Are All Sins the Same in the Eyes of God?

You'd much rather one of your children say something mean to you than, you know, stab your wife to death in her

sleep, right?

All right, Tim, the question for today is, are all sins the same in the eyes of God?

This is one of those common Christian cliches that really don't make a lot of sense at all, but then

it's a maddening thing that people will say.

And I did a few polls this last week that were asking about the severity

of different kinds of sins.

And I was a little bit surprised at how many people came along and did the sin level in game where

basically, you know, every sin is treated as exactly equal.

And really, I mean, the Bible knows nothing of this kind of thought process, but the answer is no, you know, sins are

not all the same in the eyes of God.

God knows how to tell the difference between different types of sin.

Okay, I guess, you know, my mind jumps to the fact that any sin

will send someone to hell, right?

It doesn't matter what that sin is.

One sin is all it takes to fall short of the glory of God.

So it seems like, and from that perspective, God sees them as all the same, but then you're saying,

hey, they are different.

And I think I know what you're getting at, but why don't you sort of explain the difference

and what's leading you to say, hey, no, we can read the Bible and see plainly that God really

doesn't treat these all sins the same.

Yeah, well, I think there is a reality that we all enter into the world as sinners and we enter

in not just, it's not as if we're condemned the moment we sin one time.

So we all, we enter into the world, we have inherited the guilt of our father Adam's sin.

And then that's going to naturally lead that all of us do sin.

So, you know, for as one man, sin entered into the world and death through sin.

And so death spread to all men because all of sin.

So we enter into the world sinful.

We inherit the guilt of Adam's sin.

And then we have this, you know, contagion that's attached to us.

It's going to mean that necessarily we all end up acting it out in one way or another.

But so, you know, sin is all equal in that it's

missing the mark of God's holiness.

And, you know, there's a sense in which God's holiness is infinite.

And so even the smallest sin, you know, when you contrast that to the

holiness of an infinite God, is a grievous offense, right?

So that's obviously true.

And it's all evidence of our condemned state.

Even this, you know, white lies, respectable sin, whatever.

But that doesn't mean that God can't tell the difference between different types of sin.

And that all sin are fundamentally the same.

And that doesn't mean that human beings should pretend like as if all sin are the same either.

And I mean, all it takes is just to, you know, just use any human example that you can think of to

demonstrate the point.

So, I mean, you'd much rather your kid, you'd much rather one of your children

say something mean to you than, you know, stab your wife to death in her sleep, right?

Yeah.

Yeah, I think most normal people would probably prefer the first one.

I mean, but isn't, you know, so, but then if you want to pretend like those things are the same to God even,

like, then what you would say is that, you know, that anger that, you know, caused

the rude remark from one of your kids, that God would institute the death penalty for that.

But then the issue is that, you know, as you read through the Old Testament, one of the things you're gonna find is God does make certain sins

capital offenses, and not every sin is a capital offense.

So that means that God has some way of weighing the nature of specific sins.

Meaning, it's not death penalty here and now for any sin, but some sins are

death penalty kind of sins.

Could you imagine if it was the death penalty for every single type of sin?

Well, to the social justice warriors, they would wish it was for specific sins that they

are particularly offended by.

So whenever you, you know, I mean, they would put you to death if you say something they dislike or deem to be racist or offensive in any way,

for sure, you know.

But then you have to have some level of proportion, you know.

In order to operate as a society, you have to have some way of

keeping these things in some sort of perspective.

And, you know, God is not unable to do the same kind of thing in terms of His own mind.

So, I mean, just think about, like, Judas, for instance.

So Jesus says of Judas that it would have been better that Judas were never born, right?

Of Sodom and Gomorrah, He says that, you know, of Jerusalem, it would be more tolerable for Sodom and Gomorrah than for Jerusalem,

because they had received more revelation and they're guiltier.

So, you know, in this life, God gives harsher penalties for certain sins than others.

And then in the next life, God gives harsher penalties for certain sins than others.

So that tells me that God is able to distinguish between different types of sin, okay?

So are you talking about, like, some sort of Dante's Inferno?

That would be levels of hell.

So, like, the Dante's Inferno kind of scheme is levels of hell.

Like, and the Bible doesn't teach, like, different levels of hell, like Judas and

then, who is it, Brutus or whatever that is.

I can't remember the three who were in the bottom rung of hell, but, you know, like, no, there's not levels of hell in that way.

But there's different, like, degrees of severity in hell, even, based on the amount of

rejection of God that we do in this life.

And there will be rewards, different rewards in heaven for the amount of faithfulness in this life as

well.

So God's able to distinguish these things both ways, okay?

So, like, now, like, there's a type of person then

that uses the fact that, okay, like, lust, for instance, Jesus equates

lust with adultery.

It's the kind of person who says, well, I guess lust is fine because it's not nearly as bad as adultery.

And then you have a lot of people who come along and essentially, with that kind of way of thinking about it, and say, well, that's repugnant

to a biblical worldview.

And absolutely, that's repugnant to a—you should never treat sin like that.

Like, you should never compare certain sins to others in such a way that you're going

to say, well, this one is really bad, and the ones that I'm committing are not very bad at all.

Therefore, I can keep on doing it because they're not really a big deal.

That would be a wrong way of avoiding the

problem of sin leveling in that way to where that's a way of making comparisons

to produce more iniquity.

Yeah, you're basically like the guy saying, God, thank you for not making me like this tax collector.

Right, right, right.

So that's a very bad impulse.

But then practically, we do have to have some way of distinguishing these things in

terms of how we build a government.

We have to do this in relating to other people as well, right?

So there's certain sins that you can commit against your marriage that God says are

appropriate reasons to get a divorce.

But then same thing with your parenting.

I mean, imagine if the smallest, most minor infraction that your kid

makes, you treat everything as just the worst possible

offense ever, right?

Yeah, yeah.

So you slightly raise your voice in the house.

It's like, that's a spanking offense, right?

It's like, well, I mean, you have to figure out what you're doing, okay?

I'll be honest.

There are certain things that

my daughter will do that I just think to myself, I've

got to pick my battles.

I might just let this one go because I know that there's four others that I've already got to deal

with.

Yeah, so you have to have some way of prioritizing these kind of things in the here and now.

So with kids, one of the things that we've always done is if they lie to us, that's a really big deal because we know that if they learn

to lie well, they can get away with anything.

So we treat lying very seriously.

And there's other things that we, I mean, it's not as if we're not treating them seriously,

it's just they're not like that.

They're not that.

Now, you deal with everything, but then you have to have some sense of proportion.

I mean, imagine if you're a boss and literally anything your employee does wrong, you fire them,

right?

Right.

It's like, well.

That'd be a tough job.

That'd be a tough job.

I mean, it'd be nerve wracking, right?

And do you even hold yourself to that same standard?

Yeah, I mean, so I think you do need to have in any relationship scheme, you need to have some

ability to say this is worse than this and this is worse than that.

Like in a level of severity.

And this is part of the thing that evangelicals are not able to do with the same -sex attraction kind of stuff at this point is

that they basically are treating, like they don't have any category for saying that

sodomy and transgenderism and all this stuff, they reflect a different

degree of depravity than other things.

And so we have to treat everything as if it's just normal levels of depravity.

And it's just like, then you end up with drag queen story hours at your library kind of thing, you know?

You find yourself missing the old days when you just had to deal with these other certain

specific sins that weren't as bad.

Right, right, right.

And so, no, I mean, what people do, like if they're going to make a biblical case for it, they'll say, hey, but isn't, like

you compare something like lust and adultery, right?

And they'll say, well, doesn't Jesus say that lust and adultery are essentially the same thing, right?

So you look at a woman with lust and you commit adultery with her in your heart.

And then the same thing with anger, right?

Isn't anger essentially heart murder?

So you think you're okay because you didn't murder someone?

Well, if you're angry with your brother, like that's the same kind of thing.

And I think, you know, one thing that's happening there is that there's just a profound misunderstanding of Jesus'

point, okay?

Okay.

So Jesus' point is not just to say, you know, if you lust after someone, you might as well go ahead and go all the way and commit

physical adultery.

Because it's all the same.

Like who can tell the difference?

Like literally no one can tell the difference.

It's like, no, that's not the point, right?

The point is there's a type of person who didn't go all the way with it and thinks

that they're justified before their maker because they somehow stopped short of the physical act.

But Jesus is saying, you think that you're okay?

You have lust in your heart?

You have the seeds of the same sin there that this person you think is so bad has,

right?

Right.

You just didn't go as far with it, right?

Yeah, he's basically just teaching against the, you know, the people who would say, hey, desire is not

sin.

Right, right.

Yeah, so just, you're a hypocrite, right?

This is the same thing that you're doing.

It's just to a minor, like a more, like it hasn't gone as far, right?

A lesser degree, yeah.

Yeah, so what you want to do is just think about, like now, the thing is, like in the old covenant, adultery was a death

penalty issue.

But you don't need to kill someone, do a death penalty for someone who engages in heart adultery,

right?

Why?

Well, because they're not the same, okay?

How do you even prove that?

Yeah, you can't prove it, but it's not the same level of seriousness.

It's the same way, like you don't want to, someone, if you murder someone, you get the death penalty.

But if you have an angry thought of it, you don't put them to death because it's not the same level of seriousness.

So what you do is, like if you treat, like what you think about is, if you want to understand Jesus' point, like adultery,

you would think about adultery like as a fire that has consumed your house, right?

And then lust is like a, you know, it's a,

depending on what we're talking about, it can be a bigger fire or a smaller fire that is leading up to the house.

Does that make sense?

Mm -hmm.

They're both a fire, but one is more serious than the other.

Does that make sense?

Okay.

And if you don't put it out, the point is it's going to grow and it's going to consume the house.

Right.

Right?

So both of them are sinful, both of them are wrong, but you would much rather stop that fire

before it burns the whole house down.

Mm -hmm.

Because once it burns the whole house down, that's a much bigger problem.

Yeah.

Does that make sense?

Yeah.

So you have the same problem that is different degrees.

Does that make sense?

Yeah.

So is it fair to say that, you know, in the eyes of God, sin is,

I guess it's like the same in terms, in the eyes of God, all sin is the same

in terms of where it's going to get you.

Right?

Yeah.

It's all the same in that it sufficiently proves you're condemned.

Yeah.

Like you're guilty.

Yeah.

It establishes that.

But then.

All of it.

Right.

So it establishes we're guilty, but then it doesn't necessarily establish

just on its own the fact that you've sinned.

How guilty?

Right?

Well, you're fundamentally guilty, but you could be like, they're just, I guess the way I think about it is God gives

different punishments for different.

Right. Yeah.

So if in the next life, it'll be worse for, you know,

Jerusalem than it will be for Sodom, then that tells you that he's treating the level of

high handed sin that Jerusalem get engaged in as more serious than Sodom.

But they both get you to the same place.

Do you get what I'm saying?

Yeah.

And Jesus taught, you know, I think it's the apostles.

Hey, why are you teaching in parables?

And Jesus basically says to, you know, basically to not increase

the guilt.

Right.

To blind them.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Seeing that they might see as an active judgment on them.

So the issue is, yes, Jesus is able to tell the difference between lust and adultery and between

anger and murder.

But what he's trying to say is, it's the same.

You're not okay if you stop short of the act.

Right.

And sin happens way before that.

And, you know, if you're the type of person who says, well, you know, lust is a smaller fire than adultery, the big fire.

Therefore, I'm going to let it go.

It's like, yeah, your house is going to get burned down.

Okay, weirdo.

I don't know anyone else who's all right with fires burning in their house.

Right. Yeah.

You know, a small fire is a fire, too.

Right.

But then, like, you know, that all.

So.

So the issue is God can tell the difference.

We can tell the difference.

But, you know, none of us are righteous.

No, not one.

Any.

What we need to do is treat the smaller stuff much more seriously than what we do and stop it

quicker.

Right.

That's just point.

Stop it quicker.

Don't just let it burn the house down before you stop it or before you wake up.

Treat it seriously and know that you need forgiveness of all of it, you know, more than what you think.

Not just the big stuff, the small stuff.

Right.

You need forgiveness for all of it.

But then, you know, living in the world that we live in and the way that God operates, the way we operate should be

that we should be able to make certain distinctions between these things.

And it shouldn't be that complicated.

Okay.

Fair enough.

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