Leviticus 4:1-12: in context

The law now turns to a particular kind of sin: if anyone sins unintentionally, in any of the things the LORD has commanded not to be done, and does one of them. For such sins, committed without intending them, done in ignorance or without realizing, a sin offering was required. The priest was to bring a bull, lay his hand on its head, and offer it, making atonement. Even the sin done unknowingly needed cleansing; even unintended guilt had to be dealt with before God.

It is striking that the law made provision for unintentional sin, the sin a person commits without meaning to, without even realizing it was wrong. We might assume that only deliberate, known sin carries guilt, that what we do in ignorance does not count against us. But the law says otherwise: even unintentional sin brought guilt, and needed atonement. This recognizes a sobering truth, that we sin not only in the ways we know and intend but in ways we do not even notice, that our guilt before God is deeper and wider than the sins we are aware of. And it provided cleansing for exactly this: for the sin we did not know we committed. There is both humility and comfort in this. The humility is in recognizing that we are not as clean as our awareness suggests. We tend to measure ourselves by the sins we know about, and to feel fairly innocent of the rest; but the law reminds us that we sin in ways we do not see, that there are faults hidden even from ourselves, unintentional wrongs we never notice. Who can discern his own errors? the psalmist asks; cleanse me from hidden faults. A true self-knowledge includes the awareness that our sin exceeds our awareness of it. And the comfort is that God provided cleansing even for this. He did not leave the unintentional sin, the hidden fault, uncovered; he made a way of atonement for the sin we do not even know we have committed. And in Christ, that cleansing is complete: the blood of Jesus, John says, cleanses us from all sin, the sins we know and the sins we do not, the intended and the unintentional, the seen and the hidden. This frees us from an anxious scrupulosity about whether we have accounted for every fault. We cannot know all our sin; but God does, and he has provided a cleansing that covers even what we cannot see. We come to him humbly, aware that our guilt exceeds our awareness, and gratefully, trusting that the cleansing he provides in Christ reaches even the hidden faults, the unintentional sins, the wrongs we never knew we did.

Do I measure myself only by the sins I know about, feeling fairly clean of the rest, forgetting that I sin in ways I do not even notice and that my guilt exceeds my awareness, and can I come to God both humbly, aware of my hidden faults, and gratefully, trusting that the cleansing he provided, complete in Christ, covers even the unintentional sins I never knew I committed?