Guilt Offering
Leviticus 7:1-6
Guilt is something that every man, women and child experiences. We incur legal guilt when we violate a legal or moral law. We also experience emotional guilt, when our conscience feels remorse when we do something wrong. The world attempts to deal with guilt by either narrowing the scope of it or by blaming something else as having caused it.
The Bible teaches that guilt is the result of our relationship with God is broken and needs to be mended. The guilt offering is God’s solution to dealing with it and is closely related to the sin offering. Lev 5:5-6, 15 states that when we have guilt bring a sin offering or if we have sinned bring a guilt offering. The guilt offering is God by His grace making provision for us for not knowing it at all, not understanding it all and feeling a sense of God’s righteousness and of falling short of it, yet not knowing why.
It was required in the Old Testament for violation of the Lord’s holy things (Lev 5:14-16) and for committing an unknown sin at the time of the infraction (Lev 5:17-19). What may be some of these holy things for us in the church age? We are to keep the Lord’s name holy (Matt 6:9), the gospel is holy (Gal 1:8), or bodies are the temple of the Lord therefore holy (I Cor6:19-20) and the observation of communion is holy (I Cor 11:27). Are we guilty of violating the Lord’s holy things? I dare say we are.
The Lord Jesus Christ is our guilt offering. Isa 53:10-11 “to make his life (Jesus’ life) a guilt offering”. Heb 10:10-18 “through the sacrifice of Jesus … we have been forgiven”. There is no need to carry around the burden of guilt. If we have guilt, confess it unto the Lord and get on with your life of serving the Lord. Rom 3:23-24 states “we have all sinned, but God in his gracious kindness declares us not guilty … thru Christ.”
We all have guilt on our hands, the solution is to turn to Christ, acknowledge our sin and guilt and accept him as Savior. His work at Calvary has paid for all our sin and guilt.