4. “Repairing a Broken Relationship with God” (Leviticus 4 and 5)

                                        “Repairing a Broken Relationship with God”

                                                              Leviticus 4 and 5

I want to begin by saying something that might seem terribly obvious, but it’s something I feel deeply. Sin is awful. 

I realize that in our day sin is a kind of funny word. It can have the connotation of something small and transgressive: chocolate cake is so good it’s sinful. But of course that’s not what we’re talking about. As we’ve been saying in Leviticus, when we’re talking about sin, we should think about death. Because death is the face of sin. 

We have repeatedly seen the face of sin recently, and it has been terrible. An angry shooter killing elementary kids in a Catholic school while they are praying. A young woman who fled the war in Ukraine to find safety in the US is senselessly stabbed to death on a light rail train coming home from work. And then of course, there’s the assassination of Charlie Kirk, a shooting that appears to be terrifyingly nihilistic, where it was done almost as a joke with ironic words etched in bullet casings. It’s demonic, something deeply, disturbingly dark.

Sin is an awful thing. We generally don’t talk of hating things, because we know that it is wrong to hate another human being who bears God’s image. But hatred is the only right response to sin. It’s the right way to feel about these killings, or about the terrible realities of women being abused by those in power, including ministers of the gospel. Or about how families with young children can get torn apart by the cruel selfishness of adultery. The pain caused by sin is everywhere. Don’t we just deeply, deeply hate sin?

One of the foundational truths of Leviticus is that God hates sin with a pure and perfect white-hot hatred. He sees sin far more clearly than we do. And because he is purely good, he doesn’t squint at it or trivialize it or say, “Well, it’s understandable.” No, God despises every hint, every trace of sin, because he knows how truly awful sin is. 

This morning, we come to the 3rd category of sacrifices God provided for his people to make it possible for them to have a relationship with him, sometimes referred to as the sin and guilt offerings. And one of the things we are meant to see in them is just how serious of an issue our sin is when it comes to having a relationship with God. 

From the outset, we find a uniquely urgent nature to these offerings. While ascension offerings happened in a predictable, morning and night rhythm, and while peace offerings were initiated by choice, we learn that sin offerings are a required response to a crisis. “If anyone sins,” verse 2 says, action needs to be taken. Because it is a dangerous thing to live with sin unaddressed sin in the presence of God. Sin causes a breach in the relationship between God and his people, a breach that if it’s not dealt with will lead to death. And in fact, our passage provides us with three different ways of thinking about what sin does to our relationship with God. 

Burden: First, 5:1 speaks of the person who sinned “bearing” their “iniquity.” Sin is a burden that we carry. We understand that intuitively. When you come to realize that you’ve hurt someone you can almost physically feel the weight, right? You feel the heaviness of its wrongness and its consequences pressing down on you. When God told Cain after he killed Abel that he would have to wander the land, Cain said to God, “My iniquity is too great to bear,” and he was talking about carrying the consequences of what he did. When we sin, we carry the weighty consequence of separation from God, we carry the heavy sentence of death. It’s a burden.

Pollution: And then verse 2 introduces the idea of becoming unclean. Throughout Leviticus there’s this ongoing idea of cleanness and uncleanness, something that we’ll explore further in later weeks. It operates as an enacted metaphor to speak of the effect of sin, how sin brings about a stain that pollutes and contaminates one’s relationship with God. Imagine you have a coworker that you thought was a friend of yours. But on a work project he messed up but then convinced your boss that it was your fault, that you were the one to blame. You come into work the day after you discover this and he seeks to be all friendly to you and to act as if nothing is wrong, but you can’t join in. Because your relationship with him is soiled; you can’t act like it’s okay when you’ve been betrayed. Unless this gets addressed, there cannot be friendship. That’s part of what the idea of uncleanness is getting at. We have polluted our relationship with God with the stain of death.

Guilt Debt. And then a third way of speaking of the effect of sin comes at the end of verse 2, where it speaks of the wrongdoer realizing his “guilt.” The word for guilt here has in it the idea of debt that comes in wronging someone else. If you’ve stolen from someone, you have a literal debt to repay. If you have lied against someone, you have an obligation to bring truth. This sense of owing is true in other ways as well. If you recognize that you’ve deeply hurt someone you might say, “How can I ever make it up to you?” Because in the guilt of having wronged someone, you feel the fact that we are indebted. It’s why when we pray the Lord’s Prayer we pray, “Forgive us our debts.” In having wronged God we are aware of a sense of owing him a reparation that we can never actually repay. Sin brings a guilt debt.

Here is why God’s people had to do something in response when they sinned. Their sin and its consequences were a heavy burden, sin was a stain on their relationship with the God who is the source of life, it created an overwhelming guilt debt. Unaddressed sin creates a crisis in the relationship with God. Something needs to be done.

And it’s important to understand that when our passage speaks of sin, it’s not just referring to an infrequent and obvious wrong. In our minds when we’re talking about sin here, we’re probably thinking of intentional wrongdoing; stuff that people would obviously identify as sin. And at the end of chapter 5 we see that, as it mentions things like cheating one’s neighbor, or stealing from them.

But perhaps you noticed that this isn’t where our passage begins. 4:2: “If anyone sins unintentionally,” God says. What does he mean by that? Well, chapter 5 gives us some examples. If a person was a witness to an event, yet it slips his mind and he forgets to attend the trial and testify; or if he comes into contact with something that makes him unclean, but because he doesn’t realize it at the time, he goes on with his day without engaging in the necessary cleansing rituals; or if someone makes a rash vow in the moment and later on realizes that it was not something he should have vowed to God. This is the kind of thing God means when by “unintentionally sins.”

In other words, it’s not just a problem in our relationship when we choose to do wrong, but also when we choose not to do what is good. It’s not just a problem when we do something wrong intentionally. It’s also a problem when we do something wrong and don’t even realize in the moment that it’s wrong. Unintentional sins can cause just as much of a rupture in relationship with God, a burden, a guilt debt.

Does that seem unfair to you? Overly strict? Well, let me ask you this question: let’s say that the killer of Charlie Kirk didn’t believe that he was doing something wrong. Maybe he thought it was justified. Or maybe he just thought it was a senseless act, a joke. Does that make it any better? Does the fact that slaveowners in the 19th century believed they were in the right to treat black human beings like beasts—does that remove their guilt? I can think of a few times in my life as a dad and as a husband when for a while in my insensitivity I stayed oblivious to how ways I was acting were hurting others. When I finally recognized what I had been doing, I didn’t find myself thinking, “Well it’s no big deal—I didn’t mean to.” No, I felt awful, “What an unthinking jerk I’ve been.” Because sin is not somehow less of sin when we blind ourselves to it.

Which means that when it comes to your and my sin, it’s almost certainly the case that we’re not seeing it clearly. The reality is that we’re so compromised by sin, that it’s so much a part of us that we’re blinded by it. But God is pure light, and in him is no darkness at all; he sees sin clearly and he knows just how terrible it is and how severely it must be dealt with. Which is how we want God to be. We don’t want him to look at injustice and say, “That’s no big deal.” To look at cruelty and say, “Look, I get it.” Sin is awful, and it is a very good thing that God hates it without any tolerance, with a white-hot hatred.

It just raises for us a distressing question: if God hates sin so purely, and if we are compromised so deeply by sin, what does that mean for us?

While these instructions about the sin and guilt offerings reveal to us the seriousness of our sin, they do more than that. They are meant to point to something even greater and more glorious: that this same God who hates sin loves sinful people and is committed to restoring and forgiving them. God provides a way.

When this crisis caused by sin happens, God says, here’s a way that the sin can be addressed: through the sin offering. It has five basic components, and what I want us to notice is how by it God provides a solution to every problem sin creates for the relationship.

First, the wrongdoer must bring the animal to the tabernacle entrance “before the face of the LORD,” and lean on the animal. And based on other instructions we find in Leviticus, it seems likely that at this point, as the wrongdoer leans upon the animal, he confesses the sins that have brought about this situation. 

Then, secondly, as the worshiper continues to hold this undoubtedly confused animal, he takes a knife and slits its throat “before the face of the LORD,” and he watches the animal die. And the connection would have been unmistakable. This is the cost of sin. “This is what my sin has done,” he would have thought. “It has brought death.” 

Then, third, very carefully the blood is used as part of this ritual. For blood, in the symbolic world of Leviticus, is sacred, signifying life. God says chapter 17, “The life of the flesh is in the blood, and I have given it for you to make atonement.” Sin brings about the stain of death, and so life is the cleansing agent that can wash it away. Blood is what can clean, what can purify a relationship that has been polluted. And so that’s how it is used here. When the high priest or the whole nation has collectively sinned, the veil that stands at the entrance to the holiest place, and the altar of incense that lies close need to be cleansed from the stain of death by the blood that is life. In other situations, the ascension altar needs to be cleansed. Either way, the idea is that these connection points, these places that symbolize the relationship with God are now being washed so that the relationship is no longer soiled or polluted. It’s clean.  

Then, fourth, after the blood has been used as a cleansing agent, all the fat, which was seen as the most precious part of the animal, is placed on the altar, offered up to God. In 5:6 we see this described as a “compensation” or more literally a “guilt penalty.” Here, symbolically, through offering what is most precious in the animal that has given its life, the guilt debt is paid. The guilt is removed.

And then finally verse 11 describes what must happen with the rest of the animal: it says that the priest carries the animal which symbolically has absorbed the sins of the worshiper, he carries the animal outside of the camp; in chapter 10 it explicitly tells us that the priest bears the iniquity. The burden of iniquity that until this point has weighed down the wrongdoer is now completely removed. He is set free.

And thus through his process, we are told in 4:26, the priest has made atonement for his sin, and he shall be forgiven.” Quite likely the priest would declare this out loud; at the end of this ritual he would say, “Your sin has been atoned for; you are forgiven.” 

I imagine it would have been quite the experience. You enter into this tabernacle courtyard aware of just how big of a deal your sin is—how offensive it is to God; you feel the weight, the stain, the debt as you draw near to God. And then after going through slaughter, the blood, the burning, the removal, you depart with the awareness that you are now free from the burden; your debt has been paid; your relationship with God has been cleaned. Can you imagine how thankful you would feel? Because you would understand that every part of this came from God. God provides this mysterious way to deal with sins. God is the one who gave the animals, meaning he is the one paying the guilt-debt owed to him; he is the one supplying the life-blood to cleanse from death. You would leave with a sense of the remarkable kindness of God. At an experiential level you would feel the fact that God is committed to rescuing you from your own sin.

Now, the New Testament makes very clear how all of these things are meant to apply to us.   

The writer of Hebrews, who was a careful reader of Leviticus, says this, “Every priest stands daily at his service, offering repeatedly the same sacrifices, and they can never take away sins.” His point here is not that sin offerings were a waste of time or a sham. His point is that on its own it was never meant to provide the solution for sins. The power in these offerings was always found in what they were pointing to. For they were divinely given signs to help God’s people understand what God who loves sinful people would one day do for them.

Which is why the writer Hebrews goes on to say, “12 But when Christ had offered for all time a single sacrifice for sins, he sat down at the right hand of God…For by a single offering he has perfected for all time those who are being sanctified.” Do you understand? It’s not with an animal that God atones for our sins. Those offerings were always meant to point forward to Jesus. Jesus is the sin offering that God has provided for us. His offering of himself for our sins makes us truly forgiven, truly cleansed, truly restored, not just for a moment, but for all time.  

I was watching a show the other day, and I was struck by how deeply we in our day need to understand this truth. In this show a woman had done something clearly wrong: because of how her husband had been terrible to her, she had tried to kill him. And after this deed, she felt weighed down by the wrongness, deep within that she had done something that needed to be punished. So she welcomed the idea of experiencing many years of being imprisoned, because it felt right to her. When on a technicality the charges were dismissed, she then sought to find other ways to be punished. She felt like a debt needed to be repaid. She felt stained by what she had done. And I think a lot of people wrestle with feelings like that. A lot of people are aware that there’s something wrong, not just with the world, but with them, with what they have done. And we don’t know what to do about that.

Now in this show her therapist really wanted to help her stop punishing herself. And so he used the language that is really common today. He spoke to her of her need to forgive herself, “I know how hard it is; I have a hard time forgiving myself also, but you have to do it.” And yet, no matter how hard he tried to convince this woman, he couldn’t. 

And really, why should he? The only person who has a right to extend forgiveness is the person who has been wronged. Which means you can’t “forgive yourself” for wronging another. 

Imagine when David finally, in response to being confronted by the prophet Nathan, realized his terrible guilt. He realized how wrong he had been to commit adultery and then kill his friend to cover it up. Imagine if when he said, “I have sinned against the Lord,” Nathan at that point replied. “Yes, and now you need to forgive yourself.” No. David has no right to forgive himself for these things. Telling David to do so would be an insult, a trivializing of the preciousness of life and the gravity of sin. David did wrong, and justice was required.

And I think we understand this: even if we want to believe we can resolve the problem of guilt by forgiving ourselves, deep down there’s a gnawing awareness that it’s not enough. That we’re really pretending and there’s still a problem: a debt, a burden, a pollution.

David chose a different path than this. He knew there was only one place he could truly hope to find forgiveness; not from himself, but from God. Because ultimately all he had sinned against the Lord; for in the end, all sin is against God. And so, as we read in Psalm 51 he prayed, “Have mercy on me, O God, cleanse me from my sin.” 

And what Leviticus reveals to us dimly but truly, and what we see shining forth in Jesus, is that when anyone comes to God, praying in this way, calling unto God for mercy, God forgives.

God, the one who along has the right to forgive, doesn’t simply decide, “No big deal,” about our sins, as if sin were somehow not a problem—which would be a lie. No, God deals with our sins, though it costs him greatly.  

• In His Son, God has completely paid for our guilt debt. Colossians says Jesus cancelled the record of debt that stands against us. We don’t just have to try to forget our guilt and pretend it’s not there. It’s gone. Our debt is repaid. 
• Through the blood of Jesus God completely cleanses us of the stain of sin and death. Hebrews tells us that by the blood of Jesus our hearts are now sprinkled clean from a bad conscience. There is no longer any stain, nothing polluting our relationship with God. We can come to him freely, confidently.
• And in Christ God carries our burden unto death so that there is no weight remaining. Because of what Christ has done, God declares, “I will remember their sins and lawless deeds no more.”

Sin is an awful thing, it is something God hates with a white-hot passion; it is something far too great for us to deal with it on our own. And we don’t have to. Because God has in Jesus provided for us a way to remove the stain, the burden, the debt of all that we have ever done and all we will ever do. So that we can sing, “My chains fell off, my heart was freed; I rose, went forth, and followed thee.”  

If you haven’t experienced forgiveness like this yet but you want to, consider again what we see in Leviticus. When the worshiper recognized his guilt, what did he do? He confessed his sins, and he leaned upon the one who would be sacrificed. That, God is saying, is the way to experience his forgiveness. To confess your need, to confess your sins, as awful as they are, and to lean on Jesus, to lean all that you are, all that you have done on him, knowing that everyone who leans on him will be wholly and completely forgiven.