9/17/19 Mo (To see video, click HERE)
What is the worst sin, and how do our sins compare?
In all my conversations on the streets and in the
marketplace, I’ve only met one person who claimed to be without sin, even as
she tried to sell me a stolen watch.
Most people easily admit they aren’t “perfect”, that they’ve just “made
mistakes”.
Many have a fairly nonchalant attitude toward their sins,
such as a young man named Mo whom I flagged down as he was whizzing by me on an
electric scooter. He had come to the
United States from Mali at a young age, grew up with a Catholic family in
Indiana, and now says he has returned to his Muslim roots though not practicing
Islam.
Mo believes that Islam, Christianity, and Judaism are
basically the same and worship the same God who doles out rewards for good
behavior, and he sees himself as one of those happy, positive people who will
be rewarded in the next life. So I
decided to help him test himself by the standard of the Ten Commandments, which
he easily agreed to.
“Have you ever told a lie?” I asked.
“Oh, every day!” he said without hesitation. “Who hasn’t?
I’m human”
“It’s a serious sin”, I said. “The Bible tells us that liars shall not
inherit the kingdom of heaven” (though the
verse I was trying to remember puts it much more explicitly in Revelation 21:8 “But the cowardly, the unbelieving, the vile,
the murderers, the sexually immoral, those who practice magic arts, the
idolaters and all liars—they will be consigned to the fiery lake of burning
sulfur. This is the second death.”)
I began to go on to talk about other commandments, such as
stealing, but Mo really had to get going with his rental scooter. I had really only talked about one sin –
lying, and Mo had brushed it off as an unavoidable fact of existence before we
parted ways.
But is lying, for example, really that trivial, and how
would it compare to the worst of sins, whatever that might be?
There is one sin that stands out to me as being the worst
sin that had the most negative impact on history. It wasn’t committed by Hitler or Stalin or
Jeffrey Dahmer. In fact, the person who
committed this sin had never known sin before.
All he did was eat from a fruit tree.
But this one act, a deliberate act of disobedience, was
enough to get Adam and Eve kicked out of the Garden of Eden and to bring
alienation, corruption, decay, and strife into the world. It brought murder into the very next
generation and every kind of evil into the hearts of mankind, as described by
Paul in Romans 1: They have “…become
filled with every kind of wickedness, evil, greed and depravity. They are full
of envy, murder, strife, deceit and malice. They are gossips, slanderers,
God-haters, insolent, arrogant and boastful; they invent ways of doing evil;
they disobey their parents; they have no understanding, no fidelity, no love,
no mercy. Although they know God’s righteous decree that those who do such
things deserve death, they not only continue to do these very things but also
approve of those who practice them.”
By comparison, Adam and Eve committed a seemingly small sin
which they had been nonetheless forbidden to do, and it may have had the most devastating
consequences of any sin in history. Since
that time, we have all inherited a knowledge of good and evil, and it is our
God-given conscience that likewise forbids us from committing a variety of sins. Yet, like Mo, we choose to disobey, and often
shrug our shoulders and trivialize the gravity of our sin when there are evidently
no immediate repercussions.
I didn’t get a chance to cover a few more sins in Mo’s “good
person test”. But even if lying was his
only sin, and even if he had only lied once in his life, that one act of
disobedience, just like that one forbidden fruit, is enough to poison an
otherwise pure relationship with our Holy God.
How much more the many acts of disobedience – many of which have just
become thoughtless habits – that we commit “every day”?
Sins might vary in terms of their impact on the world around
us, but every sin, no matter how small, is enough to show us our need for
repentance and the forgiveness we can find in Jesus.
Thanks, Mo, for stopping to talk and allowing me to record
the conversation! It can be seen HERE at https://youtu.be/2QLAXZi8Lkw
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