In the Gospel God Takes Our Guilt Seriously

Photo by Ben White on Unsplash

The modern mind doesn’t know what to do with guilt. We’d like to explain it away as an unhealthy vestige of an old, discredited way of thinking: we’re enlightened, so we don’t do guilt.

And even if we do think about our guilt before a holy God, we’d like to imagine that God loves us so much that He will simply forgive us. In our imagination, we see God smiling and nodding, absolving us of our guilt and shame.

When we imagine God thus, we are visualizing a God who doesn’t exist. We’re imagining a God who is outraged by what offends us and tolerates what we find permissible. In other words, we picture not the Holy One of Israel but a God who is made in our image, a “God” who doesn’t exist.

Our guilt is not just bad feelings.
 
Sure, there is such a thing as false guilt. But genuine guilt is an indicator of moral pain and a serious impediment to our relationship with a holy God. To make matters worse, there is nothing simple about our guilt. Sin has contaminated everything about us – our minds, our emotions, our personalities, our relationships, our society – every aspect of the human condition is stained with our sin and our guilt. Sin has so deeply entangled itself into our lives that God could not simply wave His hand and make our guilt disappear.

But wait! Can’t God do anything? After all, God created the cosmos by the mighty power of His Word. “By the word of the Lord the heavens were made, and by the breath of his mouth all their host…. He spoke, and it was done,” says the psalmist (Psa 33:6, 9).

A superficial “grace” that would remove our guilt by the power of a word is bland and insipid and ultimately impotent. In His anguished prayers in the Garden of Gethsemane, Jesus asked repeatedly if there was some other way for God to redeem His people. But Heaven’s silence that night showed that the Maker of heaven and earth couldn’t just sweep away our sin, even by the power of His Word. His plan to redeem us was even more complex than the creation of the cosmos, and far more costly.

The God who spoke the worlds into existence took our guilt so seriously that He gave up His life to die in our place. The Gospel shows us God dealing with our guilt in humiliation and agony. “While were yet sinners, Christ died for us,” (Rom 5:8).

The grace of God is so amazing not because He overlooks our sin but because He treats our sin with the gravity it deserves. The grace He has shown us in Christ is the only grace that is deep enough to satisfy the justice we know we deserve.

What shall we say to these things? How do we thank God for what He has given us in His Son?

We say with Paul, “Thanks be to God for His unspeakable gift” (2 Cor 9:15).

Persevere,
Paul Pyle
Pastor of Discipleship