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The War on Guilt

Truth In Love 349

The culture treats guilt as if it is a bad thing when in reality, God created us to feel guilt so that we’ll do something about it.

Feb 7, 2022

Dale Johnson: This week on the podcast I’m delighted to have with us, Dr. John Street. He is a Professor of Biblical Counseling at The Masters University and The Masters Seminary. He’s also chairman of our Board of Trustees for ACBC. It’s such a delight anytime I get to hang out with Dr. Street. So many of you are blessed by his teaching ministry as he has been in many of your churches. It’s just always good to have him on the podcast. He has been married to his wife Janie for many, many years and they have four children and seven grandchildren. I’m so thankful for this brother.

Dr. Street, I think this is an important topic. We’re going to talk about the issue of guilt—Really, the war that our culture has made on the issue of guilt. So much confusion exists, really, relative to this idea of guilt and how we think about it. We just want to get rid of it. We sort of have this allergy to this issue of guilt. You’re going to help us with a biblical understanding of the issue of guilt and so I’m looking forward to this time together. So when we talk about a war on guilt and how we think about guilt—not necessarily in the church, we’ll get to that—but how we think about guilt in the culture and why this might be a problem facing the church, what do we mean when we talk about this issue of the war on guilt? 

John Street: I believe this is probably one of the most misunderstood concepts out there in the psychotherapeutic community and the counseling community at large. In the secular community, obviously, what has happened with guilt is, guilt has become the enemy and they’re doing everything that they can in order to minimize guilt or try to repress guilt, sometimes through drugs, whatever the case may be. Even in the Christian integrationist community, you find people who are going out of their way to try to get rid of guilt or any kind of sense of guilt in the culture and society today.

This has become a problem because it’s wreaking havoc on so many lives and so many families and people. Let me share with you a quick story. I have a relative who has been well established in the medical field for a long, long time and she is a nurse, and she tells a story of what happened to her when she was in a Christian hospital in the south where a young gal had come in. She had gone to a Christian camp and ran off with this guy. They had relations. She got pregnant. She’s 17 years old. Her mom and dad found out. Obviously, as a Christian family, abortion was not an option. So they took her to the hospital. The OBGYN checked her out and said that she was healthy, the baby was healthy, and so on. But he could tell that this girl was just overwhelmed with emotions and guilt over the problem that she had and what she was going to have to do in bearing this and the shame of that for the next nine months until the baby was born. So, my relative was assigned to be her nurse, to go to counseling sessions. The OBGYN actually made out doctor’s orders for her to go to a Christian integrationist psychologist there in the hospital, and since the parents obviously could not go with her to these appointments, then my relative was able to go. She sat down and in the second session this guy, who I found out later was actually trained in Skinnerian behaviorism, basically said to her, you know what your problem is? Your problem is guilt. Now, you need to go out and have as many sexual relationships as you can until you don’t feel guilty about it at all. My relative was sitting there in the chair and she heard this and she just about fell out of her chair. Here’s a guy who professes to be a Christian giving this girl who professes to be a Christian, who has the tragic effects of sin—Nevertheless, she’s pregnant. The problem is not with the baby. The problem’s with her sense of the sin that she bears and the shame of it—And he’s telling her basically to go out and, like allergy shots, commit this sin until she doesn’t feel bad about it anymore.

Now, the thing about it is, the Bible tells us that that can actually happen, where you sin to the point that your conscience is seared as with a hot iron and you don’t feel anything anymore. So the idea behind this is, somehow get rid of the feelings or the sense of guilt, but then the question comes, even though I don’t feel guilty anymore, am I still guilty before God? The Bible says, absolutely, we are.

I’ve tried my best to be able to boil down theologically what is guilt from a biblical perspective. The best succinct definition I know of is, it is, from God’s perspective, a legal liability or culpability to punishment. Now you notice in that definition, there is no feeling or sense or even emotion that’s a part of that definition. We may have feelings because we are guilty, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that guilt equals feelings. It doesn’t mean that. I think what our culture has done is, they basically have treated guilt as if it was a really bad thing when in reality, God created us in such a way to have a sense of guilt and to feel guilt so that we’ll do something about it.

I remember, years ago, Jay Adams making a statement like that and it stuck in my mind. He says, what do you do if you’re driving down the road and the red light comes on the dashboard of your car? You don’t pick up a hammer and smash the red light. You don’t do that. Well, that’s what people do in secular and Christian forms of psychology today. They smash the red light. No, you pull the car over. You open the hood and you take a look at what’s underneath. Or you could use the illustration, what do you do when the smoke detector goes off in your house? You don’t get up there and turn the smoke detector off or smash it or get rid of it. No, you go around checking to see what the problem is in the house. Well, that’s exactly what guilt is supposed to do for us. Guilt is not our enemy. Guilt is our friend. It’s something that we’re supposed to take a look at. What’s wrong in my life? Of course, because we live in a culture that hates culpability, they don’t want to be liable for anything. Everybody’s always a victim because we live in that kind of a culture. That’s the reason why they’re trying to get rid of guilt as quickly as possible, or the sense of it. 

Dale Johnson: That’s such a huge point. The reason that our culture sort of is motivated in this direction is, it’s a way to bypass the culpability that we have before God. That’s such a critical point. One of the things as you were talking that I thought of is, I’ve heard it said that one of the greatest contributions of Sigmund Freud to our western society is the removal of guilt. I think that’s a critical point as well because we look at guilt as a feeling and not as a statement of fact, that we are culpable of something. Those feelings are legitimate, they are real, but they are responses to the truth that we are culpable. The reason we don’t like that is because now we’re forced to look outside of our self to have that guilt assuaged, to have it dealt with, because we know there’s nothing in us that can overcome that guilt. So, we are in a war helping to right-size, correct, the secular worldview of trying to feed in. That was such a phenomenal point, Dr. Street, where you talked about how the secular method will work, but it will work in a false way, not readying us and really getting rid of our guilt before God, but searing our conscience to where now sin—that culpability before God— becomes useless and meaningless to us, where we become dull to the conviction as Jeremiah talks about in Jeremiah 6 where we have uncircumcised ears. In the New Testament, we have ears but don’t hear. The Bible describes us as being blinded, and that’s essentially what happens when we go and peruse around trying to bear the weight of our guilt and we desensitize ourselves to that culpability before God in a sense of trying to get rid of our feelings.

Now, we certainly don’t want to leave ourselves there. Guilt in and of itself is something that needs to be dealt with. The Bible speaks very readily about guilt. I even often talk to some of my counselees about guilt being a grace of God for them, that they now feel truly, in a convicted honest way before God, the things that they are truly guilty for and that then becomes motivation to find out a remedy for that, and we turn to God’s Word. So, help us to understand a biblical way of viewing guilt as something legitimate and helpful and good before God. 

John Street: This is really significant, especially with counseling at large, because there’s a lot of things that present themselves as something else in counseling. For example, I went back over the past several years of counseling and took a look at a lot of the people who came to me with the presentation problem of depression, and I figured out that over those years, a good 60% of those particular people were really dealing with the guilt. They thought their problem was depression, but it was really guilt. I’m reminded of what Psalm 32 says. When David says, “How blessed is he whose transgression is forgiven, whose sin is covered! How blessed is the man to whom the Lord does not impute iniquity, and in whose spirit there is no deceit! When I kept silent,” David said, “about my sin, my body wasted away through my groaning all day long. For day and night, your hand was heavy upon me; my vitality was drained away as with the fever heat of summer.” In other words, there in verses 3-4, David is basically referring to the feelings of guilt that were overwhelming to him and affected him physiologically. Then he says, “I acknowledged my sin to you, and my iniquity I did not hide.” That word “hide” is exactly the same Hebrew word as the word “covered” in verse 1. He says, “I said, ‘I will confess my transgressions to the Lord’, and you forgave the guilt of my sin.”

So the idea is something like this, when I choose to uncover before God, when I choose to become naked before God and acknowledge my guilt, then God covers me with his forgiveness. That’s significant. Everything in our culture is trying to cover up guilt, and no wonder they’re really experiencing the effects like David describes in verses 3-4 of his body wasting away, he’s groaning all day long, the fact that God’s hand was heavy upon him, his vitality was drained away as with the fever heat of summer—I’ve had people present chronic fatigue symptoms just like that and depression symptoms just exactly like that. So, if we’re willing to go to Christ and we’re willing to identify the sin, acknowledge that particular sin, and then study and understand the forgiveness that we have in Christ—as Romans 8:1 says, “There is therefore now no condemnation to those that are in Christ Jesus.” Often times I’ll say to my counselees, do you know who wrote that? The Apostle Paul, but you know what else he was? He was a murderer. He participated in the murder of the early Christians. He was there at the murder of Stephen, the first Christian martyr. That was Paul, as Saul, participating in that. So this is a murderer writing these words, “There is therefore now no condemnation to those that are in Christ Jesus.” That’s what we need in relationship to dealing with guilt. 

Dale Johnson: Dr. Street, that explanation, I think, is so helpful. Our willingness to agree with God that, as Hebrews 4 describes, the Word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, it divides joint and marrow, soul and spirit, thoughts and intentions of the heart, and he goes on in verse 13 and he says it leaves us exposed before God—that’s actually a healthy thing because then we look up to Him for His covering as opposed to what we do as more like Adam and Eve, where we’re looking for fig leaves in the world that are dying, that are hopeless, to cover our self. That’s not the way to bear true guilt and shame. We bear that guilt exposed before God and He covers. What an unbelievably beautiful thought.

Now, I think as we close this out, certainly this issue of conscience comes into mind. You talked about a distinction here between feelings and that’s oftentimes what the secular world is trying to get rid of, unwanted feelings. So they have this war on guilt. We’ve got to get rid of guilt. But the idea is really born in our conscience, in how we see ourself before God, the law of God, even to a degree, written on our hearts. There’s an understanding that we are guilty, legally liable, as you mentioned before, before Him, and that’s what then leads our response to those feelings of guilt. So talk just for a second about the issue of conscience and how that weighs into the issue of guilt. 

John Street: Well, God has given us the faculty of a conscience to help us identify the presence of guilt. That’s a God-given thing in our lives. The word that’s used in the New Testament is the Greek term, suneidesis. It’s a sun compound word. It has been identified as a “knowing with,” or some people have referred to it as “the soul reflecting upon itself,” almost like a diagnostic software on a computer and how it’s constantly reflecting on what’s going on in terms of the actions, like perpetually running on a computer a diagnostic program.

So the conscience involves what you know or believe, rather than what you feel. You may believe something is right, but you feel hesitant or even hostile towards it, and you may feel good about what you know is wrong. Feelings are often a result of the operations of the conscience, but they’re not identified with the conscience. Of course, when the Bible talks about the conscience, it divides it down into, in essence, four broad categories. There are variations of a conscience referred to in Scripture and each person has one conscience, but that conscience may respond to various issues differently because of the facts and forming it. These could be true of the same conscience in regards to different issues. For example, the Bible talks about a seared conscience in 1 Timothy 4:2, Titus 1:15, Ephesians 4:19. Now primarily this is a type of conscience that unbelievers have. They just go on and on and that’s the end. For a time believers can actually have a seared conscience. They’ll eventually confess it and deal with it, but that kind of a conscience has been silenced through repeated sin.

Then the Bible talks about an untrained conscience—Leviticus 4:22-24, 1 Timothy 1:13, Hebrews, 5:14. Our conscience needs to be continually trained to understand the whole counsel of God because you’re culpable for your sins of ignorance as well as for ignorance itself. That’s an untrained conscience.

The Bible also talks about an overactive conscience, like in Romans 14:1-5 or Romans 14:23. Sometimes you believe that a desire, a thought, or an action is morally wrong when the Bible does not actually condemn it. In those cases, you’re required to act according to your conscience, but you should also seek to retrain your conscience according to biblical standards. So, you know, a lot of people will say, your conscience should be your guide, but that’s not true from a biblical perspective. It should be your guard, not your guide. The truth should be your guide.

The fourth type of conscience is in 1 Timothy 1:5. It’s the biblical conscience. This is rightly responding to the standard of biblical truth in a person’s life. I’m always reminded of the Apostle Paul in 1 Corinthians 4:4 where he says he searched his own conscience and he didn’t have any culpability whatsoever, but he says that that doesn’t equip me. It’s the Lord, ultimately, who does. He didn’t even trust the evaluations of his own conscience. He had to take his conscience back to what the Lord said in the Word in order to deal with that particular conscience. See, Freud messed up our society. He’s the one that coined the term, and made it very popular, false guilt. All right, that’s an oxymoron, false guilt. That’s like jumbo shrimp or military intelligence. Guilt is a fact, it’s not a feeling. It’s because Freud wanted to free the id from the superego, from the influences of culture and society, and so on. The Bible says the standard for our guilt comes from the Word of God. That’s where our standard comes from. That’s the way that we should measure our guilt before Him. 

Dale Johnson: That’s so important. Our conscience is dulled by our sin, the Scripture makes clear in 1 Corinthians 2:14 and following, and when that happens, we sin and we disregard that we are guilty before the Lord. That’s why it’s so important when Paul is warning us constantly to think on things above—or later in that passage in Colossians 3, “Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly”—because that’s informing your conscience. It becomes the measuring stick by which we take our often unwieldy and undecipherable heart and we compare that to the Word of God, and that is what grows the conscious. It makes our conscience tender and that’s a good thing because when we have guilty responses, we know we’re guilty before God, to have a tender heart, we’re going to run to repentance quicker. We’re going to run to, as you mentioned earlier, that covering of Christ, that He has paid for our guilt and our shame because of our sin. He has made that legal liability right. What a beautiful picture.

Now, you guys need to go back and listen to this again because the things that we just described, you’re going to need to chew on a little bit, you’re going to need to meditate on. You’re going to see the distinction that our culture is proposing to us, and that distinction made clarified by the Word of God in the way that we understand conscience and in the way that we understand guilt. Guilt is real, but we learn how to deal with it from a biblical perspective. Dr. Street, very insightful. Thank you, brother.