Pastor Sproul asks: What do you do with your guilt? This question often provokes a dramatic shift in the tenor of the discussion. It touches on something that is a visceral matter for many people, something that affects them at an existential level, so it moves the discussion beyond the abstract realm. In most instances, the person with whom I am speaking does not become angry when I ask this question. Sometimes the person will say that he has no guilt or that guilt is simply a term invented by religious people. Usually, however, the person treats the question seriously and tries to explain how he is dealing with guilt. This, I think, is evidence that every human being knows what guilt is. Every human being, at some level and at some point in his or her life, has to deal with it.
What is guilt? In the first place, we have to say that guilt is not subjective but objective because it corresponds to an objective standard or reality. That leads me to the simplest definition of guilt that I can compose: Guilt is that which a person incurs when he violates a law.
We understand how this works in the criminal justice system. If someone breaks a law, a statute that has been enacted by a government, and that person is apprehended for having broken the law, he may have to appear in court. But in any kind of trial, the key question is this: Is the person guilty? In other words, did the suspect do it? Did he or she transgress the law? When we talk about guilt, we’re talking about the transgression or violation of these rules or laws.
The biblical view is that God is the supreme Lawgiver and that He holds every person who is alive accountable for conforming to His mandates. People have said to me on many occasions that Christianity is not about rules and regulations; it’s about love. That’s simply not true. Christianity is about love, but that is because love is one of the rules—God commands us to love Him and to love one another. Christianity is not just about rules and laws, but rules and laws decreed by God have been a fact of life since the day of creation. So if we define guilt as that which a person incurs when he violates a law, we incur supreme guilt when we break the law of God. That is because His law is perfect. It is never arbitrary. It does not reflect merely the vested interests of a particular lobby group, but the perfect, holy, righteous character of God Himself.
I believe all of us have broken the law of God, but even if we have not violated God’s laws, we’ve certainly broken the laws of men. So all of us have experienced the objective situation of having transgressed a law. At some level, we all understand that there are certain things that are inherently wrong, and if we do those things, we incur guilt.
PAstor Sprout says an interesting thing occurs when I ask people, “What do you do with your guilt?” I don’t ask what the person is going to do about his or her guilt feelings. My question has to do with his or her guilt. While these two are closely related, they are not precisely the same thing. The basic distinction is between objectivity and subjectivity. Feelings are things that personal beings experience. People are personal beings. They have minds and wills. Each of them has a feeling aspect in his or her life. So when we talk about guilt feelings, we’re talking about something that is personal and subjective. The lack of guilt feelings does not always indicate a lack of guilt. The mere fact that a person does not feel guilty says absolutely nothing about whether he actually broke the law.
It is possible for people not to feel even the guilt they bear before God. We can be so practiced and habitual in her infidelity, we have lost any sense of embarrassment or shame. It is clear that there is often a large gap between objective guilt and the ensuing guilt feelings that flow from it. The Bible frequently speaks of the hardened heart, which causes a person no longer to feel remorse for his or her transgression. It is dangerous for us to rely totally on our guilt feelings to reveal to us the reality of our guilt itself because we can quench the pangs of conscience. The bottom line is that any time we experience feelings of guilt, we need to step back and ask ourselves as honestly as we possibly can, “Have I broken the law of God?”
One of the easiest ways to manipulate people is to heap some kind of guilt upon them in an effort to shame or embarrass them into doing what we want. There are people who have become masters at guilt manipulation. The process of guilt manipulation can be very destructive and devastating in human relationships. But that’s a small problem compared to the other side of the coin. We can become professionals at silencing the feelings of real guilt. We live in a culture that teaches us that guilt feelings are inherently destructive because they undermine a person’s sense of self-esteem. Even in the realm of psychology today, we’re told that there’s something wrong about telling people that their behavior is sinful. The driving idea here is that we don’t want to tell anyone that his behavior is wrong because we might make him feel guilty, and if he feels guilty, he may suffer some kind of psychological distress.
Let's continue Pastor Sproul's message on "Guilt" in the next post. In Christ, Brian
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