Is All Sin The Same In God’s Eyes?
Is all sin the same in God’s eyes? There is a misconception I certainly have heard many times in my life that would answer in the affirmative. That is to say, “of course all sin is the same to God!” A main passage of Scripture that lends to this misconception is James 2:10-11 which says: “For whoever keeps the whole law but fails in one point has become guilty of all of it. For he who said, “Do not commit adultery,” also said, “Do not murder.” If you do not commit adultery but do murder, you have become a transgressor of the law.”
This passage in James is a startling truth about the inability of man to keep God’s standard perfectly. A simple analogy would be to think of a scenario in which you are dangling off a 200 foot cliff by holding onto a chain. It only takes breaking one link of the chain to fall to your death. Whether one link breaks or all of them, the result is the same. That is, no matter if we break one law or many, we are still guilty before God. However, some misconstrue this verse to mean something like “All sin is the same in God’s eyes.” This would mean the man who commits murder is no different to God than the man who steals a pack of chips from a convenience store, or gossips about someone. “All sin is equal in God’s eyes.” As mentioned, this is certainly a concept I heard throughout my life. However, Scripture paints a different picture. Not all sin is the same and consequently, not all punishment is the same (both in the temporal world and in eternity). A cursory study of the Mosaic Law reveals that God viewed certain sins as worse than others. Murder is more heinous and deserving of greater punishment than, for example, theft. Numbers 15:27-31 even distinguishes those who would sin unintentionally versus those who sin willingly and recognizes the difference as one being worse than the other. In 2 Kings 21:11, God accuses Manasseh of doing things “more evil” than even the pagans who inhabited the land before him. In Ezekiel 8, God shows Ezekiel increasingly “greater abominations” with each vision (see esp. 8:6, 13, 15).
In Matt. 10:15 and Luke 10:10-16, Jesus proclaims that the cities who reject Him will be judged more harshly than Sodom and Gomorrah! In Matt. 26:24 and John 19:11, Jesus says that for Judas to betray Him was a sin worse than others. In Luke 20:47, Jesus says that those taking advantage of widows “will receive the greater condemnation.” In Luke 12:47-48, the servant who knowingly sinned receives a more severe punishment than the servant who sinned in ignorance (but was still deserving of punishment). Wayne Grudem states: “Those sins that are done willfully, repeatedly, and knowingly, with a calloused heart, are more displeasing to God than those that are done out of ignorance and are not repeated, or are done with a mixture of good and impure motives and are followed by remorse and repentance.”
Even in James 3:1, we see that teachers will be “judged with greater strictness.” We also have a very interesting passage in 1 John 5:16-17 that states there is a sin that leads to death while acknowledging there is sin that doesn’t lead to death. While the details of the verses would take a page or more to parse out, the logic and truth of “greater” and “lesser” sins is apparent in the passage. There is absolutely a spectrum of sin that ranges from less bad to unforgivable (Mark 3:28-30). Practically, we operate our lives in the same way and the world operates and functions according to this principle. To quote Kevin DeYoung, “The Bible simply doesn’t make sense – not the Mosaic law, not the exile, not church discipline, not the frequent warnings of judgment for specific transgressions – if all sins are equally vile in God‘s eyes.” Knowing this, it would be silly to conflate man’s inability to keep God’s law perfectly (and our guilt before God) with the notion that all sin is equal. There is good reason biblically to assume that Hitler will be judged more severely than the non-Christian who perhaps died by his hand. And to that point I will remind the reader that God does, in fact, judge righteously and fairly.
“The Lord reigns forever; he has established his throne for judgment. He rules the world in righteousness and judges the peoples with equity.” -Psalm 9:7-8
Bibliography:
DeYoung, Kevin- Daily Doctrine: A One Year Guide to Systematic Theology, 2024, p.123
Grudem, Wayne- Systematic Theology: An Introduction to Biblical Doctrine, 1994, p.502