Monthly Archives: November 2014

Degrees of Sin

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From an article at ‘You would have no authority over me at all unless it had been given to you from above. Therefore he who delivered me over to you has the greater sin’” (Jn. 19:11).

James 2:10 tells us that “whoever keeps the whole law but fails in one point has become accountable for all of it.” In other words, then we must be perfectly obedient. To fail in one point is to fail utterly and completely, for our Creator’s perfect holiness demands justice for even the slightest transgression. We need the righteousness of another to be put on our record because none of us has ever kept the standards of the Lord flawlessly. When we trust Christ alone, His record of perfection is imputed to us, and so we can enter into eternal life as those who have a record of obedience to the Father (2 Cor. 5:21). This is wholly by grace since Jesus credited our account with His obedience and we have done nothing to deserve it.

That one sin is enough to condemn us to hell, however, does not mean that all sins are evil to the same degree and that the consequences for our errors are all the same. God may condemn even the smallest sin, but the punishment of the “virtuous pagan” will be less severe in hell than the one who puts every immoral thought and desire into practice, because the scope of the former person’s sins is not as large as the latter one’s. To be sure, hell will be awful for both, but as one theologian has noted, all the sinners in hell would move heaven and earth if they could remove but one transgression from their record and have their punishment even barely alleviated.

Many portions of Scripture, including today’s passage, tell us there are degrees of sin, guilt, and punishment. The Jewish authorities who turned Jesus over to Rome were guilty of a greater evil than Pilate was because they had greater access to God’s revelation and had less reason for refusing to acknowledge Christ’s identity (John 19:1–16). Punishments under the old covenant civil law were meted out according to the circumstances of the crime (for instance, see Ex. 21:28–32). Those who are ignorant of the Master’s will receive fewer lashes in the end than those who know the Master’s will and are disobedient (Luke 12:35–48). Note, however, that even though ignorance may alleviate the consequences for sin, it cannot excuse sin entirely. Our representative, Adam chose his path — apart from the knowledge of God — and we all follow suit. Thus, we are culpable for our ignorance (Rom. 1:18–32; 5:12–21).

Coram Deo

That there are degrees of punishment in hell according to the extent of one’s sin means that there are also degrees of reward in heaven according to how we obey. Our obedience, to be sure, cannot earn eternal life, but once we are admitted into the kingdom by grace alone through faith alone, what we do in service to Christ earns for us, by His grace, rewards in heaven. Let us serve Him that our rewards might be even greater (1 Cor. 3:1–15).

Dr. R. C. Sproul in his book “The Holiness of God” explains why the concept that all sins are equal in God’s sight, is actually incorrect. He writes:

“The sins listed (in Galatians 5:19-21) may be described as gross and heinous sins. The New Testament recognizes degrees of sins. Some sins are worse than others. This important point is often overlooked by Christians. Protestants particularly struggle with the concept of gradations or degrees of sin. . . we tend to think that sin is sin and that no sin is greater than any other. We think of Jesus’ teaching in the Sermon on the Mount that to lust after a woman is to be guilty of adultery. We are aware that the Bible teaches if we sin against one point of the Law, we sin against the whole Law. These two biblical teachings can easily confuse us about the degrees of sin.

When Jesus said that to lust is to violate the Law against adultery, He did not say or imply that lust is as bad as the full act of adultery. His point was that the full measure of the Law prohibited more than the actual act of adultery. The Law has a broader application. Continue reading →

How not to use Greek

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Greek4Justin Dillehay is a member of Grace Baptist Church in Hartsville, Tennessee, where he resides with his wife, Tilly. They blog at While We Wait. He is a graduate of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. He writes:

Bible students love to talk about “the original Greek.” Preachers, too. Some preachers seem to want to work Greek into their sermons as often as they can.

And of course, there is nothing wrong with wanting to know something about the language that God gave us for the New Testament. But there are also dangers involved, since most Christians either don’t know Greek at all, or (which is almost the same thing) know only enough to look up individual Greek words. Just imagine how badly a foreign speaker could butcher English if all he could do was look up individual English words.

The path is littered with what D. A. Carson has called “exegetical fallacies” (a book I was assigned three times in school). This brief article is my effort to condense a couple of Carson’s lessons, in order to help us learn how not to use Greek in Bible study.

1. Usage Trumps Etymology: Avoiding the Root Fallacy

When I was a homeschooling high schooler, I took a course on etymology. Etymology deals with the “roots” of words—where a word originally came from way back in the foggy mists of time. It’s a valuable area to study, and nothing I’m about to say in this article is meant to suggest otherwise.

Nevertheless, a problem arises when people mistakenly think that a word’s etymology tells them “what it really means.”

We can see the fallacy of this notion clearly in our native English language. For example, the word nice comes from the Latin root nescius, meaning “ignorant.” But no one but a fool would respond to your calling them “nice” by saying, “Oh, I see what you really mean! You’re saying I’m ignorant! You and your veiled Latin insults!”

No one does this in their native language, but many Christians do this very thing when studying the Bible. They look up Greek words in their Strong’s Concordance, find the original Greek root, and conclude that they have found the word’s “real” meaning. This is what Carson calls the “root fallacy.”

Don’t get me wrong: roots and etymology are good. They can sometimes give you an interesting back story on why a particular word came to be used to describe a particular thing. They can even help you win the national spelling bee. But they don’t tell you the “real meaning” of a word, because a word’s meaning is not determined by its etymology, but by its usage. The question is not, “Where did this word originate?” but, “What did the writer/speaker mean by it?”

If you proposed to your girlfriend and she said, “No,” but you could somehow prove that “No” came from a Greek word meaning “Yes,” it still wouldn’t do you any good. “No” means what your girlfriend (and everyone else) means by it, not what it might have meant 1,000 years ago in an ancestor language. The reason no one today would take “nice” to mean “ignorant” is that no one today uses it that way. If you want to know what a word means today, you must find out how it’s used today. That’s what an up-to-date dictionary will tell you. For Bible students, it’s also what a good lexicon will tell you. One of the best tools for the Bible student to have right now is William Mounce’s Complete Expository Dictionary of Old and New Testament Words. This volume also contains a helpful piece called “How to Do Word Studies,” which will warn you against some of the same pitfalls that I am telling you about. Continue reading →