Fools mock at the guilt offering,
but the upright enjoy acceptance.

Proverbs 14:9 ESV

This past Sunday, I preached a sermon over the guilt offering in Leviticus. When preparing to preach, there are always bits left on the cutting room floor that don’t make it into the final cut on Sunday morning. And when I say always, that is exactly what I mean. For more than ten years now, each sermon I have preached has needed to have its potential content cut back to some degree. This is because God’s word never runs dry. There is always more that can be said about a particular text.

This Sunday, I structured the sermon around three questions: What was the problem that the guilt offering addressed? What was its solution? What was the outcome? I also had a fourth question: What is your response? But after going to Isaiah 53 in the third question and realizing that the sermon was already at its typical length, I cut out that planned fourth question. Here then is that final section, now edited to be a standalone meditation rather than the conclusion of my sermon.

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Fools mock at the guilt offering, but the upright enjoy acceptance. Like most proverbs, this is built on parallelism, meaning it has two lines that are meant to speak to one another. In this case, they are offering a contrast.

The first word is important: fools. We tend to use fool as just being dumb or silly today, but in Proverbs, the fool is someone who is in the same category as the wicked. Fools are those who are walking down the path of death, the road to damnation. So, this is not who you want to be.

What do the fools do? They mock at the guilt offering. The word for guilt offering (asham) is also the word for guilt in general. The same is also true of sin and the sin offering (hattat). Context determines which translation is most accurate. Indeed, both seem to be justified here. In ancient Israel, guilt and the guilt offering were bound together.  The guilt offering expressed a desire to repair a guilty conscience. They had sinned against Yahweh and, perhaps, against their neighbor. They then felt the guilt of their sin. In fact, they may have suffered consequences for their sin. And they brought the guilt offering as a sign of their repentance. They offered a ram to Yahweh was as compensation, and they made restitution to whoever they wronged.

Fools belittle the entire concept of guilt, repentance, and restitution. They feel no remorse over their sins. If they believe they can get away with defrauding God and others, they will. This is what makes being a fool damnable. The fool will not find forgiveness because he does not seek it. Instead, he mocks the very idea.

Contrasted to this are the upright: but the upright enjoy acceptance. The upright do not enjoy acceptance because they are sinless. The implication of this line, in light of the first line, is that they enjoy acceptance through the guilt offering.  The upright are no less sinful than fools. But when they sin, they acknowledge it. They repent before the LORD and attempt to right what they have wronged toward others, just as the guilt offering required a ram for Yahweh and restitution for the injured party. As a result of their repentance, God forgives their sin, and they are accepted by Him.

Let us ask ourselves: How then do we respond to guilt? Are we fools who mock repentance and restoration? Or are we walking in the path of the upright?

A wonderful New Testament parallel with this proverb is 1 Corinthians 1:18, which says, “For the word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved, it is the power of God.” Just as fools mock the guilt offering, so too do those who are perishing mock the cross of Christ as folly. They laugh at the notion of needing to be forgiven for their sins. The cross is foolishness to them.

But to we who acknowledge our guilt and know that we cannot save ourselves, the cross is where Jesus presents Himself as the true and better guilt offering, and it is the power of God.

In ancient Israel, a fool would mock the guilt offering, while the upright would delight in the acceptance that it established between them and both God and their neighbor. The principle is the same for us today. How do we respond to the message of the cross? Is it folly to us, or is it the very might of Yahweh?

If we acknowledge that Christ alone is the Savior who can rescue us from our sins, then for us it is the power of God.