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[0:00] Leviticus 5, starting in verse 14, going into chapter 6, verse 7. I told you, look at this. Then the Lord spoke to Moses, saying, this would all be red letter, right?

[0:11] Then the Lord spoke to Moses, saying, If a person acts unfaithfully and sins unintentionally against the Lord's holy things, then he shall bring his guilt offering to the Lord, a ram without defect from the flock, according to your valuation in silver by shekels, in terms of the shekel of the sanctuary for a guilt offering.

[0:30] He shall make restitution for that which he has sinned against the holy thing, and shall add to it a fifth part of it and give it to the priest. The priest shall then make atonement for him with the ram of the guilt offering, and it will be forgiven him.

[0:43] Now if a person sins and does any of the things which the Lord has commanded not to be done, though he was unaware, still he is guilty and shall bear his punishment. He is then to bring to the priest a ram without defect from the flock, according to your valuation for a guilt offering.

[0:59] So the priest shall make atonement for him concerning his error, in which he sinned unintentionally and did not know it, and it will be forgiven him. It is a guilt offering. He is certainly guilty before the Lord.

[1:11] Then the Lord spoke to Moses, saying, When a person sins and acts unfaithfully against the Lord and deceives his companion in regard to a deposit or security entrusted to him, or through robbery, or if he has extorted from his companion, or has found what was lost and lied about it and sworn falsely, so that he sins in regard to any one of the things a man may do, then it shall be when he sins and becomes guilty, that he shall restore what he took by robbery, or what he got by extortion, or the deposit which was entrusted to him, or the lost thing which he found, or anything about which he swore falsely.

[1:51] He shall make restitution for it in full, and add to it one-fifth more. He shall give it to the one to whom it belongs on the day he presents his guilt offering.

[2:03] Then he shall bring to the priest his guilt offering to the Lord, a ram without defect from the flock, according to your valuation, for a guilt offering, and the priest shall make atonement for him before the Lord, and he will be forgiven for any one of the things which he may have done to incur guilt.

[2:22] Tonight, I want you to see the high cost of man's trespasses. Not his sin nature, but those things he does that are wrong.

[2:35] His sins. I know there's a fine line where you say, well, it matters. Because it's easy to say we're all sinners. Because we are. We're born that way. Every one of us are sinners.

[2:45] We're sinners saved by the grace of God. We have been redeemed by the blood of the Lamb. It is a whole other thing to begin to speak of our sins. Not our nature, but our doings, our deeds, what we've done, the way we act, the way we talk, the way we behave, the way we think, the things we do that we know we shouldn't do.

[3:09] And that is our trespasses. And God stops here last. And this offering is something, while it is offering the same thing that other offerings require, I hope you saw the difference in them when we read it.

[3:24] If not, we'll get to them. But hopefully tonight, we will see that those deeds we do are very expensive. Those actions we take come with a high price tag attached to them.

[3:40] And it is the high cost of man's trespasses. Now let's take it in context. We always want to take it in context. I know I say this every time, but we have to be cautious here.

[3:53] And we have to understand this, especially in these offerings. And when we get to the book of Leviticus, Leviticus is not telling the people how to be right with God.

[4:05] Right? We would say it this way. Leviticus is not telling them how to be saved. Because it is dealing with the people that are already saved.

[4:17] They are already in a covenant relationship with God. It happened in Exodus, right? It's why we take it in context. If we read Leviticus by itself, sometimes we misconstrue this. We would open up the book of Leviticus and say, well, this is what God is telling his people.

[4:29] If you want to be right with me, this is what you do. No, this is how he is dealing with his people who are already in a covenant relationship with him, which was founded in the book of Exodus, chapter 20 and following.

[4:44] He has already redeemed them. The Passover has already taken place. He's already set them free. They're in the wilderness, which we said was, I'll test you once again. The wilderness wanderings are the place of what?

[4:56] It starts with an S. I'll give you that. Sanctification, right? God had gotten them out of Egypt and he's going to take 40 years to get Egypt out of them, right?

[5:06] He had redeemed them, set them free, but they could not yet go into where he had called them to be. He brought them out that he may take them in, but before he could take them in, he had to do something within them.

[5:18] That's what we call God has saved us, redeemed us in order that we may spend eternity with him. He said, well, that's a long journey. It's taken me a long time to get there. Well, maybe it is those wilderness wanderings.

[5:30] It takes a long time to sanctify us and to get the world out of us, though he might have got us out of the world. It is during that covenant relationship time. You are my people. I am your God.

[5:40] Think about this. God says, I'm your God. You're my people. You are special people. You're set apart. You see me during the day. I'm a pillar of cloud. You see me during the night. I'm a pillar of fire. I have my residence among you.

[5:52] I have manifested my presence literally in the middle of the camp. Shekinah glory. And this is what it's going to look like. This is how it's going to happen.

[6:02] So this is coming out of a relationship. This isn't for the lost people. This is for the redeemed, right? This is for the Old Testament saved. And this is maintaining that relationship.

[6:13] So don't discount it. Don't say, Oh, that has nothing to do with me. That's Old Testament theology. No, God is the same yesterday, today, and tomorrow. And these pictures, these offerings are there to show us the high price tag that goes on our trespasses.

[6:28] Number one, we see this. Hopefully from this passage, we see the first thing is that there is a severed relationship. There is a severed relationship.

[6:41] Now, I'm going to try to say this carefully and cautiously so that you understand this. I have a saying that I have to remind myself of all the time.

[6:56] And it is, don't be surprised when sinners act like sinners. Right? Because the sin in a sinner's life, that is a lost person's life, does not change their relationship with anyone.

[7:14] The surprising thing is when saints act like sinners. Because that begins to sever a relationship.

[7:24] In order for a relationship to be severed, it has to already be in existence. And God says, I am your God, and you are my people. Now, let's talk about when you do things, what it costs.

[7:37] So this is for the redeemed. This is for the believers. These are for those who know Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior. For the lost person, he does not have a relationship with Jesus Christ. For the person who has never claimed Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior, there is no relationship.

[7:51] I know that's hard for us to wrap our minds around, but they do not have a relationship with the Lord God Almighty in order that it may be severed. Because their very nature has already severed it.

[8:04] But for the believer, those who have trusted in Jesus Christ, those who have called on the name of Jesus so as to be saved. Now, we ought to be moved, first of all, that there are people in existence who have no relationship with God.

[8:18] And now we're dealing with the people who do. Now, it's just not saying that we need to forget about those. What they do will affect them eternally. They'll be judged based on the deeds that they do eternally. But again, we're talking covenant people here.

[8:32] The sins in our lives, the actions we take, the deeds we do, have the price tag of a severed relationship. It strains the relationship that we have with the God that we are in covenant with.

[8:46] We think we sin and we mess up. Oh, I made a mistake. I need to forgive. Oh, I made a mistake. I need to forgive. Oh, I made a mistake and I need to do that. Understand that, but mistakes come with what? Consequences.

[8:57] And mistakes always result in something. And the question we always ask is, well, I didn't mean to do it, but the main question is, but did we mean not to do it?

[9:09] Were we intentionally trying not to? Well, if we know the weight of it, then we will. And that is, look at this. God says, then the Lord spoke to Moses saying, if a person acts, and I begin to see this here, by the way God describes it.

[9:23] This is the very base of relationships, right? If a person acts unfaithfully, unfaithfully. If a person acts unfaithfully and sins unintentionally against the Lord's holy things.

[9:40] So now all of a sudden, he's talking about holy things, by the way. This is just so amazing. This is what's so different from this sin. And God is saying that if you treat that which I have called holy as common. So if you look at the tabernacle, like it's just another tent.

[9:55] Or if you think, well, those utensils in the tabernacle, they're just, they're whatever, they're just some cool gold cups. We ought to get those out. We have in our house, not right now, it's actually in a storage building, but it may be in our house we're living in.

[10:09] I don't know, I have to ask my wife. We have gold-plated flatware that was Carrie's grandmother's. It's used to, growing up as a kid, she would always eat Thanksgiving meal in this gold-plated flatware.

[10:22] So it's like a tradition around our house. Every year at Thanksgiving, we get it out and we use it. It's pretty cool. Like, oh, we got a gold fork and a gold spoon and a gold knife. And it's just pretty cool. But it means something to Carrie and it just carries on that tradition of when we have everybody over, we have it.

[10:37] But the things, that's not necessarily holy. It's just special. It holds a special place. But on that day, we treat it as common. We use it as we would our other flatware, right? We eat with it.

[10:49] I mean, when I'm eating some pumpkin pie, I take a spoon and eat it just like a regular pumpkin pie. You know, it's not like since this is a gold spoon, I'm not going to eat any different. I treat it the same. Well, there were some who went into the tabernacle or actually the temple of God, carried away the utensils of God and decided they were going to use them as common too.

[11:07] Those gold cups, remember Belshazzar and all those guys who, if you read the book of Daniel, they're having this feast and they drink this and then the hand of God showed up and wrote on the wall. That is treating the holy things which God has sanctified as common.

[11:20] And God is saying, if you begin to disregard that which I have set apart, now let's just back up and make this even more practical because the very first thing that he called holy was what?

[11:32] His people. You are holy. And if you treat one of my people as common when I have called him holy, wait a minute.

[11:44] But the description here is what gets me. When any person acts unfaithfully, when he does something and is being unfaithful to me, see, it's not a mistake.

[12:04] That's not, oh, I messed up. That's cheating on God is what that is. That's what he calls spiritual adultery.

[12:17] So our mess ups are unfaithfulness to God. And God says, you cannot be unfaithful to me and me be faithful to you.

[12:30] Paul would later write, when we are unfaithful, you are faithful still. Why? Because Jesus, you cannot deny yourself, right?

[12:42] Jesus was faithful to himself. And you say, well, that's kind of arrogant. No, that's being God. That's having authority and all those things. And he says, you are faithful.

[12:52] You stay true to who you are even when we're not. And our sins here are described as unfaithfulness. So the very first relationship we sever is the relationship we have with God Almighty.

[13:03] When we mess up, we're creating a ripple in that covenant, a ripple in that relationship that is a price tag. And it goes on down here in chapter six and says, another man, when a man acts unfaithfully towards me and does wrong to his neighbor, and we'll get into that in just a minute, he does something.

[13:23] So now you have that our sins or our actions have begun to sever the relationship we have with God and sever the relationship we have with our fellow man. It is an unfaithfulness towards God and an unfaithfulness towards others.

[13:37] So what I want you to see here, and this all matters, is that you were created for two things. Well, you were actually created for more than two, but two of your core purposes for creation was to have fellowship with God and fellowship with man.

[13:54] God created us for community. I know that some of you say, well, I'd rather be alone. I understand that. But you were created for community. You were created for fellowship.

[14:07] And unfortunately, in our sin-riddled world, that community and that fellowship does not always take place the way it should, so it creates inside of us the desire of separation.

[14:21] But God created us to be in fellowship with him and in fellowship with others. But the things we do sever those two most basic needs.

[14:36] They begin to sever the relationship we have with God and they begin to sever the relationship we have with others. To the ultimate end, that it can completely separate us from either one.

[14:49] This is why we rejoice in the faithfulness of Christ. We're looking at Old Testament time where man was responsible for, and we'll get to it in just a minute, dealing with this severance on his own.

[15:05] But we're leaning on this side of the cross where God has taken care of that and he remains faithful still to Christ that's inside of us. But it doesn't mean that it removes that weight.

[15:16] It begins to sever a relationship. The first thing that we see of the high cost of man's trespasses is a severed relationship. Number two, it is an individual responsibility. which namely is we can't play the blame game.

[15:32] Okay, it is an individual responsibility. Look at what it says. I know we've kind of said this before when we look at these offerings, but it bears repeating since it's repeated so often in these. Then the Lord spoke to Moses saying, if a person, I want you just to pay attention to the individuals here, okay?

[15:47] If a person acts unfaithfully and sins unintentionally against the Lord's holy things, then he shall bring his guilt offering to the Lord. He, verse 16, shall make restitution for that which he has sinned.

[16:01] Verse 17, now if a person sins, in verse 18, he is then to bring to the priest. And then in verse chapter 6, when a person sins, he goes on and says, then he shall do this.

[16:16] What is it? An individual responsibility. The one who sins is the one who is responsible. Each individual is responsible to bear the guilt and therefore the price of their own sin.

[16:34] Now this is a two-fold thing. It is one freeing. You are not called to bear the price and the sins or the weight of the sins of others. You're not.

[16:46] I know some who struggle because they have family members who do not know Christ, family members who have not accepted Christ and maybe it's their own children and maybe it's the others and they carry that guilt and they say, well, I counseled someone not too long ago and they're saying, well, my son, and they're just not really happy and my son, they don't have the relationship with Christ they should have and their son was an adult and I said, wait a minute, stop just a moment.

[17:06] your son is responsible for his acceptance or rejection. You can carry a weight of burden and concern but do not carry the guilt.

[17:22] You say, well, that's hard to do. Absolutely, it's hard to do. I know. I know. I have family members as well who do not know Christ as their Lord and Savior and it is painful.

[17:37] We are to pray, we're to intercede, we're to reach out but that is not our penalty to bear. It's not. But we see here we are to appoint them and to lead them and to guide them and to show them the way, the truth and they are to respond to that and trust Christ with them but on the other side of the coin is this, no one can bear our sin but us.

[18:04] You say, wait a minute, Christ bore my sins. Wait a minute, I'm getting there, okay, stay with me, don't jump ahead of me. Follow through because according to this, the weight of our trespasses, the pain of our trespasses is this, each man pays the price for his own sin.

[18:24] You cannot offer a sacrifice for the sin of someone else and no one else can offer a sacrifice for your sin. You bear your sin.

[18:35] You take your sacrifice to the temple for yourself. You cannot say, I think my neighbor messed up so I'm going to take a sacrifice to the temple for my neighbor and you cannot trust that your neighbor is going to do it for you.

[18:50] You are responsible for your sin. Why? I can't do it for you because I'm too busy doing it for me. That's Hebrews passage, right? Hebrews chapter 10, those priests who lived daily to intercede were first interceding for themselves because they were sinners too.

[19:05] But now we live under a better priest, right? A great high priest who is Jesus Christ who had no sin to bear, who had no price to pay, who had no guilt that was put upon him so he could bear our sin for us in our place because we see the glory of the cross in the truth of the price.

[19:31] The price is this, I'm responsible. It's my fault. I messed up. My trespasses demand my responsibility.

[19:42] And Jesus in his grace and his mercy steps in and says, I'll take it. That's my weight. That's my pain. That's my penalty.

[19:54] That's my due. And he says, I'll take it. I'll pay it for you because I don't have anything that I have to pay. See the glory of the cross and the high costs of our trespasses.

[20:11] My sins demand that I make them right. But the problem is I keep sinning so I can't make them right. And God in his mercy says, I know you can't so I will come and I'll take those on myself and bear them on the cross in your place.

[20:30] So we see a severed relationship. We see an individual responsibility. Number three, and hopefully this is where you saw the difference in the sacrifices. number three, a demanded repayment.

[20:44] Our trespasses demand a repayment. You can't mess up and not repay. According to the God's holy standard for those in covenant relationship, you had to repay what you took.

[21:03] it was a demanded repayment. You see this here. God says, if you sin against my holy things, you're going to bring your sacrifice and you're going to bring a fifth. And did you also notice that in this, this is the very first offering, by the way, in which the priest was commanded to value the offering being presented.

[21:22] Which means that if I brought a lamb, because this was my trespasses, this wasn't my nature, my worship, this is I messed up, I made a mistake, so I'm going to bring a lamb to the temple. God commanded the priest to value that sacrifice, which means he could say, well this, this lamb right here, it's not worth as much as you think it is, you need to take it back and go find me another one.

[21:43] Don't bring me a half blind animal, you bring me a perfect spotless animal, according to your valuation, God says the priest was to value that which I presented, so he could tell me whether or not it was worth enough to be on the altar for my mess up.

[22:02] Because it demanded that type of repayment, but God also said, if you have been unfaithful, you bring your offering and then you go ahead and you bring me a fifth, that is 20%, pay me back.

[22:15] God demanded payment for what you took and interest, 20% interest, 20% above what the valuation was. And we go down in verse 6, by the way, all these sins, we say, the unintentional, the unintentional, the unintentional, chapter 6 kind of blows the unintentional out of the way.

[22:32] I've never seen anyone that unintentionally robbed somebody or unintentionally kept something that they knew belonged to somebody else and then lied about it. Or unintentionally, you know, these are not unintentional sins, right?

[22:43] God says that if you have robbed someone or you took something that was a deposit and a security entrusted to him and through robbery took it and stole it and lied about it and testified, God says you took some money from someone else.

[22:54] Now you've severed that relationship with that other person. Tony Evans has a great commentary on this. I'll get to that in just a minute. He says, so you've done this person wrong. You need to be made right. You need to repay that.

[23:05] And you say, well, yes, you're right, God, I've sinned. I'm going to bring my offering. God says, wait a minute, before you bring that offering to me, you bring what you owe back to him, right?

[23:15] You first be reconciled to your brother. You stole from him so you go pay him back. Scripture says you pay it back in full, make restitution in full plus one-fifth, that is 20%.

[23:28] You give back to him what you took and 20%. What do we see here? The sin always costs you more than it gives you. Whatever pleasure you gain from it, it's going to cost you more in the end.

[23:44] You might have stole 100, but you're going to give back 120. God says, it demands you repay. And after you pay him back plus the 20%, then you bring me my offering because your trespasses demand repayment.

[24:02] I love what Tony Evans says here. Tony Evans says here, this is biblical justice. This is taking the courtroom and the jailhouse out of the picture and reconciling man.

[24:13] This is when man does another man wrong, it demands that he repay that man for the wrong he did and then be made right with God. So in the end, everybody wins, right? because it's not that he's anti-courtrue or anti-law.

[24:27] He says, rather than taking the offender and putting him in a warehouse full of other offenders where he can learn to offend in a greater way, we call that jail, and then leaving the offended out their money and never getting their money back, God says, no, you take the offender, make him pay him back plus some and then make him get in my house and get right with me.

[24:48] So you take him to the person's house and you take him to the Lord's house and all of a sudden he don't go to the jailhouse and he never learns anything but what God has called him to do. Makes a big difference. You say, that's good in theory.

[24:59] It is good in theory and then all of a sudden Oak Cliff Bible Fellowship started doing that. And then the judges started saying, can you take more people?

[25:13] Would you take more people? Would you take more people? Tony said, hey, don't send them to jail, send them to Oak Cliff. Make them come to church. We'll make somebody get them a job. We'll make them repay what they owe and then some. We'll make sure they're in church being discipled and at the end of six months, judge, let's see where they stand.

[25:28] He says, when we went back to six months, this individual had messed up. He had repaid almost double what he stole from the man beforehand. He was growing in discipleship. There was someone who was picking him up in the morning and taking him to work, picking him up in the afternoon and taking him home and that someone was another believer that the whole ride to work and the whole ride from work, they were discipling him and mentoring him and showing him what it looked like to be a Christian man in the society that was anti-Christ and he said, it worked so well, the judge said, how many more can you take?

[26:00] It wasn't, by the way, it wasn't Tony doing it, it was the church doing it, right? And that's what he said, now it was a win-win. We got him in the Lord's house, he repaid that person, rather than that person being out his money, he got his money back plus some and we gained one in the kingdom.

[26:17] And this is God's idea of justice. What else we see here is that God says, when you repay him and you're made right with me, then you're forgiven, your debt's free, we're not holding that over your head anymore, nobody can come back to you and say, oh, you shouldn't have done that, because you're free, you're free, you're good, guilt is removed, shame is gone.

[26:37] But this is the reality we see here, the high cost of our trespasses is they demand repayment. You are to pay back what you took plus 20% and bring your offering before God.

[26:51] Now think about this just for a minute. In light of that, none of us would ever be forgiven. Because only after you had repaid what you took, you had given back the interest, and you have been made right with God, brought an acceptable sacrifice, only then, would God say, then the priest shall make atonement for him before the Lord, and he will be forgiven for any one of the things which he may have done to incur guilt.

[27:25] But our trespasses are too numerous. We've taken too much. We've sinned too greatly. We will never be able to repay all the mistakes we've made.

[27:38] God says, trespasses cost too much for you to do, so I'll do it for you. And he came and dwelt among men.

[27:52] We call him Emmanuel. He lived a sinless, perfect life to bear our repayments, plus some, so that that acceptable sacrifice could be offered on the altar we call the cross.

[28:08] so that we could be forgiven for those, all those things. See, when we understand the high cost of our trespasses, then we really begin to comprehend how much he paid.

[28:27] It wasn't that we just messed up. It wasn't that we just make a mistake. It's that what we do breaks the relationship we have with God and man.

[28:37] what we do is our responsibility and what we do costs too much to be repaid back. And God says, I know.

[28:50] I'll do it for you. And for that, we praise him. And for that, we serve him. Let's pray together. Lord, I thank you so much for this night.

[29:04] God, I thank you for the truths that are contained in your word. And Lord, as we stand in light of them, Lord, I pray that we would stand not in Old Testament theology, not just in Old Testament truth, but Lord, that that would show us the glory of the cross, the splendor of being reconciled with you through the blood of the Lamb.

[29:32] Lord, the price that has been paid so that we may walk about forgiven and free or rejoicing in who you are. Lord, in celebrating all you've done.

[29:44] And we ask it in Christ's name. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen.

[30:24] Amen. Amen.

[31:24] Amen. Amen.

[32:24] Amen. Amen.

[33:24] Amen. Amen.

[34:24] Amen. Amen.

[35:24] Amen. Amen.

[36:24] Amen. Amen.

[37:24] Amen. Amen.

[38:24] Amen. Amen.

[39:24] Amen. Amen.

[40:24] Amen. Amen.

[41:24] Amen. Amen.

[42:24] Amen. Amen.

[43:24] Amen. Amen. Amen.

[44:24] Amen. Amen. Amen.

[44:55] Amen. Amen.

[45:54] Amen. Amen. Amen.

[46:25] Amen. Amen.

[46:55] Amen.

[47:25] Amen.

[47:55] Amen.

[48:25] Amen. Amen.

[48:55] Amen. Amen.

[49:25] Amen. Amen.

[49:55] Amen. Amen.

[50:25]  Amen.