I think back to the many years when I was a young man, and not yet a believer in Christ. One day, I heard a Christian person say that all sins were equal. In those days, I didn’t ask many questions and I kept what I heard in my heart. But deep down inside, I knew he was wrong because I had already made up my mind there were different degrees of sins (back then, I called them “evils”) in this world. I couldn’t accept how all evils were equal. There were evils that were smaller, and there were evils that were bigger. All evils were bad, but some evils were worse than others. Murdering someone was a worse evil than robbing a bank. I felt very strongly there was something built inside of me, inside my friends, inside every person’s system, that let us know this was common sense.
Is there such a thing as one sin being bigger or smaller than another? Can we, for example, rank sins? Or is every sin equal? What does the Bible say? If your unbelieving friend asks you if there is such a thing as a greater sin or a lesser sin, can you answer him capably? What will you say?
If I am right, many Christians were taught to think of sin as one missing the mark in the sport of archery. I was taught this way too. When an archer launches an arrow, and it fails to hit the bull’s eye, that is sin. When Billy Graham thinks of sin, he thinks of it as a thought or action that falls short of God’s expectation. We have a God who is perfect, and anything we do that falls short of his perfection is sin. I think this is a simple but effective way to understand sin because it puts sin right in the center of God’s perspective.
Why is this important? Because if sin makes us fall short of God’s perfection, this necessarily means that sin breaks us from having any relationship with God. Falling short of God’s perfection doesn’t make us stand a little farther from God. He cannot see us, game over. Sin, even if it is the smallest one in the world, causes us to have zero relationship with God. This is a point the people of the world find it hard to accept.
James 2.10
For whoever keeps the whole law and yet stumbles in one point, he has become guilty of all.
Romans 3.23
for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God,
Romans 6:23a
For the wages of sin is death
So, sins are equal because one sin is enough to cut us off completely from God, no matter how big or how small is the sin.