No. That was easy.
Except, I think most readers will expect me to say ‘yes.’ Aren’t we all without excuse before the wrath of God (Romans 1)? Yes, we are. Yet this is not saying the same thing.
Having been fed—mostly evangelistically—on the (true!) idea that even the smallest sin is the enough to damn you, that even the smallest sin needs redemption, we start to think this means they’re all the same. I encounter this fairly regularly.
It’s not right, as I’ll explore in a moment, and it prevents us from being able to say that some things are worse than others. We need to be able to tell people the truth.
In Numbers 15.22-31 we have ‘intentional’—called here ‘high-handed’—sins laid against ‘unintentional’ ones, with different sacrifices and conditions needed for atonement. High-handed sin cannot be atoned for at this point in salvation history. We could, more simply, look at the way that the various Laws in the Old Testament ascribe different punishments to different crimes, clearly not everything that is wrong should be considered in the same way.
In Ezekiel 23, the prophet draws a parallel between two sisters in their sin in graphic terms. He makes it clear that they are allegories for Samaria and Jerusalem—the capitals of the two kingdoms. In verse 11 he says that the sins of Jerusalem are worse than those of Samaria, and that she was more corrupt. In Jeremiah 16.10, the prophet lambasts Judah for being worse than their fathers.
In 1 John 5.16-17, the Apostle makes a distinction between sins ‘leading to death’ and those that don’t, which probably scares us a bit: I understand this to be the sin of refusing to repent and turn to Jesus. He moves on to say that all wrongdoing is sin, but there is sin that does not lead to death. There are different kinds of sin.
For a small aside, I’ve known people who would say something to the affect that ‘it was wrong, but it wasn’t sin,’ as though sin only was the very worst of things. All wrongdoing is sin. Which means that we all sin all the time. Everything I think that’s not the truth is sinful—because thinking wrong thoughts after God is sin. It’s very possible that this post contains sinful statements. I don’t think so, and I would remove them if I did think so. If there are, I should repent. It is unlikely that I haven’t sinned in my writing so far, for all I’m not aware of where that would be. This is the nature of being fallen beings: ontological sinners made saints. As I’ll expound a little later, it’s also the wonder of grace: despite this the Lord loves me and has called me to be his chosen possession (1 Peter 2). I’m the apple of his eye (Deuteronomy 32). If you trust him, so are you.
Jesus speaks of those who hand him over to Pilate as having greater sin (John 19.11), of the punishment on towns that reject his disciples’ ministry being greater than that on Sodom (Matthew 10.9), and that there are different degrees of punishment that seem to be related to our knowledge of the Lord’s will (Luke 12.47-48).
When we think about it, we all know this instinctively. Some things are worse than others, that’s obvious to our sense of decency. We find it intrinsically strange that God would think my lie equal to the vile crimes of a paedophile. Our consciences, even if seared, tell us the same. Which is why it’s helpful to see that God does not think them equal. The problem isn’t the equality of sin, it’s that my lie is enough for me to fall short of the glory of God and mean I cannot stand in his presence. No one, not even the Lord, thinks that’s the same thing.
We should, in our preaching and our pastoring teach both things. It is vital that we know that we are sinners, condemned before God by our own actions (Romans 3), without excuse. It is also prudent that we realise that the Bible paints different sins in different colours. This doesn’t lessen our need for redemption. It might change how we carefully consider whether or not we apply church discipline to a particular unrepentant sin. It might change our pastoral tone, though this is always a matter of judgement and wisdom in the moment.
It certainly changes when we’re reflecting on political theology—it is unlikely that anyone is claiming that all sins should be outlawed. Very few people want the worst sins to be legal. To take my example from before, anyone who wants paedophilia to be legal is deeply disturbed, anyone who wants to outlaw lying is probably overzealous (and hasn’t considered the practical ramifications!).
It is important that we reflect on which sins the Bible describes as worse. It’s also important that doing so doesn’t somehow make us self-righteous because we didn’t do any of the really bad sins. Sure. You’re still guilty enough to deserve eternal death. No one is righteous, not even one (Romans 3).
Dear friends, we must keep returning to the Cross. We gather there to weep over our sin and our wayward hearts, we gather to rejoice that the Lord God Almighty—he who knew no sin—has become sin so that in him we might become the righteousness of God (2 Corinthians 5). We can be cleansed and forgiven, even from the worst of things. Even the paedophile can be redeemed by faith in Christ. Which is shocking, and we can’t lose the shock of it either.
There is more that could be said about that, how we make wise judgements about how to involve those whose souls are scared by their heinous sins within the life of the church. They aren’t easy questions, though that is a Pastor’s lot. Yet we cannot turn away from baptism and the life of the church anyone who has repented and turned to Christ, whatever vile things they did before. We can be wise in how we do that in order to appropriately protect the rest of the congregation.
The most important thing to take away though, is this: however vile what you’ve done in the past, however vile what you’re doing right now, however scarred your conscience and your soul, the blood of Jesus is enough for you. He will welcome you with open arms. He will embrace you when nobody would. He will forgive you even though you don’t deserve it.
What do you need to do? Repent of your sins, trust in Jesus, and he will save you.
Photo by Shalone Cason on Unsplash
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