If, however, you are [really] fulfilling the royal law according to the Scripture, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself,” you are doing well. 9 But if you show [prejudice, favoritism], you are committing sin and are convicted by the Law as offenders. For whoever keeps the whole Law but stumbles in one point, he has become guilty of [breaking] all of it.
James 2:10
Somebody once told me that this passage of scripture means all sins are equal. Apparently, that belief is widely held because I’ve heard other Christians say essentially the same thing in different ways. My favorite one is, “Don’t judge others just because they sin differently from you.”
Treating all sin as equal will make you popular, especially with really sinful people. But you’ll find it pretty difficult to defend the idea that all sin is “equal” because you don’t really believe it.
Nobody actually believes that all sin is equal. That’s just a thing you say to make me think you’re humble. “Hey, nobody is perfect. I’ve got my faults too. I’m no better than you.” You’re only saying that because you don’t think I’m truly wicked. You don’t think I’m the head of a criminal organization that processes children to be used as lawn fertilizer.
If you truly believed all sin is equal, then you wouldn’t treat a kid who plays with matches any differently than you treat an arsonist. I mean, you wouldn’t think it was a good idea to send the kid to prison, right? And you wouldn’t think the punishment fit the crime if you grounded the arsonist from playing video games for a week.
The passage in James doesn’t say all sin is equal. It says that committing any sin makes you a sinner. Breaking any law makes you a lawbreaker. Specifically, refusing to love SOME of your neighbors is a sin. Favoritism is breaking God’s law. Murdering your neighbor is also a sin. But murder and favoritism are NOT the SAME sin. Obviously, the consequences of breaking those two laws are completely different.
While it is true that ‘nobody is perfect,’ that’s not an especially useful thing to say. And it’s flat out wrong to say that playing with matches and intentionally burning down a building are exactly the same imperfection.
