10 The law is only a shadow of the good things that are coming—not the realities themselves. For this reason it can never, by the same sacrifices repeated endlessly year after year, make perfect those who draw near to worship. 2 Otherwise, would they not have stopped being offered? For the worshipers would have been cleansed once for all, and would no longer have felt guilty for their sins. 3 But those sacrifices are an annual reminder of sins.4 It is impossible for the blood of bulls and goats to take away sins.
5 Therefore, when Christ came into the world, he said:
“Sacrifice and offering you did not desire,
but a body you prepared for me;
6 with burnt offerings and sin offerings
you were not pleased.
7 Then I said, ‘Here I am—it is written about me in the scroll—
I have come to do your will, my God.’”
but a body you prepared for me;
6 with burnt offerings and sin offerings
you were not pleased.
7 Then I said, ‘Here I am—it is written about me in the scroll—
I have come to do your will, my God.’”
8 First he said, “Sacrifices and offerings, burnt offerings and sin offerings you did not desire, nor were you pleased with them”—though they were offered in accordance with the law.9 Then he said, “Here I am, I have come to do your will.” He sets aside the first to establish the second. 10 And by that will, we have been made holy through the sacrifice of the body of Jesus Christ once for all.
As the Psalmist once said , "Forget not all His benefits" I've been pondering lately, What are the benefits of being "saved"? Certainly one of them is the freedom from guilt or a guilt-free conscience.
Most writers both secular and Christian acknowledge that there is a good guilt which keeps us from doing bad things or leads us to make amends with people when we have wronged them. A guilty conscience in this case can be a good thing. An example would be when Jesus tells us if we are going to Church and our conscience, or guilt, is telling us that we have wronged someone, we should go make up with them and then go meet with the Lord.
The area where secular psychiatrists and Christians differ is in the area of what is called toxic guilt. The Yoga journal says this about it;
Toxic guilt is what happens when natural guilt festers. It manifests as a nagging feeling of pervasive but nonspecific badness, as if your whole life has something wrong with it. This type of free-floating guilt is the hardest kind to deal with, because it arises from lingering patterns, or samskaras, lodged in your subconscious. How can you expiate your sin or forgive yourself for something when you don't know what it is you did—or when you believe that what you did is essentially irreparable? To some extent, this particular type of guilt seems to be an unintended by-product of Judeo-Christian culture, a residue of the doctrine of original sin. Toxic guilt often has roots in early childhood: Mistakes that your parents or teachers treated as a big deal, for example, or religious training, especially the kind that teaches original sin, can fill us with guilty feelings that have no real basis.
Secular thinkers would say that one of the means to a healthy psyche is to rid ourselves of this nagging feeling that we are bad because that is crippling us with a false guilt which then steals our happiness, confidence, success, relationships, pleasure, and in general makes us a sour, "woe is me" person that has a hard time with interpersonal relationships. It's interesting that all psychiatric philosophies from Freud to Skinner, come up with methods to deal with this guilt that we shouldn't have, yet we do. Christianity would say that this inherent guilty feeling is real. Don't repress it ,deny it ,or medicate it but accept it because we ARE guilty. We have an internal standard according to Romans 2 and 7 that we hold others to, knowing well that we ourselves don't meet that standard. Also, according to Romans 1, we know of a Holy God who wants our allegiance yet according to Isaiah 53, we are all going our own way. This leaves us with 2 choices - ignore or deny it, or confess and resolve it.
This passage refers to worshippers. If you desire to worship God you will feel guilt because you realize you are too sinful to come into His presence. Thankfully, Jesus made a way to remove all that real guilt. If you don't desire to worship God, then that guilt shouldn't bother you - yet it does. Don't medicate or psychoanalyze it away. Let it lead you to the cross and be guilt - free. What a benefit of following Christ!
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