Real Guilt and Phantom Guilt

Revisiting the past can be a draining and unpleasant experience.

Let’s start with this: some parents are better than others, but no parent is perfect. That includes parents who were relatively established, mature Christians when they began raising their children. There is just too much we don’t know at 25 or 34. There are things about parenting I am just learning now, three decades later.

So then, at some point, the chickens come home to roost. Your children will either start telling you in which ways you failed, or else their progress in life (or lack thereof) may tell the story more eloquently than any words. You will have one of those very unpleasant “I did THAT?” moments.

Here’s the thing: sometimes you did, sometimes you didn’t, and most of the time you’ll never know one way or another. How do we distinguish real guilt from phantom guilt?

Three Kinds of Guilt

In both biblical Hebrew and Greek, the word “guilty” has two distinct senses. In the first sense, “guilty” simply means accountable. There is a debt owed that needs to be discharged. In the second sense, “guilty” means being aware you are under obligation. When we read in Romans, particularly in the KJV, that “What things soever the law saith, it saith to them who are under the law: that every mouth may be stopped, and all the world may become guilty before God”, we are speaking of guilt in this second sense. God gave the law to bring consciousness of guilt, a rightful sense of obligation. That “stopping of the mouth” of which Paul speaks is the moment of dawning awareness: “That’s on me. I’m the man/woman. I did that. Now I need to do something about it.”

There is a third sense in which we can consider the concept of guilt, and perhaps it is peculiarly English. We Anglos often use “guilty” to describe an emotional state of distress unassociated with actual responsibility. We can speak of feeling guilty about injuries we did not cause, would never actively desire, or could not possibly have known anything about. The term we’ll use for that today is “phantom guilt”. The problem with phantom guilt is that even though you may not be responsible for the bad thing that happened, you feel like it’s your fault. Moreover, the intensity of phantom guilt may be entirely unrelated to either actual responsibility or actual damage. It may also be acute; in many cases, people who feel phantom guilt are more troubled in spirit than others who are actually guilty and know it.

Phantom Guilt in Scripture

David gives us a good biblical example of phantom guilt in 1 Samuel 22, when Saul murdered 85 priests at Nob and the entire city of priests: men, women, children, even donkeys and sheep. Who was actually guilty? Saul, and his instrument Doeg the Edomite. Yet David tells the son of one of the murdered priests this:

“I knew on that day, when Doeg the Edomite was there, that he would surely tell Saul. I have occasioned the death of all the persons of your father’s house.”

True? Perhaps in a very limited sense. But note what David did not say. He did not say, “I knew on that day, when Doeg the Edomite was there, that he would surely tell Saul, and that Saul would murder the inhabitants of an entire city.” If David had the slightest inkling a few loaves of consecrated bread and an old sword would cost hundreds of men, women and children their lives, I guarantee he would have left Nob hungry and weaponless. Hindsight is always 20/20. David’s overly-tender conscience assigned him a guilt trip that was never his to take.

People who wallow in phantom guilt often do this to themselves: they imagine they ought to have anticipated eventualities that could never have occurred to them until after the fact, when it was too late. They blame themselves for lacking qualities nobody but God possesses. They underestimate the wickedness of others because they give them greater credit than they deserve, a quality that shows good character, not a reprobate mind. What’s important here is that David broke no law, intentionally or otherwise, and God did not condemn him. The scripture does not criticize David. David criticized David. He was experiencing phantom guilt.

Phantom Guilt in the Family History

How about an extra-biblical example? I once confessed my teenage drug use to my parents in the context of discussing somebody else’s substance abuse problems. Never mind that the confession took place years after the events, when I was married, walking with the Lord, and had children of my own. You know exactly how they reacted. Of course, they blamed themselves. “Oh my, we should have known! How could we have missed that?”

Quite easily, actually. I was a brazen liar and a crafty manipulator in my teens. Every then-illegal act took place far from Mom and Dad’s purview, and they had three other children to oversee at the same time. Apart from divine revelation, they had no chance of discovering anything. They were trusting people, and I abused their trust.

My one egregious slip occurred when Dad came downstairs around 2 a.m. one morning to find me coming out of the bathroom as high as a kite. He said something like, “You’re a bit noisy, dear” to which I replied, “It weren’t that I told you so.”

No, that is not a series of typos. That was my actual response, my brain simultaneously pondering why I was suddenly unable to control my own speech. Thankfully, I had just brushed my teeth, washed up and changed my clothes. Dad had awakened out of a deep sleep, his hair standing on end, his eyes half closed. He was not exactly at his sharpest in that moment, and I managed to slide by without raising his suspicions.

How Much Should We Know?

Do you think the Lord held it against him that he’s a bit foggy in the early hours of the morning, like everyone else on the planet? I sure don’t. Any rebuke he and Mom gave themselves on my account was profoundly undeserved phantom guilt. Of course, they did it anyway. Good people often do.

Phantom guilt is invariably about negatives: things we don’t know, didn’t anticipate and sometimes could not have imagined without a spate of insights into other people’s sinful habits that might actually defile our spirits and trouble us in our own Christian walk. It’s about times we didn’t intervene to help our children because we had no conceivable way of knowing they were in trouble. The Lord wants parents to be shrewd as serpents, no doubt. He does not want us to walk around perpetually soiled. Some things you can’t un-see or un-hear, and we are not better people for suspecting our children of them in the complete absence of evidence.

My own recent discussions with a family member about events long past revealed a number of surprises, some that as a father I could and should have anticipated. When I cast my mind back, the evidence was there and I missed, excused or downplayed it at the time. That’s on me, and I had to ask for forgiveness. Then there was a series of revelations about sins of the past I could never have anticipated in a month of Sundays, not least because a number of family members cooperated for years in covering them up or trying very hard to forget they ever happened. What do you do about that?

Genuine Guilt and the Word of God

Genuine guilt requires a known violation of the word of God. Hear the Lord Jesus on the subject of conscience and revelation:

“If I had not come and spoken to them, they would not have been guilty of sin, but now they have no excuse for their sin.”

Moreover, wherever we find the concept of guilt in the NT, we find it associated with law. Again, our passage from Romans ties the two together:

“Now we know that whatever the law says it speaks to those who are under the law, so that every mouth may be stopped, and the whole world may be held accountable to [ὑπόδικος, meaning ‘under sentence’ or ‘guilty before’] God.”

Accountability requires information, and the Lord always provides the necessary information when he requires a response from us. Genuine guilt can be determined by the standard of God’s word, not by the intensity of our feelings when something we didn’t know about had terrible consequences. There are even times in Bible history when the Lord gave a man who had no law or revelation a break because he had been deceived and was acting with integrity. God plainly says he kept Abimelech from incurring guilt by defiling a married woman because he did not know she was married.

In Summary

Our Lord is very, very gracious, far more gracious than any of us deserves. When we need to know something to keep from incurring judgment, he will invariably tell us. He does not expect us to operate in the dark.

We all need forgiveness for sins we have actually committed and the guilt we have actually incurred. Equally, we need to disclaim guilt of which the word of God never accuses us. It never belonged to us in the first place.

If you are carrying that weight, it’s phantom guilt. I believe the Lord would have us let it go and move on.