Are All Sins Equally Bad? (July 18, 2004)

I think one of the devil's favorite games is to get people to obliterate moral distinctions and lump unlike things together.

What spurred this thought is a comment I heard on WMBI by a Christian counselor who said, "We have many fat preachers condemning gays, but no gay preachers condemning gluttons." It's a line designed to get a laugh and provoke reflection over how shameful it is that we treat some sins as more damnworthy than others. Who are we to condemn homosexual sin while giving ourselves a free pass on overeating? The Bible says gluttony is wrong, but many of us are afflicted with this weakness, and so, like gays, we are all sinners in need of God's grace and his unconditional love that meets us where we are blah blah blah blah blah blah.

I am tired of these false moral equivalencies that trivialize perversion. It is true that everyone is a sinner and in need of God's grace. It is also true that a saint like Mother Theresa and a beast like David Berkowitz (Son of Sam killer) must both receive forgiveness through faith in Christ. But it is not true that all sins are the same. Gluttony and sodomy are not comparable, and it is not equally valid for a glutton to rebuke a sodomite as the other way around.

More times than I can count I have heard evangelicals utter the careless statement that "All sins are equally bad in God's eyes." No they aren't. Jesus explicitly denies this in his statement to Pontius Pilate, "He who delivered me over to you has the greater sin" (John 19:11). Only if sins differ in severity can one be regarded as "greater" than another. Likewise, when Jesus says that it will be "more tolerable" for Tyre and Sidon on judgment day than for Korazin and Bethsaida (Matthew 11:21-22), it is hard to see why Tyre and Sidon should get off easier unless somehow their sins were not as bad as those of the other cities.

With regard to gluttony and homosexual practice, it doesn’t take an Einstein to see from the Bible which sin is worse. The Old Testament does not prescribe the death penalty for eating too much, but it does for gay sex (Leviticus 20:13). The New Testament does not use pigging out as an example of a sin to which the wicked are "handed over," but it does so for homosexual indulgence (Romans 1:24-27). I don't see gluttony listed among the sins that keep people out of the kingdom of heaven. But gay practice listed there (1 Corinthians 6:9-10).

And as for the social cost - my goodness. I have never met a woman who did not want to go on living just because her husband had gotten thick around the midsection. But just about any pastor can relate stories of poor, distraught, near-suicidal women who did not know what to do after their husbands had left them and the kids for another man. And though a fat guy may give himself a coronary before his time, at least he's not spewing a virus that has taken, and continues to take, tens of millions of lives.

Wisdom requires us to assign degrees of value to what is good and degrees of opprobrium to what it evil. To lump together all sin into one indistinguishable mass is intellectually lazy and biblically dishonest. A careless refusal to distinguish greater from lesser sin tends to mask true outrages, and gives false comfort to evildoers who ruin others' lives and imperil their own souls.

Some gifts are greater than others (1 Corinthians 12:31). Some expressions of love are greater than others (John 15:13). And yes, some sins are greater than others too.