Are All Sins Equal?

6 · Chris cites Jesus' principle that greater privilege brings greater accountability, using the example of cities that witnessed Jesus' works being judged more harshly than Sodom and Gomorrah because they had greater revelation

One of the places I immediately thought when this person asked me, hey, are all sins equal? I thought about how Jesus in a couple places in the Gospels says things like, to whom much is given, much will be demanded, and that there is actually a higher standard for those who have been blessed with more light, with more insight, and so forth. I'll talk more about that in a moment. And then, of course, I thought immediately of how Jesus said that there were certain cities in Israel during his time that would be judged more severely than Sodom and Gomorrah in the judgment, because Sodom and Gomorrah did not have the works of Jesus that these cities had. And he says even that if Sodom and Gomorrah saw what I'm showing you now, they would have repented in dust and ashes.

7 · Chris concludes his biblical survey with Paul's teaching in 1 Corinthians 6 that sexual immorality is uniquely serious because it is a sin against one's own body, further demonstrating biblical distinction between sin categories

So, yeah, the answer is there is definite difference between sins. Another place to go would be First Corinthians 6, where Paul says that sexual immorality in particular is a sin against the body, and it holds a certain level of weight that other sins do not.

8 · Chris signals a structural shift from biblical evidence to a two-part theological framework for understanding degrees of sin

Now, what makes some sins more serious than others? Well, there's kind of two ways, two directions we can Go here. And I can cover both of them pretty quickly.

9 · Chris introduces the first framework for evaluating sin severity: knowledge

One has to do with sort of knowledge, intention and effect. So the more someone knows, the more, the worse the sin is. So you could even have a situation where two people are doing the exact same sin. I'm thinking of something sexually immoral. Something sexually immoral that you do, you shouldn't do, but people do alone. That's a good example of this. Always mindful of the kids in the car. You could have a situation where someone literally does not know that that's wrong. And then you could have a situation where that same person, a couple years later, does know it's wrong. And that sin, though it's the exact same action, has a completely different kind of depth to it because there's a clarity and a knowledge, intention.

10 · Chris introduces the second element of the framework: intention

The more deliberate someone is in their sin, the more serious the offense. There's lots of examples in the Bible where people sin accidentally, forgetfully or rashly, passionately, and so forth. And then there's those who plot and, you know, really intend to go down a path and then effect another.

11 · Chris introduces the third element of the framework: effect

Another measure of what makes one sin worse than another is, well, what does it do to people? That's one of the reasons why teachers are judged more severely, as James 3 says, because their impact is. It's a bigger impact. And then that gets to committing adultery, for instance. It's far worse to do that than to do it privately in your own head. Both are sins, both are the same species of sin, but one has had much more of a pronounced effect on others. So one way to evaluate what makes some sins worse than others is, you know, this intention, effect, knowledge, kind of matrix.

12 · Chris introduces the crucial theological reframe: sin is not violation of abstract moral rules but offense against God as a person

But I want to introduce something else I think is actually really important when we're talking about sin. And it just came up in a conversation I had with a group of guys around a systematic theology that we're reading. And that is that it's very important that you understand and that you teach your kids to understand that when they sin, it's not that they violated a set of rules. That's not what sin is. Sin is revealed in the rules, but sin is actually a violation of God. Sin is actually a rejection of God. You see, one of the things that's really baked into the way that we think about morality is Hellenistic, in particular, Plato's conceptions of morality. And for Plato, there was this idea that there's these virtues that just exist independently of the gods. And so he calls them these forms, courage, benevolence, charity, so forth. These exist, and then everything is Measured, including the gods are measured against these sort of forms, these sort of moral categories that just exist. And if you want a good example of kind of how that plays out in modern religion, Mormonism believes basically that, that the God that we know of as God, who's the God of this planet, started off as a person and he lived up to some objective standards. You know, he ascended to moral virtue to the extent that he became glorified and is now the God of this particular planet.

13 · Chris directly addresses the congregation about their own contamination with Platonic thinking, urging them to understand that they have been thinking wrongly about sin and need to grasp that moral rules reveal God's character rather than existing independently

So this is. I will tell you that I don't know of a single Christian who doesn't think about it this way, at least sometimes. And it really does make a huge difference to your understanding of holiness and what sin is. So I want you to understand that, you know, you've been contaminated, your brain's been contaminated with some Platonic thinking that is not biblical. And it sort of puts you in the position where you tend to think of sin as a violation of a set of rules. But that's not right. The rules actually just reveal the character of God. So the rules just reveal who God is. And it's not that you're sinning against the rules. It's that you're sinning against and violating the basic fundamental nature of God.

14 · Chris expands the theological reframe with application to parenting, warning against both overly emotional descriptions of God and cold legalistic rule-enforcement

So when you sin, it's not that you've broken a rule that God has told you to follow that's not quite right. God told you to follow the rule because it was a way of protecting you from offending him. But when you sin, it's really against God. It's not against a set of objective rules out there somewhere. And I don't. Again, I don't know of any Christian who really consistently grasps. Grasp this and doesn't need to be reminded of it. And this is very important, friends, when you're raising your kids to do this in a way that doesn't make God seem overly emotional and passionate and so forth, but so you can't use, like, whiny language when describing God. The heart of God is broken right now. You've made God so sad and so on and so forth. I don't think that's the way to do it. Exactly. But on the other hand, you don't want to hold out a list of rules and say you broke rule number four. You want them to understand that they have offended God, not just some kind of set of rules.

15 · Chris argues that once sin is understood as offense against a person rather than rule violation, the concept of degrees of sin becomes intuitively obvious—just as offenses against human persons vary in seriousness based on knowledge, intent, and circumstance

So when you begin to think about sin as offense to God, God being a person, the person, in some sense, you begin to understand how. Of course, of course there's layers to the seriousness of sin. You know, you could do something to me accidentally, it wouldn't take me off. It would, you know, But I'd be like, all right, well, he did it accidentally. You know, it. It's, you know, it's not that it's okay exactly because it could be really bad that you've done something really bad. But it's still like, well, that's. But if you do it to plot against me, that's another layer. If I've told you explicitly, don't do, don't do, don't do, don't do. And I know you know, please don't do this, and you do it to me anyway, then there you go. There you go. There's another layer of seriousness. If you take something that I've given you and use it to hurt me, there's another layer of seriousness.

16 · Chris reasserts the theological claim that virtues are not independent standards but expressions of God's character, meaning moral concepts are defined by who God is rather than God being measured by them

So really, this question gets answered pretty clearly when we break free of that Platonic sense where it's like, hey, I've sinned against a rule. No, you have offended a person. All of the virtues, goodness, love, joy, beauty, mercy, righteousness, justice, these are not things that God measures himself up to that exist on their own. These are who God is. And our understanding of what goodness is or what righteousness is or what mercy is and so forth is based on who God is.

17 · Chris concludes the theological argument: because sin is offense against a being, it naturally varies in severity, but all sin deserves condemnation

So when we sin, we sin against a being. And of course, that offense is not always at a 10. Sometimes it's out of two, sometimes it's out of five, sometimes it's out of, you know, you get my point. It's all worthy of condemnation because God is wrathful against violating himself against people who violate himself. But God's figured that out right through the cross. He had a plan all along to allow his forbearance and his kindness and his justice to coexist in the cross through the cross of Jesus Christ.

18 · Chris summarizes the sermon's two-part answer: sins vary by knowledge, intention, and effect, and understanding sin as personal offense against God makes degrees of sin intuitively clear

So anyway, that's the answer to the question, are all sins equal? No, they're not. They vary wildly. And there are two ways to think about how that is. So one is the knowledge, intention and effect kind of metric. And the other is just to remember you're interacting with a person. And when you rebel against him and violate him in some way or another, there's all sorts of layers to that. One that I forgot would be if you did something against me, that would tick me off. But what if you did something against the people that I love? Well, that would be even worse. So that's why sometimes you'll see sins singled out that have a more potent damage effect on other people. Well, that would be a worse sin in that respect. So anyway, you get my point. It's actually pretty intuitive when you just remember that you're not breaking rules. You're trying to break God. You're not succeeding, but you're trying to break God.

19 · Chris closes the sermon with a worship song based on God's speech to Job from the whirlwind, celebrating God's incomprehensible sovereignty and majesty as the one who created and sustains the cosmos

All right, well, with that, I'm going to leave you. I found another song I want to play for you, and this one is one that I've just always found to be such an encouragement in reminding me of God's bigness. And so this is Where Were youe? By ghost ship, I said, God, I do not understand this world. Everything is dying and broken. Why do I see nothing but suffering? God, God, I'm asking, could this be your plan? Sin has taken hold of this whole land. Will you not say anything else to me? He said, where were you the day that I measured sunk the base and stretched the line over all the earth and carved out its cornerstone? Where were you the day that I spoke? Job the same on to split the night open, Call the morning dawn with its light to show. Who shut in the ocean with stone doors mark the reach of tides on those new shores on the day the waves rose and first broke. For. Have you seen the springs of that great sea? Walk the caverns carved in the black leaf through the gates of darkness there on its floor. Have you seen the armory I hold? Snow and hail are stacked up in silos for the times of trouble and war and strife. Can you raise your voice to the storm cloud for the thunder and surrendering out? Does the lightning ask you where it should strike? Who has cleft a channel for torrents rain to sprite about the desert with forest in the wilderness that my hand has filled? Can you hunt the prey for young lions? Can you lose the cords of all right? Is this whole world bending beneath your will? I smoke with things I did not understand Things too wonderful for me Although I had no right to ask. My God knelt and answered me. Sam.