Leviticus 5: When you’re guilty and you know it, raise your offering

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:11:22 — 16.4MB)

Subscribe: RSS

Leviticus 5 sounds very similar to Leviticus 4 in many ways. Both passages discuss unintentional violations of God’s commandments and sin offerings, but the “guilt offering” we’re looking at today is different.

When you pray to God earnestly, you feel relieved that you can release those things that only God can hear, release them to Him and find relief. We don’t approach our High Priest with animals. We are God’s Temple. When we come to God with our sins, the High Priest brings His sacrifice and our repentance to God and we received God’s forgiveness. Without God’s Spirit increasing in us, we will not grow.

The sacrifices are connected to the Messiah. No one is sentenced to death for unintentional sin — ever. The difference between a guilt offering and a sin offering is difficult to ascertain in many English translations. This is why it’s good to look at the Hebrew.

Some of the offerings are more expensive than others. This chapter shows us that no matter how poverty-stricken you are, you are to bring some kind of offering. The grain offering is the same for the poor or the wealthy. The grain offering is given without oil or incense. The 10th of an ephah of flour is not a lot of flour and even a very poor person can afford that.

The book of Leviticus tells us how we as individuals can get right with God when we make a mistake. When we make mistakes, we go to God about it.

If you are not aware of your sin, you cannot be guilty. We can’t repent of something we do not know. There are some prayers that include the phrase “forgive me for what I have done and what I have left undone,” but if we don’t know what we have done or not done, we can’t repent.

Ignorance of the law is not an excuse in secular law or in Biblical law, but often a person who breaks a rule in ignorance is granted a degree of mercy and the penalty is lower for rules broken in ignorance than those broken on purpose.

God is the same yesterday, today and forever. His pattern of forgiveness is the same. His forgiveness is as real today as it was then. Paul called us to be living sacrifices, not dead sacrifice.

“Now if a person sins after he hears a public adjuration to testify when he is a witness, whether he has seen or otherwise known, if he does not tell it, then he will bear his guilt.” (Lev 5:1)

The word translated as adjuration in English is the Hebrew word alah, (Strong’s H0423) which means oath, swear, curse. We have a similar rule in English common law. If you know that a crime as been committed or planned to be committed and you do not report it the authorities, you, in a sense, are guilty of that crime.

“Or if a person touches any unclean thing, whether a carcass of an unclean beast or the carcass of unclean cattle or a carcass of unclean swarming things, though it is hidden from him and he is unclean, then he will be guilty.” (Lev 5:2)

The word that is translated as guilty in this verse is not the same Hebrew word that is translated as guilty in Lev. 5:1. The word in Lev. 5:2 is asham (Strong’s H816), which means to offend or be guilty. The Bible tells us what to do if we have had contact with the dead, it involves sanitation and bathing. It’s not a sin to have contact with the dead, but you do have something offensive on you, in a sense, and that offense has to be rectified.

“Or if a person swears thoughtlessly with his lips to do evil or to do good, in whatever matter a man may speak thoughtlessly with an oath, and it is hidden from him, and then he comes to know it, he will be guilty in one of these.” (Lev 5:4)

The Hebrew word for oath here is shava (Strong’s H7650) This is a covenant type of oath, which is made in anger. We have an example of this in the New Testament when a group of men made an oath not to eat until they had killed the Apostle Paul. This chapter tells us how they would have repented of that oath. When you make an oath in God’s name, it should be taken seriously because God is alive and to make oaths in His name and not keeping them offends Him.

A transgression against God’s name demands a particular sacrifice. “He shall also bring his guilt offering to the LORD for his sin which he has committed, a female from the flock, a lamb or a goat as a sin offering. So the priest shall make atonement on his behalf for his sin.” (Lev 5:6) He doesn’t demand life for life when a person makes a rash oath using God’s name.

God’s relationship with us is one-on-one, it’s private. David’s psalms are full of prayers that he did not have to go through a priest to have approved. They were David’s individual response to his God, his Father.

For all these sacrifices, the sinner comes to the Tabernacle and gives the proscribed offering before the High Priest. The High Priest makes the atonement, it is God who forgives the sin.

Yeshua doesn’t condemn us for our sin, He brings the atonement and it is God who forgives sin.

When Yeshua said that we are to be a shining light, it is that light that is to show people their spiritual condition. If people see us and say, “I want to live like him/her.” That is the wrong picture. What they are supposed to see is that because of us, they want to live like God wants them to live.

Lev. 5:14 starts out a new subject about a different type of unintentional sin:

“Then the LORD spoke to Moses, saying, ‘If a person acts unfaithfully and sins unintentionally against the LORD’S holy things, then he shall bring his guilt offering to the LORD: a ram without defect from the flock, according to your valuation in silver by shekels, in terms of the shekel of the sanctuary, for a guilt offering.’”

Reader: Jeff. Speaker: Richard Agee. Summary: Tammy.