Five Eternal, Counter-Cultural Truths about God, Us, and Our Sin

Five Eternal, Counter-Cultural Truths
about God, Us, and Our Sin

Leviticus 5:1-13

Main Idea: When we commit sin, we are guilty before God, but when we confess and seek His forgiveness, He provides atonement for our sin and forgives us.

I. Transgressing God’s Law Is Sin.

A. Indifferent silence

B. Prolonged impurity

C. An unfulfilled promise

II. Sin Results in Guilt.

III. God Requires Confession of Guilt.

IV. God Provides Atonement for Sin.

V. After Confession and Atonement, God Forgives.

Leviticus 5:14 begins a section that is devoted to the guilt or restitution offering. Leviticus 5:1-13 is between the purification or sin offering (chapter 4) and the guilt offering (5:14–6:7). So how shall we classify the offering described here? Is it a purification offering with the preceding verses, or is it a guilt offering with the following verses? The words “guilty” or “guilt” appear in verses 2, 3, 4, and 5. However, we will classify it as a sin offering because verses 9, 11, and 12 state, “It is a sin offering.” Also, verses 6 and 7 have the words, “as a sin offering,” verse 8 has “for the sin offering,” and verse 11 has, “as an offering for his sin.” So Leviticus 5:1-13 serves as sort of an appendix to the sin/purification offering, dealing with some special cases.

In 2013 Holy Trinity Anglican Church in Hastings, England received a heavy package in the mail. The church treasurer, Simon Scott, opened the package, and inside was a large, 200-year-old Bible. A letter also arrived at the church explaining why the Bible had been sent. The letter was from a retired man living in Germany. He wrote that in 1971 he and his wife were in Hastings, and they took an English class at Holy Trinity Church. While sitting in class his eyes landed on some beautiful old Bibles under a bench in a corner of the room. He stole one of them and took it home with him. In his letter to the church he wrote,

I made a big mistake. . . . Back home I felt my action was not correct. . . . This Bible always brought me a guilty conscience. . . . I deeply regret what I did and can only hope this Bible finds its rightful home again.

Right away he began to feel guilty about stealing it, but he didn’t return it. So for 42 years he lived with a guilty conscience (Hastings and St. Leonard’s Observer, “Thief Returns Bible 40 Years after Swiping
It,” August 16, 2013; http://www.hastingsobserver.co.uk/news/thief
-returns-bible-40-years-after-swiping-it-1-5393318).

I don’t know if he is a follower of Jesus or not, but he does testify to having a conscience. God has given every human a sense of right and wrong. Romans 2:15 refers to people who do not know Jesus, but it says of them, “the work of the law is written on their hearts. Their consciences confirm this.” All people have some sense of right and wrong because all people are made in God’s image. God has also given us a sure guide to right and wrong in His perfect Word, the Bible. God’s Word not only tells us what is right and wrong, but also what to do with a guilty conscience.

God spoke His Word to His people in the wilderness of Sinai and gave them His law. He knew they would transgress His law and commit sin. Sin is not allowed in the presence of the perfectly holy God, so God could have given up on His people because of their sin. Instead, God provided a means to atone for it. That leads us to five eternal, counter-cultural truths about God, us, and our sin.

Transgressing God’s Law Is Sin

That eternal truth began with Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden. God gave Adam and Eve a law—don’t eat of the fruit of the tree that is in the midst of the garden. They transgressed that law, and sin and death entered the human race. Still today, when anyone transgresses God’s law, it’s sin.

The first four verses of Leviticus 5 refer to three sins specifically. First, verse 1 refers to indifferent silence. Verse 1 has to do with someone witnessing wrongdoing, presumably a crime. He saw the crime and he was called to testify, but he did not testify. He said nothing about what he saw, so the person who committed the crime would not experience the consequences of his behavior, and justice would be thwarted. The witness had the opportunity to help the cause of justice but he refused. That’s the same as promoting injustice. Silence is not always golden; sometimes it’s just cowardly yellow. When we have the opportunity to speak about a wrong we witnessed, indifferent silence is sin.

Verses 2 and 3 refer to the sin of prolonged impurity. Leviticus 11–15 addresses the laws of impurity, or uncleanness. For now, it suffices to say that God declared to the Israelites that some things were clean and some things were unclean. His people were to stay away from the things that were unclean, and if they came into contact with something unclean they were to observe the purification rituals that the Lord commanded. Verses 2 and 3 in Leviticus 5 have to do with someone who did not stay away from an unclean thing, so he was defiled. The defilement could have been unintentional, so the defilement itself was not necessarily sin. But the defiled person neglected to observe the purification ritual, which the Lord commanded. That neglect made him guilty of sin, and when he recognized his guilt he was to offer a sacrifice to atone for his sin.

God’s words about prolonged impurity are an exhortation to us to keep short accounts with God. That means that every day we ask God to reveal our sin to us, and when He reveals something we have said, done, or thought that’s not pleasing to Him, we confess it immediately and ask for forgiveness. We don’t prolong our impurity. Obviously, committing a sin is bad, but it’s even worse to commit a sin, recognize we have sinned, and do nothing about it. Sin is always unacceptable to God, and it always breaks our fellowship with God. Therefore, when we recognize we’re guilty, we confess our sin, turn from it, ask God for forgiveness, and thank Him for the forgiveness He gives by His grace.

Verse 4 refers to the sin of an unfulfilled promise. It describes someone taking a rash oath and later recognizing the oath was not wise. God’s Word says that we are to fulfill our vows. So if we make a promise, we have to keep it; we have to be people of our word.
Ecclesiastes 5:2 says, “Do not be hasty to speak, and do not be impulsive to make a speech before God. God is in heaven and you are on earth, so let your words be few.” God says that it’s better not to vow at all than to vow and fail to keep the vow (Eccl 5:5). Deuteronomy 23 says,

If you make a vow to the Lord your God, do not be slow to keep it, because He will require it of you, and it will be counted against you as sin. But if you refrain from making a vow, it will not be counted against you as sin. Be careful to do whatever comes from your lips. (vv. 21-23)

If a promise passes our lips, we have to be careful to do it. Honoring our word is not an old-fashioned standard; it is God’s standard. God tells us that if we say we’re going to do something, we do it. Today people make sacred vows at the marriage altar and break them. People sign their names to contracts and then don’t do what they said they would do. Sometimes we say, “I’ll do that for you” and later we think, “I don’t have time to do that! What was I thinking?” We realize our promise was rash, but we did speak the words. If we don’t do what we said, it’s an unfulfilled promise. In worship we sing, “All to Thee, my blessed Savior, I surrender all,” and “The greatest thing in all my life is serving You.” Or we go to the altar in worship and make a promise to God. Then when we leave worship, we have a lot to do, and the things we said in worship are crowded out. But God takes our promises seriously. We should too.

Sin Results in Guilt

The words “guilt” or “guilty” are used in verses 2, 3, 4, and 5. When we transgress God’s law and commit sin, we’re guilty. Years ago I counseled a young man and woman who were engaged to be married. They were living together before marriage. I read to them from the Bible that God regards that as sin. They responded by explaining to me why living together made perfect sense for them and why there was nothing wrong with it. Perhaps they deserved some credit for the audacity of defending fornication as legitimate to a Christian minister, but clearly they were having difficulty seeing that when we transgress God’s law we’re guilty of sin. That couple was an example of how truths like guilt and sin go against the grain of our culture.

Sin is not a popular subject in our culture. People speak less and less about right and wrong behavior, and more and more about personal preferences regarding behavior and celebrating any kind of behavior. In 1973 psychiatrist Karl Menninger published a book entitled Whatever Became of Sin? Menninger wrote of the ascendancy of the sciences in Western culture. Branches of science like psychology and psychotherapy avoid terms like “evil” and “immorality,” so Western culture avoids such ideas. Menninger traced how the theological category of sin became the psychological category of sickness. He also cited the fact that no American president had mentioned “sin” in a public speech since 1953. “So,” Menninger concluded, “as a nation, we officially ceased ‘sinning’ some twenty years ago” (Whatever Became of Sin?, 15). The trajectory Menninger demonstrated has continued since 1973. Trust in God has declined while trust in science has increased. God and true science are not incompatible, but in the modern West an increasing percentage of people look to the sciences to define reality instead of looking to God. Since, as Menninger wrote, the sciences do not necessarily include moral categories, acknowledgment of moral guilt has diminished as commitment to the sciences has increased.

Leviticus 5 describes guilt as a reality, a metaphysical entity attached to someone who commits sin. We commit sin, and we bear guilt. Our culture tends to think of guilt as a psychological pathology. When people feel guilty, that doesn’t feel good, so they’re prone to go to a therapist to help them feel better. The goal of such therapy is to ameliorate any bad feelings, to help patients feel better about themselves. Many therapists would regard it as poor form to say to a patient, “You feel guilt because you are guilty, and you’re guilty because you transgressed God’s law and that’s sin.” Though many people in our culture would regard that approach as wrong, God’s Word says that breaking God’s law is sin, and when we sin we are guilty. That is a spiritual reality, whether we feel guilty or not. The feeling of guilt is the result of God’s gift of conscience that prods us to an awareness of our sin and motivates us to repent of sin and reconcile with God whose holiness we have offended. Perhaps the worst thing we can do is attempt to eliminate the feeling of guilt without addressing the root problem of sin that caused the guilt. So how do we address our root problem of sin? That leads to a third truth.

God Requires Confession of Guilt

Verse 5 says, “If someone incurs guilt in one of these cases, he is to confess he has committed that sin.” The basic meaning of the word translated “confess” is to declare or proclaim. The word is used in three primary ways in the Old Testament. First, it was used primarily to refer to confessing or declaring God’s attributes and works (praise). Second, it is used a few times to convey man’s praise of man. Third, it is employed to refer to confessing personal or corporate sin (Alexander, “yada?,” TWOT, 1:364–65). The way this word is used in the Old Testament gives strong support to the idea that the confession God intended in Leviticus 5 was public confession, declaring one’s sin. The sin offering was visual confession, and God said worshipers were to add to the offering their verbal confession. God expected them to declare their sin. When we realize our guilt, we confess.

The phrase “but later recognizes it” occurs twice in these verses (vv. 3,4). Before we confess we have to realize our guilt. Have you ever been checking baggage at the airport or going through security and airport personnel asked you, “Has anyone placed anything in your luggage without your knowledge?” When they have asked me that, I have wanted to say, “If it was without my knowledge, how could I know that they did it and report it to you?” But we don’t say that; we just say, “No, no one put anything in my luggage without my knowledge,” as if we know that. Things can happen without our knowledge. We can commit sin without our knowledge. In the last section we considered unintentional sin. We can commit a sin and not know that it’s sin. That’s why we have to ask the Lord in prayer to reveal to us our sin so we can confess it and ask for His forgiveness. Surely we know that we always need to confess, because we always sin. First John 1:8 says, “If we say, ‘We have no sin,’ we are deceiving ourselves, and the truth is not in us.” Either we recognize our guilt and confess our sin, or we deceive ourselves and think we do not need to confess. The truth is that we’re guilty of sin, and God requires confession of guilt.

God Provides Atonement for Sin

Leviticus 5 mentions atonement in verses 6, 10, and 13. Atonement is an important word in Leviticus. The word atonement refers to reconciliation—two parties becoming “at one” with each other. They were estranged from one another, but they’re coming together. Atonement refers to doing what is necessary for two parties to be reconciled. In the case of our relationship with God, it refers to taking away sin. Sin has to be removed for us to be reconciled with God.

God formalized the removal of sin in the sacrificial system. In order for sin to be removed, God’s righteous wrath must be satisfied. God Himself provided the means of His satisfaction in the sacrificial system. When the sacrifice was offered, God’s wrath was satisfied, and the worshiper could be reconciled to God.

As we read Leviticus, we have to remember that it was not the ritual itself that reconciled people to God. God reconciled people to Himself based on His merciful willingness to forgive and the heart condition of the person who observed the ritual. In Psalm 51:16-17 David wrote to God, “You do not want a sacrifice, or I would give it; You are not pleased with a burnt offering. The sacrifice pleasing to God is a broken spirit. God, You will not despise a broken and humbled heart.” Hebrews 10:4 says, “It is impossible for the blood of bulls and goats to take away sins.” God’s righteous wrath against sin is not appeased merely by performing a religious ritual—that’s paganism. The one true God sees the heart, and He requires sorrow over sin that leads to confession of sin. That sorrow and confession result in turning from sin and turning to God. That’s what God wants. He wants our hearts to be right with Him. In the old covenant period God gave His people ceremonies that symbolized turning to God. But the bulls, goats, turtledoves, bread, and flour were only symbols. Depending on the hearts of the worshipers, the symbols could have represented reality, or they could have given merely the appearance of reconciling a person to God. Only God forgives sin, and He forgives on the basis of the condition of our hearts and His merciful response.

Verses 6, 10, and 13 make the same statement regarding atonement: “the priest will make atonement.” In the old covenant period the priest served as a mediator between God and man. The book of Hebrews says that human mediators, the priests, were always inadequate, and from the beginning God intended them to be temporary. God’s purpose was always to send the Messiah, God the Son, who serves as our permanent and perfect high priest. As 1 Timothy 2:5 puts it, “For there is one God and one mediator between God and humanity, Christ Jesus, Himself human.”

So the Old Testament sacrificial system was temporary and preparatory—it prepared God’s people for the perfect sacrifice He had in mind, Christ Jesus. And Jesus is God in the flesh, who offered Himself as a sacrifice. He is both sacrifice and priest. And when Jesus became our sacrifice He was not merely a symbol of the worshipers’ sorrow over sin and repentance. God actually placed our sin on Jesus on the cross. Second Corinthians 5:21 says, “He made the One who did not know sin to be sin for us, so that we might become the righteousness of God in Him.” Jesus knew no sin, so only He is truly qualified to be our priest. Human priests sin, but not Jesus. Since Jesus knew no sin, He is also the perfect, unblemished sacrifice. Even the best animals offered for sacrifices were never perfect, but Jesus is; He knew no sin. But God the Father made Him “to be sin for us.”

Do we understand the eternal gravity of what Jesus did “for us”? He allowed Himself to be nailed to a cross on Good Friday. He allowed God the Father to pour out the totality of human iniquity on Him. He became the epicenter of depravity so we could be rescued. On Him was placed all of human sin. Abusive fathers beating toddlers to death, pimps seducing teenage runaways into lives of prostitution and drugs—Jesus took that on Himself on the cross; it fell on Him with unspeakable violence. Nazi troops cutting down women and children with machine guns, Canaanites burning their children as sacrifices to Molech, suburbanites killing their babies in the womb because they are too inconvenient or expensive, Persians crucifying thousands to advertise their cruelty, Bible toting deacons praying in church while their wives sit in back hoping the make-up will cover the bruises, Assyrians gloating over the captives they skinned alive, politicians lying for money and power, nice church people gossiping to slander other nice church people, lecherous husbands giving their attention to images on a screen instead of to their wives, suicide bombers murdering innocents in the name of a false god, Crusaders murdering in the name of Jesus, and child molesters making sure their victims don’t testify against them—all of that and more was placed on Jesus on the cross. God the Father dumped the whole pile of human garbage on God the Son on the cross. By that act Jesus won our forgiveness. Forgiveness is also in Leviticus 5.

After Confession and Atonement, God Forgives

Verses 10 and 13 say that after the worshiper offered the sacrifice and atonement was made for sin, “He will be forgiven.” How wonderful to know that we can be forgiven by God! And His forgiveness is available to everyone. Chapter 4 of Leviticus says the sin offering was available for every person regardless of social status—priests, the congregation as a whole, leaders, and common people. Leviticus 5 says the purification offering was available for every person regardless of economic status—if people could not afford a lamb or goat, they could bring a few birds. If they could not afford a few birds, they could bring some flour. No one was excluded from God’s forgiveness on the basis of social status or economic status. The ancient rabbis referred to this offering with the title ?oleh veyored—the “ascending and descending” offering (Milgrom, Leviticus 1–16, 308). It was for all God’s people—for those in high positions and for the lowly. No one was barred from God’s forgiveness.

In Psalm 32 the psalmist extolled the joys of experiencing God’s forgiveness:

How joyful is the one whose transgression is forgiven, whose sin is covered! How joyful is the man the Lord does not charge with sin.
(vv. 1-2)

It’s a joy to know God’s forgiveness. It’s a curse to be unforgiven by God. Years ago a wonderful Christian lady in a church where I was pastor served as a nurse. She told me about one of her patients, and she asked me to visit him. I went to see him; he was dying of AIDS, which he had contracted through his own sinful choices. He was in his 20’s, maybe early 30’s, blonde and handsome, but he was close to death and he knew it. I shared the gospel with him. He knew the facts of the gospel; his problem was that he couldn’t accept the fact that God would forgive him. He was angry—not at God, not at the world, but at himself. He couldn’t forgive himself, and he couldn’t imagine how God could forgive him. I told him that if he confessed his sin and put his faith in Jesus as Savior and Lord, the past wouldn’t matter at all. God would wipe away his past sin and welcome him into heaven on the merits of Jesus. He would not accept that. His guilt and anger seemed to block his willingness to believe that God could or would forgive him. How tragic.

How about you? Have you put your faith in Jesus as Savior and Lord? If not, receive Him today. He’ll forgive your past sin and give you new and eternal life. And when we do know Jesus as Savior and Lord, we still have sin to confess. At least on a daily basis we should ask the Holy Spirit to reveal our sin to us so we can confess it and receive God’s forgiveness. Thank God that 1 John 1:9 says, “If we confess our sins, He is faithful and righteous to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.” The sacrificial system described in Leviticus was God’s invitation to come into His presence and worship Him. We want to accept His invitation through His final and universal sacrifice for sin—Jesus, who is not only the sacrifice but also high priest, the Messiah, and God the Son.

Reflect and Discuss

1. How would you classify the offering found in Leviticus 5:1-13?
2. Why should you keep short accounts with God?
3. How can you take seriously the promises you make to God? Would it be better to keep silent in worship rather than sing empty hymns and praises to God? Why or why not?
4. Why do you think sin is not a popular subject in our culture?
5. Are you willing to stand against the culture? How does this decision affect your daily interactions with people?
6. How is Jesus both the priest and the sacrifice?
7. In what ways is Jesus superior to the old covenant priests?
8. Ancient rabbis referred to the sin offering with the title ?oleh veyored, the “ascending and descending” offering. What do you think this means?
9. Do you ever act as if someone should be barred from God’s forgiveness? How does Leviticus 4 and 5 address this sinful attitude?
10. In what do you find your joy? Have you trusted in Jesus as Savior and Lord, experiencing the true joy of being forgiven? Explain.