The Art of Comparative Sin

There’s a serious problem with that kind of thinking: biblically speaking, there are no good people. “For there is not a just man on earth who does good and does not sin,” the wise man reminds us in Ecclesiastes 7:20. 

The problem with you and me weighing in on the sins of others is that we usually make ourselves the reference point. Evil people seem evil because we aren’t as evil as them. We become the standard, the baseline for what we assume is acceptable behavior . . . and then we assume our standard is the one God must use. 

It’s important to realize just how incapable we are of assessing evil. We carry out our assessment using flawed instruments.  “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked,” Jeremiah tells us.  (Jeremiah 17:9)  It’s kind of like having the thermostat in your car set way too low: the car will be boiling over long before any kind of warning shows up on your dashboard.  Your heart is already saturated with sin, which renders you incapable of any truly objective assessment.  You are always going to underestimate the sinfulness of sin, because you’re starting from the wrong point.

Sure, you might seem better than a serial killer, but it’s important to understand that all of humanity is so far away from God’s holiness that the gaps between individual sinners becomes irrelevant. It’s like choosing between lethal cancers; one might seem a little worse, but they’re all going to kill you.

Quoting the Old Testament, Paul tells the Romans:

As it is written: “There is none righteous, no, not one; there is none who understands; there is none who seeks after God. They have all turned aside; they have together become unprofitable; there is none who does good, no, not one.” (Romans 3:12)

The practice of comparative sin is based on an age-old misunderstanding of the gospel. Nobody gains entrance to the kingdom because of their goodness; everybody who makes it is there because of Christ’s goodness. Even the elders before the throne feel compelled to take off the crowns awarded to them and cast them at the feet of God.  (Revelation 4:10) 

Be very careful before you conclusively decide that someone is lost; if you’re going to play that game, always remember that there’s someone out there who seems better than you.

I know that a lot of you are going to make New Year resolutions in a few days.  I’ve got a suggestion: perhaps for the next year, we should all keep the comparisons down to ourselves and Christ. That might prove to be a real eye-opener when it comes to exposing evil.