I was greatly blessed at our men’s study Tuesday night. The fellowship was encouraging and humbling; the questions were sharp and perceptive; and the discussion was edifying. I look forward to next month!
During the discussion that night, the question of “high-handed sin” came up. After some exploration of the topic, I promised to look into it further. I had not prepared anything on that particular topic, and though I remembered looking at the question in the past, I thought it would be best for all of us if there was a little more study put into the question: under the Law of Moses, was atonement possible for premeditated (“high-handed”) sins?
Numbers 15:29-31 says: “You shall have one law for him who does anything unintentionally, for him who is native among the people of Israel and for the stranger who sojourns among them. But the person who does anything with a high hand, whether he is native or a sojourner, reviles the Lord, and that person shall be cut off from among his people. Because he has despised the word of the Lord and has broken his commandment, that person shall be utterly cut off; his iniquity shall be on him.”
So there are two categories of sin spoken of here. There is the “unintentional sin.” The context of these verses, Numbers 15:22-31, gives a summary of sacrificial procedure to atone for sin – but only for unintentional sin. This is further underlined in Leviticus, where the qualification “unintentionally” is applied to: 1) all four levels of the sin offering (Lev. 4:2, 13, 22, 27, and also 5:1-13 where the statement “it was hidden from him” refers to unwitting sin); 2) the guilt offering (Lev. 5:14, 18).
Bottom line is that the guilt and sin offerings are specifically for unintentional sins. The text repeats this so often that it cannot be ignored.
The other category of sin spoken of in Numbers 15 is that of “high-handed” sin. What does that mean? Interestingly, we could define this idea in two different ways, and each gives a different answer.
The first way we might define it is by looking at those sins which are excluded from those qualified as “unintentional.” The easy answer is that, therefore, a high-handed sin is anything intentional or premeditated. That is the classic answer. However, there is a problem with this way of defining the answer, and that is found in Leviticus 6:1-7.
In this passage, which is a continuation of the instructions for the guilt offering (which started in Lev. 5:14), a list of sins are described. What they have in common are three things. First, unlike the sins described immediately previously in 5:14-19, which deal with sins against the Lord’s holy things and specific violations of his commands, all the sins in 6:1-7 have to do with sins against others. Second, these sins are all property offences. Third, these are all sins that appear to be intentional and premeditated –despite the fact that the section they belong to, Lev. 5:14-6-7, begins with the qualifier “unintentionally.”
How can this be? How can an intentional sin be “unintentional”?
But I said there was another way to define the meaning of the term “high-handed.” And as it turns out, it solves the problem of the first at the same time!
In Numbers 15:30 and 31 God specifies the true nature of a “high-handed sin.” It “reviles the LORD” (30) and “despises the word of the LORD” (31). So this suggests that it’s more than simply deliberate and premeditated, though it is that. It is, in fact, a conscious, willing, and rebellious act of defiance before God. These are the sins for which there is no atonement.
That leaves us with the problem in Leviticus 6:1-7. We seem to have a “grey area” between sins that are unintentional and sins that are flagrant and rebellious acts of defiance. Leviticus 6 seems to describe sins that were not unintentional – they were deliberate. But there’s a difference from the flagrant and rebellious sins, and it’s seen in Leviticus 6:4. It reads, “If he has sinned and has realized his guilt and will restore what he took…”
It’s been pointed out that another summary of the law found in Numbers, chapter 5:5-7, deals with this idea of restoration and restitution as well. But this text adds a crucial difference: “Speak to the people of Israel, When a man or woman commits any of the sins that people commit by breaking faith with the Lord, and that person realizes his guilt, he shall confess his sin that he has committed.”
Both texts have the idea of restoration in mind: the sinner, having come to a conviction of his sin, is willing to restore, with interest, what has been taken. And Numbers adds the idea of confession – the person must confess their sin before atonement can take place. But even Leviticus has a glimmer of that idea when in 6:4-5 he is described as “realizing his guilt” and then acting to reverse the situation – a tacit and implied confession in Leviticus, one made explicit and verbal in Numbers.
So it seems that a deliberate and intentional sin may, by God’s design and mercy, be “counted” in the same way as an unintentional sin and covered with a guilt offering if and only if confession and restitution takes place. Or, in other words, God will move the person’s sin from the “high-handed” to the “unintentional” category if he demonstrates genuine repentance, and so make atonement possible.
The scholars I looked at in studying this question left the issue there – they saw this as a very attractive and sensible way to solve the question of whether atonement for high-handed sin is possible. Basically, it’s not the deliberate sinner who is high-handed, but the unrepentant sinner, they say. And that fits very well with Hebrews. I like it too; I think it resolves most of the question.
But not all. And what's unresolved is what we'll look at next time.