The Politics of Guilt

Guilt - An Inescapable Reality

The fact of guilt is on of the major realities of man’s existence both personally and socially.

The human race, in apostasy from God, is deeply involved in a rebellious claim to autonomy and in the guilt which follows that claim.

As a result of this omnipresent sense of guilt, there is an omnipresent demand for justification.

The Need for Atonement

Psalm 106:6 NKJV

We have sinned with our fathers, We have committed iniquity, We have done wickedly.

Romans 3:23 NKJV

for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God,

Atonement is a repair of the breach caused by guilt, and the consequence of atonement is justification.

Because the need for this repair is so urgent, the whole personal, social, religious, and political life of guilty man is colored by this demand for atonement and is in fact dominated by it.

Atonement in the Bible generally has two different elements, expiation (or the removal of sin and guilt), and propitiation (the appeasing of God’s wrath and therefore the restoration of relationship with Him).

1 John 4:10 CSB

Love consists in this: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins.

Self-Atonement

As Christians we know that atonement is accomplished for us by Jesus on the cross. However, without Christ, non-believers have to turn to all sorts of strategies of self-justification.

Psychosomatic ailments

“If I suffer enough, I will pay for my sins”

Gambling

“They play to lose” The gambler plays with an unconscious will to lose, to punish himself for his guilt and cleanse, although vainly, his conscience.

Alcoholism

Alternately - the marriage to an alcoholic as “my cross to bear”

Burden-bearing

Playing the public saint in order to atone for private guilt. The guilty rich will engage in philanthropy.

Self-conscious burden-bearing, public works of virtue, worry and fretting, worship or penance, all serve as devices for self atonement, as forms of do-it-yourself salvation.

Injustice Collecting

The injustice collector places himself in positions where he will be sure to feel offended, and then self-righteously sees himself as one sinned against and hence innocent.

All attempts at self-atonement are forms of self-deception.

Most of the examples so far listed are examples of self-punishment.

Another form of self-justification involves reducing the world to the sinner’s level.

This happens when people want to take revenge against the innocent for their innocence in an attempt to reduce them to the same level of guilt.

Psalm 140:4 NKJV

Keep me, O Lord, from the hands of the wicked; Preserve me from violent men, Who have purposed to make my steps stumble.

“The [person seeking self-justification] seeks to buy an area of immunity and autonomy for sin from God. His thesis is that a jealous God is preventing him from enjoying his pleasure by declaring it a sin. This jealous God must be bought off and independence gained for the freedom to sin, for the privilege of living without God and without law.”

Scapegoats

Confessing the lessor sin

White privilege/Racism

Confessing the sins of the past

Slavery/Reparations

Ultimately men are angry and in rebellion against God’s rule over all things, but they are unable to strike at God directly. So they strike at God’s image.

Effigy burning

False Responsibility

Make men feel guilty for all things and for everyone.

It is obvious that men cannot do much more than care for their own families. Therefore ask them to exercise this imposed responsibility for the world by delegation, to delegate it to the state and the elite planners.

By being given this world responsibility, the state and its elite planners become gods, governors of all things.

Salvation has thus become the work of man. Man remakes man by statist law and action.

False guilt has no true cause and hence no focus, and it is therefore more pervasive and paralyzing.

The only answer to this impasse is the assertion of the sovereignty of God and His saving and cleansing power. Man’s responsibility is to do his duty under God, not to feel total responsibility, which is not man’s business.

(Story of Uzzah)

The Politics of Suicide

We are guilty because we do not want to follow the law of God. We don’t want to submit to His rule over all things. But rebellion against God’s rule will always lead toward death both personally and corporately.

Proverbs 8:36 NKJV

But he who sins against me wrongs his own soul; All those who hate me love death.”

Proverbs 3:1–2 NKJV

My son, do not forget my law, But let your heart keep my commands; For length of days and long life And peace they will add to you.

Proverbs 29:18 KJV 1900

Where there is no vision, the people perish: But he that keepeth the law, happy is he.

Proverbs 13:14 NKJV

The law of the wise is a fountain of life, To turn one away from the snares of death.

The politics of suicide leads to parasitism, since the suicidal state is not only bent on death but bent on carrying others to death also.

Every relativistic philosophy is a rebellion against the conditions of life, and hence unconsciously against life. In relativism, man refuses in effect to accept the world as already made, as a finished product and a law system.

The politics of apostasy is therefore the politics of universal jurisdiction, of totalitarianism. The state which will not acknowledge God will not thereby leave a vacuum in the universe: the state will fill it.

The Cross Changes Everything

Through the death of man Jesus on the cross we can be free from sin, free from guilt.

The only possible source of political liberty is on the premise of the atoning work of Jesus Christ.