Leviticus 7:1-6: in context

This is the law of the guilt offering, and to understand why it mattered you have to know what made it different from the other sacrifices. The guilt offering, sometimes called the trespass offering, was tied to a particular kind of sin: wrongs that involved a debt, cheating a neighbor, defrauding someone, misusing what belonged to God or to another person. And the law that governs it, laid out just before this passage, is specific about what dealing with that kind of guilt required. You did not only bring the sacrifice. You also had to repay what you had taken, and add a fifth of its value on top, to the person you had wronged. Atonement and restitution came together.

That is the thing worth noticing. This offering did not let a person square things with God vertically while leaving the horizontal debt unpaid. If you had defrauded your neighbor, seeking God's forgiveness was not enough; you had to actually make it right with the neighbor, returning what you took and more, and then bring the offering. And the text calls this whole arrangement most holy, twice. The sacrifice that deals with having wronged someone, and the repayment that goes with it, is among the holiest things in the whole system. Making things right with the person you cheated is not a lesser, merely practical matter tacked onto the real spiritual business of getting right with God. In this law, it is part of the real spiritual business, and it is holy.

That cuts against a very common way of handling guilt. It is far easier to ask God quietly to forgive me for how I wronged someone than to go to that person and actually make it right, to repay what I took, to repair the damage, to say it out loud and restore what I owe. The guilt offering refused to separate the two. Is there a wrong I have asked God to forgive while never making restitution to the person I actually harmed, a debt left unpaid because dealing with God felt easier than dealing with them?