SPROUL; In this session together, we’re
going to consider a very controversial matter and one that has plagued an awful lot of Christian
people. And not only Christians, but those who are
outside the church have struggled with this question, and that is this: are there degrees
of sin or degrees of righteousness? It’s a very, very important practical question,
and we’ll look at it as soon as we open with prayer. Let’s pray. Father, again we look to you, asking for the
grace that we need to grow in our appreciation of your righteousness, that we may begin to
love the things that you love and hate the things that you hate so that your kingdom
may be honored in this world and in us. For we ask it in the name of our King. Amen. I’ve discovered that there seems to be a
great, great misunderstanding about biblical, and New Testament ethics, particularly, that
floats around the secular culture. Not too long ago, I read a somewhat fascinating
essay written by a renowned psychiatrist, a man who was distinguished for his brilliance,
for his academic pedigrees, and for his very insightful judgments. In this particular essay, the psychiatrist
who was writing it was very distressed about Christianity. You see, the psychiatrist was expressing the
fact that in his practice, as a physician, he was forced to deal with people everyday
who were neurotic, and at times, psychotic, as a result of an inability to handle guilt. Did you ever stop to think how many problems
of psychiatry relate to the question of guilt? And so, there’s a certain sense in which,
as a medical practitioner, a psychiatrist has to be concerned about ethics—not just
on how he conducts his practice, or not just in how he conducts his own personal life,
but how he understands the relationship between right and wrong and guilt and its powerful
impact on the human personality. Well, this particular psychiatrist was very
distressed and very exercised in this essay as he was writing a critique of the ethical
teaching of Jesus. Now I have to give him credit for that, because
even in our culture today, those who are most hostile to Jesus and to the church and to
Christianity, nevertheless, usually have good words for Jesus as an ethical teacher. They say, “Well, I don’t believe He’s
divine. I don’t believe He’s the Savior of the
world or any of that, but yes, I’ll grant that He’s the greatest ethical teacher that
ever lived.” Well, here comes this psychiatrist, and he
lays the gauntlet on the table. He makes it very clear. He says, “Hey, I don’t think Jesus was
such a red-hot teacher of ethics.” Well, what was the substance of his criticism? What he said was this: he went straight to
the Sermon on the Mount and he said, “On the Sermon on the Mount we see the crux of
Jesus’ ethical teaching. Why do we take it seriously at all?” asked
the psychiatrist. “Why should we consider Jesus a great moral
teacher or a great educator of ethics when he gives an address in which he tells people
that it is just as bad to lust after a woman as it is to commit adultery? Or, as he suggested on the Sermon on the Mount,
it’s just as bad to hate somebody, as it is to kill him?” And he goes on in this essay to show how foolish
such an ethic would be. He said, “Consider, in terms of the destruction
that is wrought in the community and the violation of people that is wrought as terms of a difference
and a distinction between hatred or anger and murder. If I hate you, if I’m angry at you without
just cause, that certainly hurts you as a person; I diminish your joy, your happiness,
by my sinning against you with hatred and unjustifiable anger. There’s a sense in which the quality of
your life has been harmed by my sin, and that is a very serious matter,” says the psychiatrist. “That kind of psychological punishment on
people that comes from hate and anger is destructive, but,” he said—the psychiatrist says, “it’s
not worthy to be considered with the destructive capacity of murder. You see, if I murder you, I’ve made your
wife a widow and your children orphans. I’ve taken away their—perhaps their main
source of income from their lives. I’ve devastated that family. Yes, I’ve hurt you if I hate you; I’ve
hurt you if I angered you, but I haven’t destroyed your family by taking your life. How could a wise person put those on an equal
basis? Or,” as the psychiatrist suggests, “if
I lust after you, maybe I’ve depersonalized you, turned you into a thing, a tool, and
I’ve insulted your dignity, which is serious, but that’s not the same thing as committing
adultery, wherein the actual bond of union between two marriages now is being disrupted,
and the security of the home, of the family, of the children, and all the rest that flows
out of the illicit affairs of adultery. That’s radical, even. It’s not the same as lust,” and so the
psychiatrist is scratching his head and he said, “I just don’t understand why the
world puts Jesus of Nazareth up on a pedestal as an ethical teacher, when He is teaching
us that it’s just as bad to lust as it is to commit adultery; it’s just as bad to
be angry as it is to kill.” Well I would have to say that I share the
consternation of that psychiatrist in the fullest degree at one point. That, if indeed, if Jesus of Nazareth ever
taught that adultery was no worse than lust and that murder was no worse than hate, I
would be as astonished as the psychiatrist is that the world has revered the ethical
teaching of Jesus. But the simple fact is, dear friends, Jesus
of Nazareth never for a moment taught that it is as bad to lust, as it is to commit adultery;
it is as bad to be angry, as it is to murder. Jesus never taught that. He never taught it in the gospels. He never taught it in the Sermon on the Mount. It’s not taught by the apostles. It’s not taught in the Old Testament. In fact, the Old Testament, for example, which
is the book upon which Jesus was reared and to which He owed His own human allegiance
in terms of His ethical patterns, is filled with distinction after distinction after distinction
with respect to the degrees of sin. Even in the judicial system of Israel, clear
distinctions were made between first-degree murder—what we would call murder by malice
aforethought—and involuntary manslaughter. There were different penalties prescribed
for that. There’s a clear delineation of the severity
of sin, and as the same token and the balance on the other side of the scale, differences
of levels of reward and merit of righteousness. But why would anybody ever come to the idea
that Jesus taught that there were no distinctions? Well I think it comes from a simple misreading
on the Sermon on the Mount, where Jesus, in that particular situation, is dealing with
the Pharisees. And Jesus does say to them, “If you lust
after a woman in your heart, you have violated the law against adultery, and if you hate
your neighbor without just cause and if you are angry at your brother without just cause,
you have violated the law, ‘Thou shalt not kill.’” Now the point of which Jesus is saying is
certainly not to say—and He didn’t say, actually—that it’s as bad to hate as it
is to murder, and that was not His point that we should infer from His teachings. What is the point? Let me go back to the graph again and use
the graph for something completely different than we were just doing. I mentioned at the beginning that sin is complicated—that
not only is sin complicated, but it is complex. There is another continuum. We see here the continuum from evil to good,
and that not only is there a continuum from evil to good, but there are grades on this
continuum. The worst thing, when we’re talking about
adultery, is the actual physical act of adultery. But there are stages—you know, over here
you have chastity—that’s righteousness. Over here you have wickedness of illicit love
and adultery, but there are all kinds of things that fall in between those two poles. A man can kiss another woman—not his wife. That’s not adultery. That’s not a sexual act of intercourse. That relationship can progress through stages
of deeper and deeper and deeper involvement sexually. And it’s—there’s the sense in which
it may start with something that is innocent, just a friendship, which is righteous, but
the friendship moves over into stages of leaning in the direction of an illicit, unlawful relationship
culminating in adultery. Now there are steps along the way, and there’s
a sense in which, at the beginning of that complex, that complex of sin is lust. When lust is born in the mind, that’s the
first step towards moving in the direction of carrying out the fantasy, carrying out
the mental idea to the actual reality of violating the law of God. Now the point that Jesus is making is this:
that the law that God gives—thou shalt not commit adultery—is not so easily maintained
and kept with integrity if one merely refrains from the most abysmal act of adultery. Gail Green did a survey of the sexual revolution
and the sex ethics of college girls in the sixties in this nation, and she said at that
time, her discovery, in her particular survey, was that the prevailing philosophy of sexual
activity among college girls in the sixties was the so-called “everything but” philosophy,
or what she called the “technical virginity.” That is, that the ethic that was prevalent
was, “It’s all right to be involved sexually with men as long as you don’t go all the
way.” Then a change took into the seventies. “It’s all right to go all the way as long
as you’re promiscuous, and we—as long as you’re not promiscuous,” and then we
moved to a next step, where it’s all right to be promiscuous, and so we’ve seen the
changes in the cultural attitudes just in the last fifteen or twenty years. What Jesus is saying is that when God says,
“Don’t commit adultery,” the full measure of that prohibition incorporates within it
the whole complex of that sin—not only the actual act, but all of the things that are
a part of it, all the way from adultery back to the initial beginnings that crossed this
line of lust. And by the same token, when the law says,
“Thou shalt not kill,” we haven’t kept the law if we’ve got through this world
and never murdered anybody, but Jesus is saying the broader implications of that prohibition,
the broader implications of God’s law are, not only should we not kill, but that we should
not harm; not only should we not harm, but we should not injure, mentally, psychologically,
any other way. And not only that, there’s a positive thing,
there’s a positive balance side, a positive righteousness. Not only should we not kill, but we should
promote life. There is a positive as well as a negative
ramification of the law, and again, what Jesus was doing there was criticizing a simplistic
understanding of the law, which is exactly what the Pharisees got into. And the rich young ruler—you remember—he
came, and he asked Jesus, “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” And Jesus said, “You know the law: thou
shalt not kill, thou shalt not steal, thou shalt not commit adultery,” and what does
Jesus—what does the young man say? “All these things I have kept since my youth.” Had he? Well if you understand the law in the narrow
sense of the most wicked expression of these sins, it’s perfectly possible that that
rich man had never stolen a nickel, had never actually committed adultery, had never killed
anybody, but what Jesus was trying to teach him was that he couldn’t keep the Ten Commandments
for five minutes in their broader amplifications, and that’s the lesson he was trying to teach
the Pharisees. He was never saying that it’s as bad to
lust as it is to commit adultery, but He’s saying that if you lust, you have not fulfilled
the whole measure of the complex of the law. That’s a vital point for us to understand,
because the scriptural ethic would not make sense apart from this kind of understanding. And, I might add that the church, both Roman
Catholic and Protestant, historically, has understood throughout Christian history that
there are degrees of sin. The Roman Catholic formula, which was made
popular in the Middle Ages and of course became a point of dispute in the sixteenth century,
but is still in focus in Roman Catholic moral theology is the distinction between mortal
and venial sin. Now the point of that distinction is that
there are some sins so gross, so heinous, so serious that the actual commission of those
sins is mortal—not that it kills the person but that it kills the grace of justification
that is residing in the soul of the believer. Not all sin is that devastating in its consequence. There are sins that are really sins, but there
are venial sins. There are less serious sins. They don’t have this killing capacity that
mortal sin has, and so Rome has that distinction. Now, a lot of Protestants, particularly evangelical
Protestants, have rejected the idea of a degree of sin because they know that the Protestant
reformation rejected the Roman Catholic distinction between mortal and venial. And so they’ve jumped to the conclusion
that since Protestantism denies the Roman Catholic view of mortal and venial sins, therefore
the Protestant church denies any gradation or distinction between sins. Let’s go back to the reformers themselves. John Calvin was an outspoken critic of the
Roman Catholic Church and certainly as critic of this distinction between mortal and venial
sin. And here’s what Calvin has to say: Calvin
said that all sin is mortal in the sense that it deserves death. The Bible does say if you sin against one
point of the law, you sin against the whole law, and so that if I commit one sin, in that
slightest act of transgression—did you ever consider the ramifications or repercussions
of one tiny little act, one tiny little peccadillo, one tiny little just driving fifty-one miles
an hour when the speed limit’s fifty miles an hour, just that tiny little transgression
against the civil magistrates, which God calls you to obey—not malicious, not violent,
vituperative, hostility towards God, but you transgress the law of God. Minor matter, but at that point, you chose
to disobey your Creator, your Creator who is altogether holy, altogether just, altogether
righteous, and you have chosen at that moment to put your fallen human creaturely will in
an exalted position above God Himself. At that moment, in that slightest sin, you
were involved in an act of cosmic treason. You don’t look at it that way—nobody does—but
is that not what it is? When I sin, I choose my will over the will
of God Almighty. At that point, presumably, what I’m saying
by implication is that I’m more intelligent, I’m more wise, I’m more righteous, I am
more powerful than God Himself. I insult the holiness of God with my sin. And not only that, I bear false witness against
God, because I’m created in the image of God, and as the image bearer of God, I am
supposed to reflect the character of God to the whole creation, and the squirrels are
watching me and the kangaroos, and when they see me sin, and if everything is in order,
what they’re doing is they’re saying, oh, this must be how God is—unjust, proud. See, I am lying about the character of God
when I sin. But, we could go on all day about the implications
there, and I’m not here to browbeat anybody about little peccadilloes, and what Calvin
is saying is that all sin is mortal in the sense that if God were absolutely just, He
could destroy us all for the smallest sins that we’ve committed. In fact, the penalty for sin was given in
the very first day of human creation—“The soul that sinneth shall die, the day that
you eat of it, you shall die.” But God doesn’t deal with us always according
to justice; He deals with us according to grace, and He allows us to live, and He moves
to bring about our redemption. And Calvin says, “All sins are mortal in
that we deserve death from them. No sin is mortal in that it can destroy our
saving grace.” If you don’t believe that you lose your
justification and have to come back through the second plank of salvation, through the
sacrament of penance. We have to repent, yes, but we’re not—our
grace, the justifying grace that the Holy Spirit brings to us is not killed by our sin
because of the grace of God. So Calvin denied mortal sin on two bases,
and then he said he didn’t like venial sin because it came across as the idea that ah,
sins aren’t really serious. Nevertheless, Calvin and every other one of
the reformers strenuously maintained that there is a difference between petty sins and
what they called gross and heinous sins, and that distinction is important for Christians
to realize, and it’s important for us if we’re going to have the fruit of the Holy
Spirit to be able to realize it because we are called to be patient and kind and longsuffering
with other Christian people, and with other non-Christian people, even to be patient with
them in their sins. There’s no perfect Christians running around
the church, and the New Testament speaks about a kind of love that covers a multitude of
sins. In fact, one of the most serious sins is a
sin of pettiness, by which people begin to harp away at minor transgressions in the community
and then they tear the body of Christ apart, and from a very small transgression, great
damage comes when it is fueled by the fire of gossip and slander and pettiness, where
we’re called to patience and tolerance towards the struggling failures of other Christians. Not that we’re called to be soft on sin,
and yet at the same time, there are certain sins that are listed repeatedly in the New
Testament in catalogs of sin that are very, very serious that ought not to be allowed
to be tolerated in the church. Adultery is serious. Incest called for ecclesiastical discipline. Drunkenness, murder, fornication—these sins
the New Testament extrapolates from the law of God as being particularly destructive to
human life and to human society and calls forth church discipline when these sins are
manifested. So, I think it’s clear that we have distinctions
there and not only do these references illustrate it, but consider the warnings of Scripture. The warnings, for example, that the apostle
Paul gives to us that we ought to be careful. He’s speaking to the unbeliever, the unconverted,
that the person is saying that they are heaping up, treasuring up, storing up wrath against
the day of wrath. Simply to say, you either get into heaven
or you don’t get into heaven. With degrees of sin and degrees of righteousness,
there are also degrees of hell and degrees of heaven. You say, “Wait a minute. I’ve never heard of such a thing.” There are at least twenty-two references in
the New Testament to degrees of rewards that are given to the saints in heaven—different
levels, different rewards, different roles that will be played. The Bible warns again and again against not
adding to the severity of our judgment, that it’ll be more tolerable on the Day of Judgment
for Sodom and Gomorrah than it will be for Chorazin and Bethsaida. Jesus says (after he’s been delivered to
Pilate) to Pontius Pilate, “Those who have delivered me to you have greater guilt than
you do.” Jesus measures and evaluates guilt, and with
the greater guilt and the greater responsibility comes the greater judgment. It’s a motif that just shot through the
New Testament. But you say, well, isn’t the ultimate issue
whether we get there or don’t get there? I remember asking that question to a theologian
in seminary, and he said to me, “R.C.,” he said, “The sinner in hell would do everything
in his power and give everything that he had to make the number of his sins in his lifetime
one less.” Now in our—we understand that in our own
law courts. If a person is a mass murderer and goes out
and slaughters eighteen innocent people, he’s come into the court, and he is charged with
eighteen counts of murder, and he’s convicted of eighteen counts of murder, he can be sentenced
to eighteen consecutive life sentences, and we laugh at that. We say, “Ha, you only have one life. We’re not cats; we don’t have nine lives. You can’t go to prison for nine lifetimes,
so it’s ridiculous to have eighteen consecutive life sentences.” Not when you’re dealing with an eternal
God who has plenty of time to make sure that the scales of justice are balanced. You see the whole idea of gradation of sin
and gradation of punishment, gradation of virtue and gradation of reward is based upon
God’s justice. If you commit twice as many sins as another
person, justice demands that the punishment fits the crime. If you’ve done twice as much virtue as the
other person, justice demands that you get more reward. And God tells us that even though whether
we get into heaven or not get into heaven will be on the basis of the merit of Christ—the
merit of Christ alone that gets me in there—my reward, once I get to heaven, will be distributed
according to my works—not that my works are ever good enough to impose an obligation
on God to reward them, but God has used this as the method by which He promises to reward
His people. Those who have been abundant in good works
will receive abundance of reward. Those who have been derelict and negligent
in good works will have a small reward in heaven. By the same token, those who have been grievous
enemies of God will have severe torments in hell; those who have been more mild and less
hostile will have a lesser punishment at the hands of God, because God is perfectly just,
and when He judges, He will take into account all of the extenuating circumstances. And it’s not just a question of the number
of sins, but you may have committed five sins and this person, one sin, but this one sin
over here could be seen in God’s eye as ten times more grievous than the five little
ones over here. God takes all those things into account. As Jesus said, “Every idle word will be
taken into account in the judgment.” Well, why is it important for us to labor
this point? Here’s where the trick comes in. Let me think. I don’t know how many times I’ve talked
to guys, particularly, who are struggling with lust, and they say to themselves or they
say to me, “I might as well go ahead and commit adultery because I’m already guilty
of lust.” They actually begin to think that way. “I can’t be in any worse shape in the
sight of God if I go ahead and finish the deed.” Oh yes you can because the judgment of actual
adultery will be much more severe than the judgment upon lust. God will deal with you at that level, according
to the severity of your crime, and it’s a foolish thing for a person who has committed
a misdemeanor, to therefore say, “Well I’m already guilty. I might as well make it a felony.” God forbid that we should think like that
because if we do, we have to face the righteous judgment of God. And so we are called to move from faith to
faith and from grace to grace and from life to life abounding in good works, adding to
the treasure that God is laying up for his people in Heaven, diminishing the treasure
of wrath, adding to the treasure of blessing. That we must keep in our mind as we seek to
build a Christian conscience and a Christian character. All right, in our next time together, we’re
going to look at some of the universal principles of ethics that God has established for us
in the very act of creating the world, and we’ll consider that the next time.
