Are Some Sins Worse than Others?

You are listening to Shameless Popery with Joe Heschmeyer, a production of Catholic Answers.

Welcome back to Shameless Popery. I’m Joe Heschmeyer. So today I want to explore a question. Are some sins worse than others? Are all sins equally bad, or are there degrees of sin? For instance, are there mortal sins and venial sins? And this is, as you might imagine, a controversial point because Catholics very clearly believe that some sins are worse than others, that there are such a thing as mortal sins and such a thing as sins that aren’t mortal. And many of our Protestant brothers and sisters disagree with that and think that’s a completely unbiblical idea. I want to explore that today. Before I get there, I have to acknowledge a mistake I made in the prior video. I was responding to a guy by the name of Mike Gendron, he’s an ex-Catholic, who was arguing against Catholicism, and he was claiming falsely that the second Vatican Council had some anathemas against Protestantism, that it adds to the over 100 anathemas against Protestants in the Council of Trent.

And I pointed out that Jimmy Aiken had correctly told him back in 2000 that there are no anathemas in the Second Vatican Council, and there are nowhere near 100 anathemas on the subject of salvation in the Council of Trent. But the second time I said that, I left that caveat off and just said there were not 100 anathemas in the Council of Trent, and that’s wrong, there were 132, but they’re on a wide variety of topics. They’re not all directed at Protestantism, they’re not all directed at what’s called soteriology, the study of salvation. So I misspoke there, I apologize. He caught that and I’m glad, it shows that he at least watched the first few minutes of the video. Hopefully he watched the rest. So with that said, I want to actually turn to something that he said on this subject because he’s really against the idea that there’s mortal and venial sins and he claims that it’s actually a doctrine of demons. So I’m going to let him present the case for all sins being equally bad.

Catholicism declares venial sins do not cause death, only temporal punishment. Does that sound familiar? It’s Satan’s first lie in the garden. Satan told Eve, “You surely shall not die if you break God’s command.” So what does the Roman Catholic Church do? It perpetuates the lie of the devil in the garden with its doctrine of venial sin. Remember what Paul said, “Some will depart from the faith and follow doctrines of demons.” This is clear evidence that the Catholic Church follows the doctrine of the devil.

So that is a pretty bold claim that to believe in a degree of sin, that there’s mortal and venial sins, according to Mike Gendron, is the same as saying that it’s fine to sin against God, and you won’t die. And it’s the same thing that the serpent told Adam and Eve, and it’s therefore a doctrine of demons. And so then he’s trying to say, “Oh, this must be what Paul’s talking about.” Even though when Paul’s talking about doctrines of demons, he’s really clearly talking about gnosticism since he talks about people who forbid certain foods and make marriage evil. Nevertheless, it’s obviously not good exegesis, but he’s pointing to something real, which is that Protestants tend to reject a belief in venial sin. They believe all sin is mortal sin. And the problem with that is, well, it’s not biblical. It’s not accurate.

And we see this in several different ways. But you know what, actually before I get there, there’s one other thing that inspired me to talk about this. It wasn’t just Mike Gendron. It was also watching a murder documentary that my wife put on, and then she’s pregnant and falls asleep 20 minutes into any show. So she puts this show on and almost immediately falls asleep. So I’m just watching this really disturbing documentary, but there is a particular line. This is a man who had killed his own family on Easter Sunday, but then he went to prison and then was claiming to be Christian. And I was struck by the way he was using Protestant theology to, it seemed to me, downplay the severity of what he had done. So I’m going to show you one of the letters he wrote and you’ll see why I care about this issue, why I think it matters.

And he does say in this note from 2014 that he grew up in a Christian family. He went to Catholic school at San Joaquin Memorial, but he says they weren’t a very religious family. He said he was very career-minded. His main focus was on academic and professional success. However, the horrific and painful loss of my entire family turned my life upside down. He says, “Koren, the most important thing that I could ever tell you in this lifetime is that the word of God, the Bible teaches us that every single person on this earth is a depraved sinner. We are all equally in desperate need of accepting Christ Jesus as our Lord and Savior.” When I initially…

Okay, so what struck me about that is the use of the word equally. And in as much as he’s saying we all equally need Jesus. Yeah, there’s a sense in which that’s of course true. We all need Jesus. All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. All of us need to be saved by Jesus Christ. But I think you can see in that letter the way there’s something really predatory going on that just claiming, “Oh, look, we’re all depraved.” He doesn’t say, “Maybe my sin is a little worse. I murdered my family on Easter.” It’s just like, “Yeah, nobody’s perfect, we’re all sinners.” And it set off alarm bells because I’ve seen people talk this way. There was a controversy, and I could no… I tried to find this, I couldn’t find where this conversation was. There’s a controversy about a sexual predator working in a Protestant church, and these two women were talking about this and one of them said, “Look, I know all sins are equally bad, but this one seems especially bad.”

And it was striking to me because her intuition was better than her theology. That yeah, if you’re in the position of hiring and you know one person struggles with gluttony, and the other one is a sexual predator, you don’t have to say, “Well, all sins are equally bad,” because they’re not. And so you don’t have to put… You don’t have to, in other words, pretend that some sins aren’t especially bad, that some sins aren’t especially dangerous. But unfortunately, if your theological system doesn’t allow for that, then you really have backed yourself into a corner. So with that, I just point out what scripture has to say on it. For instance, Jesus tells us, “Why do you see the speck that is in your brother’s eye but did not notice the log that is in your own eye?” Well notice that he’s suggesting that some sins might be worse than others.

Some are specks and some are logs. Now, this is an important framing of the issue, which is you could use this distinction between mortal and venial sin. You could use the gradation of sins or the fact that some sins are more serious than others as a way of trying to excuse yourself, but that’s not how the Bible uses it. In other words, we’re told there are some sins that are better or worse than others, but that we shouldn’t be so quick to say we are not guilty of the worst sins. So that’s the first thing I’d want to point out. I now want to turn to what I think is the most important passage to know. Now, there’s a lot of biblical passages that talk about a distinction and a gradation to sin, but if you only have one verse you can go to, that verse should absolutely be 1 John 5, and I’m going to give you the context of verse 14 to 17, and then we’re going to focus in a more intent way on the latter half of that.

But just to give it the proper biblical context, John is talking about our confidence in Christ. He says, “This is the confidence which we have in him that if we ask anything according to his will, he hears us.” Now, that’s an important caveat. Anything according to his will, he hears us. “And if we know that he hears us and whenever we ask, we know that we’ve obtained the request made of him.” Okay, so this is what he is talking about. There are things you can pray for, and as long as they’re in the will of God, he’ll do them. Then he says this, “If anyone sees his brother committing what is not a mortal sin, he will ask, and God will give him life for those whose sin is not mortal. There is sin which is mortal. I do not say that one is to pray for that. All wrongdoing is sin, but there is sin which is not mortal.”

Okay, so let’s highlight a couple things there, especially in the second half, verse 16 to 17. First, we’re dealing with a brother. This is not talking about an unbeliever. This is talking about a brother in Christ. And second, he’s clearly delineating two types of sin. He’s saying there’s mortal or deadly sin, and then there’s non-mortal, non-deadly. Now, he doesn’t name that, later Christians will start calling that venial, which just means pardonable sin. And because that’s the context, right? You pray for them to be pardoned for it, and they’re pardoned for it. And so this seems like a really incredibly clear passage saying, “Yep, there are mortal and venial sins, there are mortal and non-mortal sins.” The thing that Mike Gendron claims is a doctrine of demons is actually just coming straight explicitly from scripture, and this is how early Christians understood it.

So for instance, St. Augustine, when he’s writing his commentary on this passage, or a homily one should say, homily one on the First Epistle of John, he points out, “A man, so long as he bears the flesh, cannot but have some, at any rate, light sins.: But then he tells us, don’t rest too easy on the fact they’re light sins. “These which we call light do not make light of. If you make light of them when you weigh them, be afraid when you count them.” In other words, yeah, maybe one of them isn’t so bad, but look at how many venial sins you have. Many light make one huge scent, many drops fill the river, many grains make the lump. And then he goes on to say, “And what hope is there? Before all confession was anything himself righteous and before the eyes of God who sees that which is man, that was not and is, lift up the neck. Before all, then, confession, then love,” and then here he actually is going to quote 1 Peter 4:8, one of my favorite Bible verses.

“Above all, hold unfailingly your love for one another, since love covers a multitude of sins.” There’s something really fascinating going on here, starting with the fact that as Augustine points out, we continue to sin. If you’re going to make sense of mortal and venial sin, we have to start with the fact that Christians continue to sin. And this is how 1 John also begins. “If we say we have no sin, we deceive our ourselves, and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just, and will forgive our sins and cleanse us from all our unrighteousness. If we say we have not sinned, we make him a liar, and his word is not in us.” So that’s about us, now. We still have these elements of unrighteousness. We have these elements of sin that are still present in our life, and I shouldn’t need a Bible verse to say that, right? That should be really clear.

So if that’s the case, then we’re at an odd spot because again, go back to that example. One person struggles with some small sin, and another one struggles with some huge sin, or maybe doesn’t even struggle, maybe has completely given themselves over to that sin. I think intuitively, I may be wrong about this, but I think intuitively, most Protestants get this on some level. And Trent Horn made this point, I’m stealing this from him, that if you found out that your pastor struggled with a particular sin, there are some sins that are so egregious that if you’ve found out he struggled with that, or that he’d committed that, or was committing that as pastor, you would say, “Maybe he was never saved in the first place. Maybe he’s not a true Christian,” et cetera, et cetera.

But there are other sin where you wouldn’t have that reaction, where you’d say, “Oh, yeah, that’s a relatable ongoing kind of struggle. We all have that. Oh, I was a little lazy at work. I should have tried harder. I should have worked a little harder than I did. I struggled with sloth,” okay. But, “I stole a bunch of money from work, and was having an affair, and this, that and the other.” Then we don’t treat those things the same because at a human level, Protestants and Catholics both know they’re not the same. If your theological system doesn’t allow for that fact, then I think that’s a problem that needs to be rectified. So all that’s to say, I think 1 John 5 is really clear. There’s mortal and venial sin, and that doesn’t mean venial sin is no big deal. I mean, notice the context here is that we should pray for a brother who falls into venial sin. Now, what you’re praying for there is that God will forgive him of that.

That he’ll pardon him those faults because we know all of us have those faults that we fall into. We may not even be aware we’ve committed a venial sin. We may not even be conscious. If you’ve done certain really serious sins, you know it and it might drive you to repentance, but with the smaller sins, you often may not even be mindful of it. Like, “Oh, I guess I was a little uncharitable there. I was a little rude. I was a little…” Fill in the blank. And so this is one of the reasons why we pray for one another, because there may be unconfessed venial sin, because we just didn’t think about it. We didn’t take it seriously. And so John’s telling us, well pray for each other for that. He’s not telling us, pray for one another with mortal sin. What’s needed there is actually the grace of repentance, not just for God to overlook the sin. But with venial sin, we can just pray that God will overlook the sin because it’s only venial. It’s not a deadly sin.

Again, I think all of that is pretty straightforward, pretty clear, pretty explicit in the text. And so I’m struck by the way that many Protestants are forced to make a straightforward passage complicated. Now, I don’t know how Mike Gendron would respond to everything I just said, and if he’s watching this one, I hope he will respond to it, but I do know that he quotes R.C. Sproul. So I wanted to see, well, how would R.C. Sproul deal with this? And R.C. Sproul, he is the founder of Ligonier Ministries, and so he or someone at the ministries has a daily devotional on this passage. It is not signed on the website. I think it’s Sproul who says this, it reads like him, but I can’t say 100% that he’s the one who wrote this. But whoever wrote it said, “This is a very difficult passage primarily because it is not exactly clear what exactly John means by the sin leading to death.”

Now, I think that’s so fascinating that here’s this seemingly obvious point that John is making. There’s deadly and non-deadly sin. But because Protestants are committed, not all, but these Protestants are committed to the idea that all sin is deadly for non-Christians and no sin is deadly for Christians, that they can’t just acknowledge like, “Oh yeah, a brother might struggle with deadly or non-deadly sin.” And so Ligonier Ministries, or Sproul, or whoever it is, says, “The death spoken of refers to eternal death. Thus, it seems likely John understands there to be at least one unforgivable sin.” Now, this is really… The logical leap here, and you’ll see this repeatedly in Protestant commentaries on this, to go from this sin is deadly to this sin is unforgivable, is a really telling move because it’s not in the text. There’s nothing John says about there’s one sin that’s unforgivable. That’s just not there at all.

He says there’s sin that leads to death, there’s sin that doesn’t lead to death. Then the text goes on. “Various possibilities for this sin have been suggested such as the unpardonable blasphemy of the Holy Spirit mentioned by Jesus himself. Others mention a persistent refusal to hear the gospel. While it’s difficult to be sure. These various possibilities cannot be strictly separated.” Now, I was struck here because I see this frequently. You’ll find a passage that seems to point pretty clearly to the truth of some Catholic claim. So for instance, Matthew 16:17 and 19, where Jesus says to Peter, “Upon this rock, I’ll build my church,” he just renamed Simon Peter, a name which means rock, and then said, “Upon this rock, I’ll build my church.” And it’s like, okay, very clearly there’s a wordplay going on here. And yet you’ll find Protestant commentaries that basically amount to anything but the Catholic view.

Whatever it is, it can’t be the thing it seems to be. It can’t be the clear thing that it was always understood to be. It has to be something else. And so maybe it says maybe it’s that, it’s the other thing. It’s a really complicated passage. That kind of evasion is something worth, I think, calling out. That none of these are good explanations. The idea that John is referring to an unpardonable sin of blasphemy against the Holy Spirit is not based on anything in the text. There’s just nothing in there that sounds remotely like that. And the Protestants proposing these theories on some level, I think, realize these are not very strong theories. So they’ll propose three or four bad theories, and that is going to have to cut it, but there’s a clear way of understanding it. There’s mortal sin and there’s venal sin. Okay, so that’s Ligonier.

Sam Storms who works at Gospel coalition, he does a similar thing. He says, “The problems posed by this passage are innumerable and therefore so are the interpretations placed upon it.” And then he points at what he calls the foremost or more cogent views, and they are namely, number one, that the sin under death is apostasy. Number two, that it’s blasphemy of the Holy Spirit. You already heard that one. And number three, that this is about sins committed by Christians versus non-Christians, and number four, that this is actually just about physical death. And the physical death, what I wanted to just address, because that one is, I think, pretty clearly wrong, if you read the context of 1 John. If you go back to 1 John 3, John says, “By this, it may be seen who are the children of God and who are the children of the devil. Whoever does not do right is not of God, nor he who does not love his brother.”

Then a few verses later, “We know that we’ve passed out of death into life because we love the brethren. He who does not love remains in death.” Now, obviously this doesn’t mean physical death. We’re not saying until someone is made right with God that they’re physically dead. No, this is spiritual death, clearly. “Anyone who hates his brother is a murderer, and you know that no murderer has eternal life abiding in him.” So he just defined what he means by death. You don’t have eternal life abiding in you. And notice here, again, this is talking about brethren, who this might be true of. This is a really striking passage because Protestants will claim this isn’t possible. That if you’re one of the brethren, then you’re necessarily saved. You can’t lose your salvation, and therefore none of this could apply to you. And John is just teaching the exact opposite, that it’s possible to have one of the brethren who hates his brethren, and because he hates his brother, he is a murderer and he doesn’t have eternal life abiding in him.

So he’s calling this out pretty explicitly in 1 John 3, and I think that gives us important context for 1 John 5. Okay. So there’s one more person I want to look at here. That’s Albert Mohler. He’s the president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, and he’s chosen this in a series of sermons that he’s doing at the seminary to look at hard passages, making sense of these difficult to understand passages. And I think that is in itself really striking. This is literally the first of the hard passages that he wants to unpack. That he’s taken this passage that the early Christians had no trouble understanding. Some sins are light sins, some sins are deadly sins, and he’s turned it into this really difficult to understand passage. And so he starts with a lengthy caricature of the Catholic position. I’m skipping most of that, but then he’s going to get into trying to understand it from a Protestant perspective. So here’s Mohler.

So what are we going to do? Well, a part of the problem, by the way, in that Roman Catholic system was the subjectivity. Again, no list. We want a list. And not only that, if we look at the text, it says there is sin, and it’s the sin. There is one sin.

Okay. I want to just highlight that that’s not actually what the text says. It says, “If anyone sees his brother committing what is not a mortal sin, he will ask and God will give him life, for those whose sin is not mortal.” There is sin which is mortal. It doesn’t say there is one mortal sin. So he’s starting by framing the question in a way that’s just false. He’s saying the text says something it actually doesn’t say. The word one isn’t there in the English or the Greek.

It doesn’t mean necessarily just one sin by word or by act, but there’s sin that leads to death. We need to know what, what is it. First of all, we just remind ourselves that all sin leads to death and not just physical death, but eternal death. Ezekiel 18:20, “The soul that sins shall die.” Not just physical death. Romans 6:23, “The wages of sin is death.”

Okay, so notice he’s interpreted those passages to say that all sin leads to death, but he’s commenting on a passage that says literally the opposite of that. All wrongdoing is sin, but there is sin which is not mortal. He’s just said all sin is mortal. That’s what it means to lead to death. Now, he doesn’t actually believe that, because he believes that he sins as a Christian, and that he’s not going to die for it. He thinks his sins aren’t mortal, but he still proclaims that all sin is mortal. This is a strange thing about the evangelical Protestant system. It declares that all sin is mortal sin and that if you think that there’s venial sin, that’s a doctrine of demons, right? But then they’ll say, “Well, the sins that a Christian commits, those aren’t mortal sins because he’s saved, and he can’t be unsaved.”

So you don’t actually believe that all sins are mortal. You just are trying to present as true these two false claims, one that all sins are mortal, and two, that Christians can’t commit a mortal sin. Those two things can’t both be true, and in fact, neither of them are true. 1 John 5 is clear that a brother could commit a mortal sin, or could commit a sin that isn’t mortal. And so in trying to explain this passage, or really explain this passage away, Mohler is just saying the exact opposite of what the passage said. So yeah, I would say these commonly cited passages, “The wages of sin is death,” is taken to mean every individual sin is mortal sin. But it doesn’t say that. It doesn’t mean that. That’s not how the early Christians understood it, and that’s not consistent with the rest of scripture. So we might have to say the Protestant reliance on those passages is mistaken. It’s incorrect. Okay, back to Mohler.

So there has to be something else here. We’ll see it in a moment. So what are the options? If you look at the history of Protestant Evangelicals trying to wrestle with this question, there are several options. The first one I’m going to mention, but we’re not going to look at it for long. The first suggestion is that this unpardonable sin, the sin that leads to death, is apostasy. Apostasy. Someone who is a believer but commits apostasy, denies the faith.

So there’s a couple things I want to point out here, and then I’m going to just say if you want to watch the rest of that, you can. It’s another 25 minutes. He’s first said within the history of Evangelical Protestants, he’s not going to even look at what did the first 1500 years of Christians believe about this passage? Because they understood what the passage meant. They didn’t find it complicated or hard. There’s mortal sin and there’s venial sin. But he’s only going to look at Evangelical Protestantism, and he is going to say, “Yeah, Protestants don’t agree about what it means. They’ve got a bunch of different theories.” And then he talks about unpardonable sin, that this is not just a sin that’s deadly, but that apparently cannot be forgiven. The text doesn’t say that. That’s not there. And then he gives a bunch of different theories.

He begins with apostasy, but as you would hear, if you listen to it little more, he’s going to actually deny that that’s possible. He’s going to say that no Christian can actually fall away, and therefore apostasy is literally an impossible sin. If you deny Christ, you never affirmed him. If you affirm Christ, you’ll never deny him. And I think anyone who’s, I don’t know, looked at Christians who have fallen away from the faith should know this is false. You get people like Templeton who co-founded, what was it, Campus Crusade for Christ with Billy Graham, and then fell away and became an atheist. But according to this, we’d have to believe he was just pretending to be a Christian the whole time he’s leading other people to Christ.

Nevertheless, if you take this view, you’re in a weird spot because you can’t believe there’s a sin that leads to death if you think it’s impossible for a Christian to incur spiritual death. So you’re forced to come up with really strange and convoluted understandings of the text, because there’s no way of harmonizing Protestant theology with what the text actually says. Okay, I think that’s enough for that. Let’s go to another aspect, then. What is it that makes some sins worse than other sins? And Catholic theology has traditionally identified three criteria. One, the action itself. Some actions are worse than other actions. Two, the level of your knowledge, and three, the level of your consent to the action. And you need all three of those for it to be a mortal sin.

Mohler actually complains about this, because he says… this is the subjectivity that he was complaining about at the beginning… how can you really know if you’ve consented, how can you really know what you knew? Fine. But that problem is a biblical problem he’s got, because all of that, the knowledge, consent, and then the object or the action itself, is taken straight from scripture. Let’s start with the object itself. Galatians 5, St. Paul talks about those works of the flesh that he tells us not to engage in. He says, “Walk by the spirit. Do not gratify the desires of the flesh.” What are the desires of the flesh? He says, “The works of the flesh are plain immorality, impurity, licentiousness, idolatry, sorcery, enmity, strife, jealousy, anger, selfishness, dissension, party spirit, envy, drunkenness, carousing, and the like. I warn you, as I warned you before, that those who do such things shall not inherit the kingdom of God.”

He doesn’t say, “As a Christian, you’re guaranteed the kingdom of God, therefore you don’t have to worry about these things.” Or, “Try not to do them, but don’t worry, you’ll be okay even if you do them.” No. He says, “If you do these things, you will not inherit the kingdom of God.” And he’s talking to Christians. This is the very thing Mohler denies as possible, that you can lose your salvation as a Christian because of sin. That there are certain sins that are serious enough to cut you off from the kingdom, to cut you off from God. That’s what St. Paul is saying here in Galatians 5 and several other places. Mohler wants a list, Paul gives a list. Now, Paul is clear that his list is not extensive. He adds, “And the like.” He’s not saying this is every mortal sin, but he gives examples of the things that, if you give yourselves over to those sins, you won’t go to heaven.

So that’s the object. That’s the action itself. Some actions are worse than other actions. It is wrong to hit your neighbor if they don’t deserve it. It’s worse to murder your neighbor. And anyone who pretends those are equally bad actions is living in a state of delusion. But the object isn’t the only part of this. You don’t, in other words, just look at the action. You also have to look at the knowledge and intent. And so Jesus gives us the example in Luke 12. After one of his parables, he says, “That servant who knew his master’s will, but did not make ready or act according to his will shall receive a severe beating, but he who did not know and did what deserved a beating shall receive a light beating.” Notice that. Two people who commit the exact same sin might get different punishments because one of them knew better, and the other one didn’t.

Ah, okay. He’s going to then draw this out to a very clear principle in verse 48. “Everyone to whom much is given, of him will much be required. And of him to whom men commit much, they’ll demand the more.” So think about the parable of the talents. One guy gets one talent, one gets two, one gets five. Everyone is judged based on what they’ve been given by God. So if you’ve been given more, if you’ve more divine revelation, if you’ve been given more wisdom and insight, God expects more from you. Your neighbor who doesn’t know better will be judged less harshly than you if you do know better.

Now, the problem with this is that we are poor judges of our own knowledge. We’re poor judges of what we do and don’t know. And there’s a clear passage also in the Gospel of Luke that points to this. Jesus says from the cross, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” Think about this. The people who turned Jesus over to be executed on the cross included the religious authorities of Judaism. And yet Jesus from the cross pleads for their forgiveness on account of their lack of knowledge. What God considers knowledge is not just, you read in a book somewhere this was the right thing to do, or the wrong thing to do. There’s something deeper than that that he’s judging. So that’s knowledge. And so Mohler is right. You can’t say with a great deal of clarity what you do and don’t know. That’s the nature of it. You don’t know what you don’t know. But we’re told that God will judge us based on what we know.

So we don’t have to have an infallible knowledge of whether a particular sin was extremely grave or less grave. If you’ve done something that you now know was wrong, go into a confession for it. You don’t need to know whether it met the strict requirement of mortal sin there. We can still believe there very clearly is such a thing as mortal said. So that’s knowledge. But there’s also consent, and we see this also in the passion of Christ. Pilate says to Jesus that he has the power to release him or the power to crucify him. And Jesus responds in a really fascinating kind of way. He says, “You would have no power over me unless it had been given you from above. Therefore, he who delivered me to you has the greater sin.”

Now, what’s going on there? Well, Pilate actually has knowledge. Pilate knows Jesus is innocent, and his wife has a prophetic dream telling her to tell Pilate, “Have nothing to do with Jesus because he is innocent.” And so in the case of Pilate, he’s going to do something horribly wrong, condemn Jesus to be crucified, and he’s going to do it knowingly. And yet Jesus is still going to plead for him. He doesn’t say it’s not a sin. It clearly is a sin, but it’s not as bad a sin. There is a greater sin, which is the one committed by the Jewish authorities and Judas who betrayed Jesus. Why? Because they, the authorities, the high priest and the like, intentionally got involved. They had Jesus arrested, and they had him turned over to Pilate to be executed. Pilate didn’t get up that morning saying, “I think I’m going to go persecute Jesus of Nazareth. I’m going to go find an innocent man to put to death.”

He didn’t do any of that. He’s got an angry mob demanding the blood of an innocent man, and so he buckles. It’s an action of cowardice. That’s shameful, that’s sinful, but it’s less bad to be the person who gives into the mob than it is to be the mob. Hopefully that’s clear. So that’s the question of consent. Now, you can imagine that in the extremes. If someone is a rape victim, you don’t say, “How dare you commit fornication or adultery?” No, you would say, “Of course not. Yes, a horrible thing happened to you, but you had no say in the matter, and so therefore there was no sin.” This is why you need something like free will for there to be sin. Because if we don’t have free will, we’re all in the situation of the rape victim.

Things happened to us. We didn’t have any say over them. Therefore, we’re not accountable for any of them. And so if there was no free will, there would be no judgment, because how could you judge something that the person couldn’t have done otherwise? So that’s what’s important here, is that there’s an actual consent to the sin that’s important. And so if you imagine a spectrum, you can have a greater or lesser consent to the sin. Pilate is not a rape victim, right? Pilate has a greater ability to consent than someone who has just done to them. Simon of Cyrene for instance, he has got no say in the matter. He gets roped into the process of carrying the cross. Pilate’s not in that spot. He’s got a greater amount of freedom, a greater amount of authority, but not as great as the amount of the leaders who betrayed Jesus. And so very clearly from Jesus’ response to Pilate, we see that in addition to the action itself, in addition to the amount of knowledge, Jesus is also interested in how freely did you agree to this sin?

And so again, I want to go back to something I said a second ago. Mohler complains that you can’t just objectively determine this. Has my neighbor fallen into mortal sin, for instance. He doesn’t say my neighbor, he’s saying yourself. But yeah, it’s true. It’s a messy process. We can say certain sins are gravely wrong, but without having the mind of God, you can’t know how much was my neighbor free to consent to that? Because there’s all kinds of things that can really dampen your ability to freely say yes or no to a sin. Things like addiction, even cultural biases, all sorts of things. And so thanks be to God. We don’t have to sort all of those things out. We can know here are the things God cares about. Is the action right or wrong? How gravely evil is it? What did we know when we did the action, and how freely did we consent to it?

But ultimately, this is a question that God, and not our neighbor, not even ourselves, God alone, is able to judge, in this particular case, this was or wasn’t a mortal sin. So the last passage I’d point to is Romans 2. Romans 2 has this fascinating line that I rarely hear Protestants point out, that, “It is not the hearers of the law who were righteous before God, but the doers of the law who will be justified.” It’s funny because Romans allegedly teaches that we’re justified by faith alone. But in Romans itself, Paul says, “No, it’s the doers of the law who will be justified.” And then he gives the example of the Gentiles who don’t have the Mosaic law, but who still do by nature what the law requires. That is, they don’t have, “Thou shall not kill,” written on a stone tablet, but they still know they shouldn’t commit murder, because they know from the level of their heart.

And Paul says, “In that case, they are a law to themselves.” That they show what the law requires is written on their hearts. And then he says, “On judgment day, their conscience also bears witness, and their conflicting thoughts accuse or perhaps excuse them on that day.” So yes, at the end of time, you will be accountable, and your conscience will reveal before God and the world these things you did. And you’ll get accused or excused. There’ll be something that is exculpatory or mitigating or there’ll be something that’s makes it even worse. All this to say, think about it in terms of just like a human courtroom. It’s important to know a crime was or wasn’t committed. But even human judges want to know, what was the context?

Did the person know what they were doing was wrong? Was there a contextual situation? For instance, a woman kills her abusive husband because she’s afraid for her life. That’s not going to be handled in the same way as someone who just goes and murders a stranger for fun. In both cases, you have the action of murder, but in one case, it’s treated very differently, and for good reason. If we have that wisdom as humans, why would we not expect God to have that wisdom as God? So to bring all this around, we want to say a couple things. Number one, there clearly are greater and lesser sins. You’ve got sins that are specks and sins that are logs. You’ve got sins that are venial and sins that are mortal.

All of this is very explicitly taught in scripture, and it’s only because evangelical protestants are committed to a system that doesn’t allow them to see that, they have to explain those passages away. But they’re all over the place. The references to worse sins or greater sins, that sort of thing is all over the place. And second, if you want to know what makes a sin worse, it’s the action itself, it’s the degree to which you knew that you shouldn’t have done it, and it’s the degree to which you consented to it. So I hope this doesn’t lead you to be judgmental of your neighbor. I hope what it does instead is to make you realize that even if your neighbor is doing something wrong, it may be that you have a greater degree of knowledge than they do, or maybe you’re more free from a particular temptation. The temptation has hampered their will. An addiction or something has hampered their will.

And so should it actually make us, if we take this principle seriously, it should make us appreciate that what looks like a serious sin to us may not be as serious in the life of our neighbor. This is important because what looks like a log to us may actually be just a speck in our neighbor’s eye. In any case, I hope that’s helpful. It is not a doctrine of demons to believe that mortal and venial sin is a real distinction. It is simply taking the Bible literally and seriously. For Shameless Popery, I’m Joe Heschmeyer. I hope you’ve enjoyed, please like, comment, share, do all that jazz. I do try to read the comments, so if you want to comment on this, especially on YouTube, I look forward to seeing what you have to say. God bless.

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