Sin's equality

My friend and I had a very interesting conversation this morning regarding sin. It started off with the controversial story of late UK disc jockey Jimmy Savile. Jimmy was knighted by UK monarchy and received a special mention by the Catholic church for his many philanthropic deeds. Then came a damning documentary alluding that Jimmy was an alleged paedophile who committed many vile acts. Now the question we posed was whether Jimmy was naturally inclined to commit such an act, whether soberness of mind or lack thereof had anything to do with it and what the consequences of such an act are.

In order to understand these questions we must provide a framework for these actions.  This framework can be neatly summarised as sin. And here sin is meant in both a religious sense when man turns his back on God and in a secular sense where man harms himself and those around him (you could make the case that both have the same practical implications).

I think that it is fair to say that every human has sinned in his life. We often judge the severity of sin in the sense that it exhibits harm on fellow man and this leads to judgement of the sinner. Should the sinner and the sin be judged equally? What about the mental state of any two men - Let us assume that we have two murderers. The one commits murder because he thinks that he does society a service by eliminating a type of person while the other murders a person out of hatred. The first person, one could argue, is mentally ill while the other had perfect ability to know that there was nothing wrong with the person he murdered but yet still did it. My logic dictates that the heart of the second murderer was more ill than the heart of the first murdered. How then are we to judge the sinner? The sin makes them equally guilty for the outcome was the same, but the sinners were completely different in that their motives differed with varying degrees of "wrongness". C.S. Lewis gives us a perfect example of the difference between the heart of man and the psychology of man. Assume that two soldiers are inhibited from entering the battle field due to a crippling effect of fear. Assume that psychology is able to remove fear from both men. The one man freed from the burden of fear exclaims his joy and now wishes to defend his country at any given cost while the other man makes the choice to run out of a sense of self-preservation rather than fear. The heart of the first man was sincere and good, while the heart of the second man was ill and evil. How are we then able to judge the sinner? That is why God tells us to leave any kind of judgement to Him. We are all imperfect judges!

We are now able to discern that sin and the sinner cannot be judged the same. Now, can we truly distinguish between different kinds of sin being worse than others? We usually assign some hierarchy to sin. We might assume that a lie is not so bad as stealing, that stealing is not bad as murder or that murder is not so bad as rape. But it can it not be argued that we should view sin as all the same? There is a saying in Christianity that tells us that every man would carry a cross and that God will not tempt a person more than what that person is capable of handling. A certain individual finds it easy not to lie but struggles not to commit murder. Another person continuously lies but the thought of murder does not cross her mind. Both these people have an affliction to a type of sin. In each their desire to commit the sin is equivalent. If they both give in to their desires they both sinned and the sin has the consequence of making them both guilty for not resisting. You see, we only look at what happens after the sin or the outcome of sin, which is either a lie or a death, but we don't see that their affliction (the desire to lie or to murder) was the same. Is this not perhaps what Christ meant when He defended the prostitute from stoning by saying the man with a clear conscience should be the first to cast a stone. Christ also said that you commit adultery by just looking at another women in a sensual manner. Once again, this makes us imperfect judges of sin.  

I am in no way defending Jimmy. And of course I agree that we should have a secular court ruling on the consequences of sin. Mad men who inflict harm upon society should be locked away. Sane men who inflict harm upon society should be locked away. But let us not be mistaken. We have all sinned in some way or another. We have all given into the desires of our hearts. We are all equally as guilty and we are all sinners. Thus, before we judge another we should remember that I have done exactly the same thing, that is sin. What only separates us the consequence of sin. Other than that we are equally guilty of sinning.

Is there redemption? Some believe that you can do many good deeds that would outweigh bad deeds. But this does not cancel out sin. The sin has already left a stain. Others believe that living out ones sentence is fair pay for sin. But now we are punishing the consequence of sin and not the sin itself. The Bible tells us that any sin is punishable by eternal death. God gives us a way out: Christ. Christ had to endure the same temptations as man and yet did not yield to sin. Yet He took up the cross and bore the burden of man and was nailed to the cross so that man would stand guilt free before God. Our inheritance should have been death, yet what we got was eternal salvation. This is love at its maximum.