Why we should never say “all sins are equal in God’s sight”
I have heard this said before: “All sins are equal.” I actually hear it enough that it seems to me to be a common, even standard position, that Christians hold: that all sins are of equal severity in God’s sight. Whether you tell a white lie or murder somebody in cold blood, sin is sin, and all sin incurs the just punishment of God.
But does the first statement (all sins are equal) follow from the second (all sin merits just punishment)? No one can deny that the Bible says all sin is deserving of death. James 2:10 says, “For whoever keeps the whole law but fails in one point has become guilty of all of it.” Romans 6:23 says, “the wages of sin is death.” Not just certain types of sin, but all sin. All sin is a capital crime, no matter what kind of sin it is. When we sin, we participate in the destructive act of our first parents Adam and Eve, whose sin brought about all the misery and evil we see in the world today. We become contributors to the same destruction of God’s creation that they began. All sin, no matter how small, contributes to the fall.
It does not follow from that, however, that all sins are equal. At no point does the Bible say so outright, and indeed, it doesn’t really make sense. Is God really as grieved when someone steals $10 as he is when someone commits genocide? Does God treat lying about whether you broke curfew the same as murdering someone? That sounds absurd. We mere humans are capable of recognizing the difference between petty theft and mass murder — not just in the consequences of the acts, but the degree of evil it takes to commit them.
Further complicating matters, sin is not even always an outright evil act. Sin, in the Bible, literally means to miss the mark. It’s not just when we outright do a bad thing. It’s whenever we fail to live up to the perfect standard of God, in our thoughts and actions. So based on that definition, even if we do a good thing for the wrong reason, we’ve sinned. We’ve failed to live up to God’s standard of righteous actions from a righteous heart.
Keeping that in mind only further highlights the absurdity of saying all sins are equal in God’s eyes. If that were true, if I saw a man begging in the streets for money, it would make no difference to God whether I gave him $10 because I pridefully wanted everyone to see how generous I was, or took a knife and killed him. That’s a blunt illustration, but that’s exactly the point. If all sins are equal in God’s eyes, that’s what it means. It’s absurd. If someone told me I was no more offended at murder than petty theft, I would be insulted, and I think any of us would be. How would saying that about God not be an insult to God and his morally perfect character?
Jesus himself indicated that even in hell, there are degrees of punishment. He told the cities of Chorazin and Bethsaida that it would be worse for them at the judgment than for Sodom and Gomorrah (Luke 10:13-14). Or take a look at the parable of the wicked servant in Luke 12, which concerns the final judgment. Jesus said that servants who committed different degrees of evil would receive different degrees of punishment: “And that servant who knew his master’s will but did not get ready or act according to his will, will receive a severe beating. But the one who did not know, and did what deserved a beating, will receive a light beating” (Luke 12:47-48a). It’s pretty clear that, both in this life and the next, God recognizes that some sins are worse than others and deserving of more severe punishment.
So it’s not that all sins are equal in God’s sight, and I think claiming they are does a disservice to God’s character. God gave us the ability to discern not just good from evil, but degrees of evil from one another. Surely he himself is capable of doing the same thing. But the error we often make — and try to correct with the “all sins are equal” claim — is to think that compared to mass genocide, premarital sex and gratuitous cursing “aren’t that bad.” What we should instead be doing is recognizing how deeply abusing God’s gifts of sex and language grieves him and wrongs him, and how unthinkable it would be to go even deeper into the depths of evil than we’ve already gone.
I get the intent behind saying all sins are equal in God’s eyes. We want to get across that none of us has any reason for being prideful that we’re better than anyone else. That’s of course true (Eph 2:9 and 1 Cor 1:29 both say no one can boast before God), but we don’t need to make the unjustified logical leap that all sins are equal to reach that conclusion. The fact that we are all under a death sentence is enough. Who brags about being under a “better” death sentence than someone else? The point of the Bible’s saying we have no reason to boast is not so we can say our neighbor is no better than Hitler; it’s to say that none of our best deeds can even approach God’s standard of perfection. We have no reason to brag about having done anything to deserve salvation. But to say that God doesn’t recognize and/or care about the difference between degrees of evil (and degrees of good for that matter) is an insult to God’s character, I think. We should exercise the utmost care in how we represent God to the world, and avoid extreme sayings like this one.
