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Bible Dictionaries
Guilt
Hastings' Dictionary of the Bible
or GUILT. 1. Guilt may be defined in terms of relativity. It is rather the abiding result of sin than sin itself (see Pearson’s Exposition of the Creed , ed. James Nichols, p. 514 f.). It is not punishment, or even liability to punishment, for this presupposes personal consciousness of wrong-doing and leaves out of account the attitude of God to sin unwittingly committed ( Leviticus 5:1 ff.; cf. Luke 12:48 , Romans 5:13; see Sanday-Headlam, Romans , p. 144). On the other hand, we may describe it as a condition, a state, or a relation; the resultant of two forces drawing different ways ( Romans 7:14 ff.). It includes two essential factors, without which it would be unmeaning as an objective reality or entity. At one point stands personal holiness, including whatever is holy in man; at another, personal corruption, including what is evil in man. Man’s relation to God, as it is affected by sin, is what constitutes guilt in the widest sense of the word. The human struggle after righteousness is the surest evidence of man’s consciousness of racial and personal guilt, and an acknowledgment that his position in this respect is not normal.
We are thus enabled to see that when moral obliquity arising from or reinforced by natural causes, adventitious circumstances, or personal environment, issues in persistent, wilful wrong-doing, it becomes or is resolved into guilt, and involves punishment which is guilt’s inseparable accompaniment. In the OT the ideas of sin, guilt, and punishment are so inextricably interwoven that it is impossible to treat of one without in some way dealing with the other two, and the word for each is used interchangeably for the others (see Schultz, OT Theol . ii. p. 306). An example of this is found in Cain’s despairing complaint, where the word ‘punishment’ ( Genesis 4:13 EV [Note: English Version.] ) includes both the sin committed and the guilt attaching thereto (cf. Leviticus 26:41 ).
2. In speaking of the guilt of the race or of the individual, some knowledge of a law governing moral actions must be presupposed (cf. John 9:41; John 15:22; John 15:24 ). It is when the human will enters into conscious antagonism to the Divine will that guilt emerges into objective existence and crystallizes (see Martensen, Christian Dogmatics , Eng. tr. [Note: translate or translation.] p. 203 ff.). An educative process is thus required in order to bring home to the human race that sense of guilt without which progress is impossible (cf. Romans 3:20; Romans 7:7 ). As soon, however, as this consciousness is established, the first step on the road to rebellion against sin is taken, and the sinner’s relation to God commences to become fundamentally altered from what it was. A case in point, illustrative of this inchoate stage, is afforded by Joseph’s brothers in their tardy recognition of a guilt which seems to have been latent in a degree, so far as their consciousness was concerned, up to the period of threatened consequences ( Genesis 42:21; cf. for a similar example of strange moral blindness, on the part of David, 2 Samuel 12:1 ff.). Their subsequent conduct was characterized by clumsy attempts to undo the mischief of which they had been the authors. A like feature is observable in the attitude of the Philistines when restoring the sacred ‘ark of the covenant’ to the offended Jehovah. A ‘guilt-offering’ had to be sent as a restitution for the wrong done ( 1 Samuel 6:3 , cf. 2 Kings 12:16 ). This natural instinct was developed and guided in the Levitical institutions by formal ceremony and religious rite, which were calculated to deepen still further the feeling of guilt and fear of Divine wrath. Even when the offence was committed in ignorance, as soon as its character was revealed to the offender, he became thereupon liable to punishment, and had to expiate his guilt by restitution and sacrifice, or by a ‘ guilt-offering ’ (AV [Note: Authorized Version.] ‘trespass offering,’ Leviticus 5:15 ff; Leviticus 6:1 ff.). To this a fine, amounting to one-fifth of the value of the wrong done in the case of a neighbour, was added and given to the injured party ( Leviticus 6:5 , Numbers 5:6 f.). How widely diffused this special rite had become is evidenced by the numerous incidental references of Ezekiel ( Ezekiel 40:39; Ezekiel 42:13; Ezekiel 44:29; Ezekiel 46:20 ); while perhaps the most remarkable allusion to this service of restitution occurs in the later Isaiah, where the ideal Servant of Jehovah is described as a ‘guilt-offering’ ( Isaiah 53:10 ).
3. As might be expected, the universality of human guilt is nowhere more insistently dwelt on or more fully realized than in the Psalms (cf. Psalms 14:2; Psalms 53:2 , where the expression ‘the sons of men’ reveals the scope of the poet’s thought; see also Psalms 36:1-12 with its antithesis the universal long-suffering of God and the universal corruption of men). In whatever way we interpret certain passages ( e.g. Psalms 69:28; Psalms 109:7 ff.) in the so-called imprecatory Psalms, one thought at least clearly emerges, that wilful and persistent sin can never be separated from guiltiness in the sight of God, or from consequent punishment. They reveal in the writers a sense ‘of moral earnestness, of righteous indignation, of burning zeal for the cause of God’ (see Kirkpatrick, ‘Psalms’ in Cambr. Bible for Schools and Colleges , p. lxxv.). The same spirit is to be observed in Jeremiah’s repeated prayers for vengeance on those who spent their time in devising means to destroy him and his work (cf. Jeremiah 11:18 ff; Jeremiah 18:19 ff; Jeremiah 20:11 ff. etc.). Indeed, the prophetic books of the OT testify generally to the force of this feeling amongst the most powerful religious thinkers of ancient times, and are a permanent witness to the validity of the educative functions which it fell to the lot of these moral teachers to discharge (cf. e.g. Hosea 10:2 ff., Joel 1:4 ff., Amos 4:9 ff., Micah 3:4 ff., Haggai 2:21 f., Zechariah 5:2 ff. etc.).
4. The final act in this great formative process is historically connected with the life and work of Jesus Christ. The doctrine of the Atonement, however interpreted or systematized, involves belief in, and the realization of, the guilt of the entire human race. The symbolic Levitical rite in which ‘the goat for Azazel’ bore the guilt (EV [Note: English Version.] ‘iniquities,’ Leviticus 16:22 ) and the punishment of the nation, shadows forth clearly and unmistakably the nature of the burden laid on Jesus, as the Son of Man. Involved, as a result of the Incarnation, in the limitations and fate of the human race, He in a profoundly real way entered into the conditions of its present life (see Isaiah 53:12 , where the suffering Servant is said to bear the consequences of man’s present position in regard to God; cf. 1 Peter 2:24 ). Taking the nature of Adam’s race, He became involved, so to speak, in a mystic but none the less real sense, in its guilt, while Gethsemane and Calvary are eternal witnesses to the tremendous load willingly borne by Jesus ( John 10:18 ) as the price of the world’s guilt, at the hands of a just and holy but a loving and merciful God ( John 3:16 f., Romans 5:8 , Ephesians 2:3 f., 1 Thessalonians 1:10 , Revelation 15:1; cf. Exodus 34:7 ).
‘By submitting to the awful experience which forced from Him the cry, “My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken Me?” and by the Death which followed, He made our real relation to God His own, while retaining and, in the very act of submitting to the penalty of sin, revealing in the highest form the absolute perfection of His moral life and the steadfastness of His eternal union with the Father’ (Dale, The Atonement , p. 425).
It is only in the life of Jesus that we are able to measure the guilt of the human race as it exists in the sight of God, and at the same time to learn somewhat, from the means by which He willed to bring it home to the consciousness of men, of the full meaning of its character as an awful but objective reality. Man’s position in regard to God, looked on as the result of sin, is the extent and the measure of his guilt.
‘Only He, who knew in Himself the measure of the holiness of God, could realize also, in the human nature which He had made His own, the full depth of the alienation of sin from God, the real character of the penal averting of God’s face. Only He, who sounded the depths of human consciousness in regard to sin, could, in the power of His own inherent righteousness, condemn and crush sin in the flesh. The suffering involved in this is not, in Him, punishment or the terror of punishment; but it is the full realizing, in the personal consciousness, of the truth of sin, and the disciplinary pain of the conquest of sin; it is that full self-identification of human nature, within range of sin’s challenge and sin’s scourge, with holiness as the Divine condemnation of sin, which was at once the necessity and the impossibility of human penitence. The nearest and yet how distant! an approach to it in our experience we recognize, not in the wild sin-terrified cry of the guilty, but rather in those whose profound self-identification with the guilty overshadows them with a darkness and a shame, vital indeed to their being, yet at heart tranquil, because it is not confused with the blurring consciousness of a personal sin’ (Moberly, Atonement and Personality , p. 130).
5. The clearest and most emphatic exposition of the fruits of the Incarnation, with respect to human guilt, is to be found in the partly systematized Christology of St. Paul, where life ‘in the Spirit’ is asserted to be the norm of Christian activity ( Romans 8:9 ff.). ‘There is therefore now no condemnation to them that are in Christ Jesus’ ( Romans 8:1 ) is a reversal of the verdict of ‘Guilty’ against the race (cf. Colossians 3:6 f., 1 Thessalonians 2:16 ), in so far as man accepts the conditions of the Christian life (cf. Galatians 5:17 f.). Where the conditions are not fulfilled, he is not included in the new order, for ‘if any man hath not the Spirit of Christ, he is none of his.’ His guilt is aggravated by ‘neglecting so great salvation’ ( Hebrews 2:3; cf. John 15:22; John 15:24 , Matthew 11:20 ff.), and the sentence pronounced against the disobedience of the enlightened is, humanly speaking at least, irreversible ( Hebrews 6:4 ff; Hebrews 10:29 ff.).
J. R. Willis.
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Hastings, James. Entry for 'Guilt'. Hastings' Dictionary of the Bible. https://www.studylight.org/dictionaries/eng/hdb/g/guilt.html. 1909.
