Now of course, in some sense, like most prevalent false statements, it has some truth to it. All sin leads to death. All sin deserves death. All sin separates us from God. Jesus blood is for all sin. And I'm sure you can come up with many others.
So if someone is using it to demonstrate that all sin needs to be dealt with, for instance in evangelism, then perhaps it's helpful.
But there is one enormously important sense in which it is categorically untrue, unbiblical, and, frankly, stupid. And that is in thinking that God has the same feelings toward all sin.
Passages abound. Almost every page of the Bible seems to have this concept. In fact, when does God ever, in the Bible, not distinguish between sins? God waits for the sins of the Amalekites to reach it's full measure. God punishes the sin of Sodom and Gomorrah, and Ninevah, and Babylon who he called against his own people but later punished them for it. Is it that these people did 1000 sins, but other nations only did 500? Because if all sin is the same in God's eyes, then that's the only conclusion you can come to - and it's a silly one. Of course it's not about quantity! It's about quality! The sin of Sodom was really bad sin. The sin of sacrificing one's child is a particularly bad sin.
Now my Sunday School teachers assured me that 'there is no such thing as a white lie'*. I appreciate what they were getting at. Lying is bad, and claiming that nobody really got hurt does not exonerate you. But this doesn't mean there aren't really black lies does it? For the sake of not treating some sins lightly, we seem to have simultaneously rejected the notion of treating some sins heavily.
I think this is really dangerous.
*This is a topic for another blog post. Spoiler alert: I think there is such a thing as a white lie.
(I've ranted about this before, and it may have been on this blog. I had a quick flick through and couldn't find it though, so I think I ranted about it elsewhere)
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This is a subject that often generates more heat than light.
ReplyDeleteIn essense, I agree with you. However, I think the correct answer to the question, 'Is all sin equal?' is 'yes and no.'
The 'yes' answer arises because sin is disobeying God. Isaiah 14 and Ezekiel 28 both contain what I would call the canonical passages defining sin. In both of these passages it is clear that sin is saying 'I know better than God how to run my life.'
But the passage in Ezekiel goes on to say 'By your many sins...'
In this passage it seems that the pride which led to the disobedience was a one time event. The time, however, continued and never came to an end. But the many sins, most likely many and varied, seem to me to be the manifestation of the sin of disobedience.
The Old Testament law has a wide range of punishments for various sins. While it is true that the law was not just religious but also civil the punishments, at least in our 21st century world view, don't always seem to fit the crime. Inded, in some cases they seem to be arbitrarily harsh. For example, 'anyone who curses his father or mother shall be put to death.' This would seem to imply, to us, that there were no Israelite teenagers. Cursing your parents is normal behaviour, part of growing up.
The point I am trying to make is that there were many sins each with its own punishment. And those punishments did not always seem to be necessary for good civil government. Therefore there was an element of religious obedience as well as civil obedience.
And again in the New Testament there are many examples of different sins being treated differently.
But I would suggest that these, again, are the manifestation of the sin seen in the Isaiah and Ezekiel passages. Satan said 'I will make myself like the most high...' and that is what we do. We disobey God because we think we can do a better job runnning our lives than he can.
So perhaps we do have to make a distinction between sin and sins. Maybe all sin is equal but all sins are not.
I agree with Dad (Richard). I think that there is a difference between sin and sins. I think that all sin is equal, because it is the same thing. Our rejection of God's rule and our insistence to rule ourselves is, I think, sin. What our Sunday school teachers talked to us about are sins, and they are different.
ReplyDeleteI also agree with you, Tony, that different actions on our parts grieve God different amounts.
Good post.