Dennis Peacocke looks at how we deal with guilt

Dennis Peacocke

When man refuses to listen to God and instead constructs a counterfeit reality, his house of cards will inevitably topple no matter what his pride does to prop it up. And of course, man's ultimate act of pride is to reject the fact that he's filled with guilt from habitually breaking God's laws. The only true escape from that guilt is provided by God Himself-the cross of Christ upon which we can heap our deficiencies and find a forgiveness and self-acceptance that allows us to live life to the fullest. Prideful man hates that cross. It is morally offensive because it challenges man's sense of his own goodness and demands that he deal with his lawbreaking rebellion. It is intellectually offensive because it clarifies reality, reducing it to the simple dynamic of how a man relates to his God, rather than leaving him room to maneuver in the dark shadows of self-induced complexities and relativistic ethics. Prideful man believes that nothing could be so simple as obedience to God's reality (truth) and the acceptance of Christ's atoning death on the cross. Such pride then forces him to construct his own laws and ways of dealing with his unrelenting guilt. If the consequences of man's spiritual gymnastics weren't so eternally serious, they'd be hilarious. Unredeemed man isn't just a joke-he's made himself the joke.

Christian Reality

When we as Christians are properly relating to the cross of Christ, we experience three major benefits.

1. We can accept the reality of absolute law because we have an effective way of dealing with the guilt we feel as a result of frequently falling short of that law (sin). If you have no way of dealing with your guilt, you must deny that there is anything about which to feel guilty! If you do this, you must likewise attack that which measures your guilt-the law. Christians can affirm God's laws of reality and affirm their failures, yet accept their guilt and cast it off upon Christ's provision for it-His cross. The result is true freedom because we are affirming God's reality, His absolutes, our own weakness, and Christ's provision for dealing with it.

2. We can accept ourselves because the cross tells us that God knows our shortcomings and has provided a means of dealing with the guilt that comes from them.

3. We can accept others because in the cross we experience the enormous relief of God's
forgiveness, so that we are then able to pass that relief along to others. We forgive them for hurting us in the same way God forgives us for hurting Him. You can only give away what you have, and if you haven't received forgiveness yourself, you can't give it to others.

Humanistic Reality

1. Humanists can't accept the reality of absolute law because if they do, they then have to deal with the fact that they are outlaws! Since no one believes they are perfect, that knowledge of imperfection creates compounding guilt. If guilt can be got rid of in some way, then that which makes someone feel guilty can also be rejected, i.e., the law. Once God's laws have been rejected, humanists must make all laws relative, so that their value system becomes mushy, and "forgiving." If my value system is soft, dealing with my guilt will be far easier. In other words, while God deals with my guilt through His cross, humanists deal with guilt by changing their laws and making them fuzzy. The goal of most modern psychotherapy is not one of helping the individual obey external laws, but rather one of removing guilt by lowering standards to the point where guilty feelings are no longer produced. Similarly, when a society cannot deal with its collective guilt, it lowers its standards of conduct, as evidenced by the epidemic of drug abuse and pornography in our nation.

2. Humanists can only accept others who are humanists. Anyone who has absolute standards is a threat to a humanist since it forces the issue of the law, guilt, and how you deal with it. In a guilt-ridden society, everyone blames someone else for his problems: the women blame the men, the blacks blame the whites, the capitalists blame the Marxists, the poor blame the rich - with everyone either blameless or the object of blame! It would seem pretty easy to measure the "guilt index" of any society by two things:

a. The amount of public name calling
b. The number of new movements emerging which attempt to help people deal with guilt (apart from the cross). So many examples spring to mind, from the encounter groups and E.S.T. of the seventies, diet-fad clubs, Eastern cults, transcendental meditation, and similar "higher mental awareness" exercises, all the way through to the virtual worship of soap operas where everybody is worse than you so you feel more normal, and so on.

Karl Menninger, one of America's most prominent medical psychologists once asked the question, "Whatever happened to sin?"

I think I know...we tried to bury it because it carried with it the curse of unresolved guilt.

Reprinted by permission. This article is excerpted from Dennis Peacocke's book "The Emperor Has No Clothes" available at www.gostrategic.org