of Judah, but none will be found, for I will forgive the remnant I spare.”

Jesus became our guilt offering once and for all, removing the sin and resulting guilt from our lives. If the Old Testament teaches us that sin is a debt, the New Testament teaches that Christ’s offering paid the debt for which we could never pay ourselves. The Lamb of God is the guilt offering for each of us.

Hebrews 10:22 gives an invitation to all:

Let us draw near to God with a sincere heart in full assurance of faith, having our hearts sprinkled to cleanse us from a guilty conscience and having our bodies washed with pure water.

What, then, can be said about guilt? Can guilt be a good thing? Yes, if it is based in fact and dealt with accordingly. Just as physical pain serves the purpose of telling us that something is wrong with our body and requires attention, so guilt tells us something is wrong spiritually and needs to be rectified. Guilt is not meant to be wallowed in any more than pain is to be endured without treatment of some kind. How guilt is dealt with is very important, as Paul writes in 2 Corinthians 7:8-10,

Even if I caused you sorrow by my letter, I do not regret it. Though I did regret it—I see that my letter hurt you, but only for a little while—yet now I am happy, not because you were made sorry, but because your sorrow led you to repentance. For you became sorrowful as God intended and so were not harmed in any way by us. Godly sorrow brings repentance that leads to salvation and leaves no regret, but worldly sorrow brings death.

The remedy for guilt is seen in the familiar words of 1 John 1:9, “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness.” Confession involves the recognition and acceptance of personal responsibility for our wrongdoing. Repentance means to turn away from the wrong and toward the right. And don’t forget restitution—if we have wronged another person we must go to them and be reconciled. Ray Stedman writes,

And so this [guilt] offering is provided for us, fulfilled in Jesus Christ, that we might heal all the broken relationships of the past. This is essential to a clear conscience. If you want to have a clear conscience before God some of you may have to go back and heal some broken relationships. You may have to make some restitutions. You may have to admit some errors. But once you do, those relationships will be healed before God, and will be a glory and a blessing to you for the rest of your life.[24]