Wednesday, October 5, 2022

Guilty! - Part 1

Wednesday, October 5, 2022

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.

You chew on that as you hit the Rocky Road; have a blessed day!

Go to VIDEO (read by author)

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©  

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