The Forgotten Duty: Restitution and the Gospel Text: Leviticus 6:1-7
Introduction: Horizontal Sins and Vertical Treason
We live in a sentimental age, an age that has reduced Christianity to a therapeutic feeling of being forgiven. In this modern fog, sin is a private affair between me and God, a matter of the heart, easily resolved with a quick and quiet prayer. Once that transaction is complete, we feel the warm glow of forgiveness and believe the matter is settled. But this is a cheap grace, a counterfeit gospel. It is a gospel that has been thoroughly domesticated by our individualistic and therapeutic culture. It is a gospel that carefully avoids the checkbook.
The book of Leviticus, which many modern Christians treat like a dusty and irrelevant attic, is a bracing slap in the face to this kind of thinking. Leviticus is intensely practical. It is about blood and guts and money and property and real-world relationships. It teaches us that sin is never a purely private affair. It always has dimensions. Sin is vertical, an act of treason against the high King of Heaven. But it is also horizontal, a crime that damages our neighbor. And you cannot pretend to deal with the vertical dimension while leaving the horizontal damage untouched.
Our text this morning deals with what we might call relational sins, sins of bad faith between men. These are sins of commerce and trust, robbery and deceit. And what God lays out here is a foundational principle that our generation has almost entirely forgotten: true repentance involves restitution. Forgiveness does not transfer the property rights to the thief. If you steal your neighbor's car and then ask God for forgiveness, you do not get to keep the car. To do so is to prove that your repentance was a sham. This passage teaches us that true, biblical repentance is costly. It costs you your pride, and sometimes it costs you hard cash, plus twenty percent.
The world understands this principle better than many Christians. If an employee is caught embezzling, the company doesn't just want an apology; they want the money back. But when it comes to our sins before God, we have been taught a truncated gospel that separates what God has joined together. We want the comfort of the guilt offering without the costly duty of restitution. But as we will see, the two are inseparable companions.
The Text
Then Yahweh spoke to Moses, saying, "If a person sins and acts unfaithfully against Yahweh and deals falsely with his companion in regard to a deposit or a security entrusted to him or through robbery, or if he has extorted from his companion, or has found what was lost and dealt falsely 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 return 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; 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. Then he shall bring to the priest his guilt offering to Yahweh, a ram without blemish from the flock, according to your valuation, for a guilt offering, and the priest shall make atonement for him before Yahweh, and he will be forgiven for any one of the things which he may have done to incur guilt."
(Leviticus 6:1-7 LSB)
All Sin is Theological (vv. 1-2)
We begin with the foundational statement that frames the entire issue:
"If a person sins and acts unfaithfully against Yahweh and deals falsely with his companion..." (Leviticus 6:2)
Notice the structure here. The sin is described in horizontal terms: dealing falsely with a companion, mishandling a deposit, robbery, extortion. These are man-to-man offenses. But before any of that is mentioned, God defines the sin vertically. It is an act of unfaithfulness "against Yahweh." This is absolutely crucial. There is no such thing as a merely horizontal sin. When you lie to your neighbor, you have not just offended your neighbor; you have committed treason against God. You have violated His law, defied His authority, and profaned His name.
This is precisely what David understood after his horrific sin with Bathsheba and Uriah. He had committed adultery and murder, sins that profoundly and destructively impacted other people. Yet in his great psalm of repentance, he cries out, "Against you, you only, have I sinned and done what is evil in your sight" (Psalm 51:4). He was not saying that he hadn't sinned against Uriah. Of course he had, grievously. He was acknowledging the ultimate reality that all sin, no matter who it hurts on the horizontal plane, is fundamentally a vertical rebellion against the throne of God. Every sin against our neighbor is a sin against their Maker. God's law has been violated.
This is why our secular world cannot deal with sin. They try to reduce everything to the horizontal. For them, a crime is only a problem if someone gets hurt or if society is disrupted. But if no one is "hurt," then anything goes. They have no category for treason against Heaven. But the Bible insists that God is the primary offended party in every sin. Property rights are not a social convention; they are a divine institution. To steal from your neighbor is to steal from the one in whose image he is made, and to trample on the law of the God who owns all things.
The Nitty-Gritty of Deceit (vv. 2-3)
The text then lists a series of examples. This is not an exhaustive list, but a representative one, covering various ways men defraud one another.
"...in regard to a deposit or a security entrusted to him or through robbery, or if he has extorted from his companion, or has found what was lost and dealt falsely about it and sworn falsely..." (Leviticus 6:2-3 LSB)
This covers a wide range of economic sins. There is the sin of violating a trust, taking something left in your care. There is the sin of outright robbery, taking something by force. There is the sin of extortion, using leverage or power to squeeze something out of someone. And there is the sin of finding something and then lying about it. "Finders keepers, losers weepers" is not a biblical principle.
The common thread in all these is deceit and bad faith. The final clause, "and sworn falsely," raises the stakes. This is not just a lie; it is a lie under oath. It is perjury. It is calling upon the name of God to witness to your falsehood, which is a direct violation of the third commandment. This shows how the horizontal and vertical are intertwined. You tell a horizontal lie to your neighbor, and you back it up with a vertical lie to God.
This is a picture of how sin works. It is rarely a simple, isolated act. It is a web of deceit. One sin requires another to cover it up. You steal, then you have to lie about it. Then you have to swear an oath to seal the lie. This is practical atheism. It is living as though God does not see, does not hear, and will not judge.
The Mathematics of Repentance (vv. 4-5)
When the sin is recognized and guilt is established, God prescribes a two-fold response. The first part is horizontal.
"...he shall return what he took... 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." (Leviticus 6:4-5 LSB)
This is the principle of restitution. True repentance makes things right. It is not enough to say "I'm sorry." You must give back what you took. But notice, it's not just simple repayment. He must restore it "in full" and add a fifth, or twenty percent. Why the extra twenty percent? This is not a fine in the modern sense. It is sanctified interest. It recognizes that when you steal from a man, you don't just take his property; you take the use of his property for a period of time. You steal his capital. Property exists in time, and time has value. That twenty percent is the acknowledgment of the disruption, the loss of use, and the trouble caused.
This is God's economic wisdom. It makes theft unprofitable. But more than that, it makes repentance tangible. It is easy to mouth the words of an apology. It is much harder to write a check. This financial cost is a powerful deterrent to future sin and a potent demonstration of the sincerity of your repentance. It is the proof that you have truly changed your mind.
Look at Zacchaeus in the New Testament. When he was converted, he didn't just say he felt bad about his past extortion. He stood up and said, "Behold, Lord, the half of my goods I give to the poor. And if I have defrauded anyone of anything, I restore it fourfold" (Luke 19:8). He went above and beyond the requirement. And what was Jesus' response? "Today salvation has come to this house." Jesus connected the salvation to the restitution. The two were inseparable companions. Forgiveness does not cancel the debt to your neighbor. It empowers you to joyfully repay it.
The Atoning Sacrifice (vv. 6-7)
After the horizontal dimension is addressed, the vertical dimension must be settled. The offender cannot just repay his neighbor and call it good. He must come before God.
"Then he shall bring to the priest his guilt offering to Yahweh, a ram without blemish... and the priest shall make atonement for him before Yahweh, and he will be forgiven..." (Leviticus 6:6-7 LSB)
The restitution to the man is made on the same day as the guilt offering to God (v. 5). The two actions are a package deal. You cannot have one without the other. You cannot be right with God if you are not willing to get right with the man you have wronged. And you cannot truly be right with the man you have wronged unless you acknowledge that your ultimate sin was against God.
The man must bring a ram without blemish. This is the substitute. An innocent animal must die in the place of the guilty man. This points forward, as all the sacrifices do, to the ultimate guilt offering. The priest makes atonement, which means he covers the sin. The blood of the ram provides a temporary, symbolic covering for the treason that was committed against Yahweh.
And the result is glorious: "he will be forgiven." This is the goal. Not just a restored bank account for the victim, but a restored soul for the sinner. God's justice is restorative. It aims to heal the breach both horizontally and vertically. It restores the community, and it restores the sinner to fellowship with God. This is not a system of earning forgiveness. The restitution is not the price of forgiveness; it is the fruit of repentance. The forgiveness itself is purchased by the blood of the substitute.
The Gospel of Restitution
Now, as Christians, we read this passage through the lens of the cross. We do not bring a ram to the priest. Why? Because our High Priest has offered the final, perfect guilt offering. As the prophet Isaiah said, "Yet it was the will of Yahweh to crush Him; He has put Him to grief; when His soul makes an offering for guilt, He shall see His offspring" (Isaiah 53:10). Jesus Christ is our guilt offering. He is the ram without blemish who was slain for our treason. His blood is the final atonement that cleanses us from all sin.
But here is the error we must strenuously avoid. We must not think that because Christ fulfilled the guilt offering, He has abolished the duty of restitution. Not at all. Christ's sacrifice does not make restitution unnecessary; it makes it possible. Before Christ, we were slaves to sin, unable to make things right. But now, in Christ, we have been set free from sin's dominion in order to walk in righteousness. And that righteousness is intensely practical. It involves paying people back.
The fact that Jesus paid our vertical debt to God does not cancel our horizontal debts to men. Rather, it should make us the most eager people on the planet to settle our accounts. If you have stolen, you must not only stop stealing, but "labor, doing honest work with your own hands, so that you may have something to share with anyone in need" (Ephesians 4:28). Part of that sharing is making restitution to those you have wronged.
This is a forgotten duty in the modern church, and its neglect has brought great reproach upon the name of Christ. We have Christians who declare bankruptcy without a second thought, leaving creditors high and dry. We have Christians who have trails of broken business deals and unpaid debts, all while singing about grace on Sunday morning. This ought not to be.
True repentance, the kind that flows from a heart that has been truly cleansed by the blood of Christ, is a repentance that makes things right. It writes the letter. It makes the phone call. It sends the check, with twenty percent added. It does not rationalize or make excuses. It does not say, "Well, that's under the blood." It says, "Because that is under the blood, because I have been forgiven an infinite debt I could never repay, I will now joyfully and diligently repay the finite debts I owe to my neighbor." This is the gospel made visible. This is how a watching world will know that our faith is more than just a feeling. It is a reality that transforms everything, right down to the bottom line.