We are going to deal with understanding the issue of guilt
the next three days. In GenesisChapter
42 we find Joseph’s brothers, who had hated their brother, sold him into
slavery, and brought the misery of decades of guilt down on their heads. They’re discussing why they’re having a bad
time, trying to understand their own guilt:
Speaking among
themselves, they said, “Clearly we are being punished because of what we did to
Joseph long ago. We saw his anguish when
he pleaded for his life, but we wouldn’t listen. That’s why we’re in this trouble.” “Didn’t I tell you not to sin against
the boy?” Reuben asked. “But you
wouldn’t listen. And now we have to answer for his blood!” Genesis 42:21-22
Added to Joseph’s brothers (and the rest of humanity),
the prime example of a man who clearly understood his own guilt was a thief
dying next to Jesus.
But the other
criminal protested, “Don’t you fear God even when you have been sentenced to
die? We deserve to die for our crimes, but this man
hasn’t done anything wrong.” Luke
23:40-41
Guilt is something that plagues everyone, like the man
who wrote to the IRS; he enclosed a check for $500, with a note explaining that
he couldn’t sleep because he had cheated on his income tax the year
before. At the bottom of his letter he
added: if I still can’t sleep I’ll send the rest.
Unresolved guilt is debilitating. It affects our health, our attitude, and
productivity in life. It also affects
our worship and service.
The basic answer to the question of why we feel guilt is
that:
We feel guilty because we are guilty!
Paul tells us that everybody sins:
For everyone has sinned; we all
fall short of God’s glorious standard. Romans
3:23
Innocent? We know
better than to claim that when standing before holy God. John’s epistle specifically states that if we
try to claim we are not sinners we’re only deceiving ourselves.[1]
There are all sorts of techniques for our denial; the
main two are:
1. We try to hide
the evidence.
Joseph’s brothers hid their sin of selling their younger
brother into slavery. But God knew all
about it and eventually brought everything out in the open. There is no such thing as “secret” sin.
2. We try to blame
others.
Of the eleven brothers who sold Joseph, Reuben (the
oldest) tried to shift the blame from off his shoulders by blaming the other
ten; that didn’t work for Adam and Eve either.
(If you recall, Eve blamed the serpent.
That was bad enough, but Adam blamed Eve AND God. He said, “…it was the woman YOU made
for me, Lord.”)
Now, with all our techniques for getting rid of the
guilt, we still feel guilty. And we will
talk about why we don’t feel forgiven tomorrow.
For You Today
It’s tempting to use
the excuses for why you did what you did. Or, worse, to just flat-out
deny that you did anything wrong, or it was less of a sin than someone else…none of that changes history in the sight of
an all-knowing, and all-seeing God, who is all-righteous, and holds us
accountable. Sin will be dealt-with! And it will always be on God’s terms, never
our excuses or denial.
There
are about 2,000 devotional posts and 400 sermons in the Rocky Road Devotions library. To dig deeper on today’s topic, explore some
of these:
Clean Sweep, But Not Swept Away and It's Not My Fault
[1] Images: via Pixabay.com Unless noted, Scripture quoted from The New Living Translation©
[1] See 1 John 1:8
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