Leviticus 4

These sin offerings were meant to atone for “unintentional” sin, so they could not be offered by someone who had willfully and deliberately sinned. “Unintentional” sin is one which is not recognized at the time it is committed.  This could also be called a “sin of ignorance.”  For the people in Moses’ time, many of these sins involved breaking the holiness or cleanliness laws.  Jesus taught about so-called sins of ignorance and it is recorded in Luke 12:47,48:  “The servant who knows the master’s will and does not get ready or does not do what the master wants will be beaten with many blows.   But the one who does not know and does things deserving punishment will be beaten with few blows.  From everyone who has been given much, much will be demanded; and from the one who has been entrusted with much, much more will be asked.” In this story, we (Christians) are the servants who know our master’s will.  We have been given much and entrusted with the truth about eternity, so much is expected of us.  We are expected to do our best to live by God’s standards.  But, there is no such thing as a “perfect Christian.”  The prophet Isaiah predicted that the Messiah would atone for our sins: “All of us, like sheep, have strayed away.  We have left God’s paths to follow our own.  Yet the Lord laid on Him the sins of us all” (Isaiah 53:6).  Jesus forgives our sins but still cares about how we live and the kind of example we set for others.  His forgiveness is not a license to do whatever we want.  In the story from Luke 12 mentioned above, we should observe that the man who sinned through ignorance was still accountable for his sins.  So, ignorance does not excuse us from the responsibility for our sins.  We are all held accountable by God for intentional as well as unintentional sins.  Our culture tends to condemn only those sins which are intentional, but since we have been called by God into His family, we are held by a much higher standard than our culture permits.