Less Bad Is Not Good: What Scripture Actually Measures Sin Against

I am not a murderer. I don’t steal. I am a nice person, at least most days. Compared to criminals, or murderers or even that terrible person I don’t like from the office or even church, I am way better. I’m not perfect but definitely better than them.

Does this sound like you? Welcome because you are not alone, I have had those thoughts more times than I want to admit. It is comfortable, it is easy, because there is always someone worse right? and that must mean I am good.

But as for the cowardly, the faithless, the detestable, as for murderers, the sexually immoral, sorcerers, idolaters, and all liars, their portion will be in the lake that burns with fire and sulfur, which is the second death.

Revelation 21:8

Read the whole list

Have you ever read this verse and considered the order or even the type of people mentioned here? Murderers. The sexually immoral. Sorcerers. Idolaters. Those are the names we expect to find in a verse about judgment, usually the ones we are not, and finding them there makes sense to us, because we are not on that part of the list.

But look at how the list opens, and look at how it closes.

It opens with the cowardly and the faithless. It closes with all liars.

John is writing to churches under persecution. Persecution is not something most of us know anything about, but for this church it was very real. So when he mentions the coward, it is the person who decided confessing Christ carried a cost too great, and kept silent. Who let the moment pass. Who chose their own safety over the one whom previously they had confessed as their Lord and savior.

A heart that flinches when being faithful costs something is a heart that exists in every age, and it shows up many places that never involve a courtroom or a sword. The conversation where I choose to not say something. The conviction I keep to myself in fear of upsetting someone. The moment I could have been honest, speaking the truth in love and chose instead to be a people pleaser.

Scripture puts that kind of heart on the same list. Not because the harm is identical in a physical sense, but because the direction is. Every sin, traced back to its root, is a turning away from the love God requires, and every turning away leaves a person under judgment apart from Christ.

The wrong measure

Man looks on the outward appearance, but the LORD looks on the heart.

1 Samuel 16:7

We measure what we can see, because it is all we can see. Reputation. Conduct. The version of a person that shows up to work. God is not working from that data. He is looking at the part of a person that no one else has ever seen, including, most of the time, the person themselves.

And He is not measuring it against my neighbor. He is measuring it against Himself.

Why? Because God is the only one who is truly good.

And Jesus said to him, “Why do you call me good? No one is good except God alone.”

Mark 10:18

So if you want a sobering look at whether you are truly good, you should not be comparing yourself to another person, you should compare yourself to God, and you will find that no one is good.

None is righteous, no, not one; no one understands; no one seeks for God. All have turned aside; together they have become worthless; no one does good, not even one.

Romans 3:10-12

What good do we aim for?

So what is the standard? What is the good we need to aim for?

Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love.

1 John 4:8

John does not say God loves, as though love were one item in a longer inventory of divine qualities. He says God is love. It is who He is. It is what God is. And if that is true, then sin has to be defined in relation to it. Not as a list of forbidden behaviors, but as movement away from the One whose nature is love.

That is why being less bad than someone else is not the same thing as being good. Less bad is a comparison between two creatures. Good is a comparison with the Creator.

And we are held to that standard because we were created in God’s image, made in the image of Love, to love.

So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.

Genesis 1:27

Which means the doctrine of sin is downstream of the doctrine of God. What you believe sin is will only ever be as deep as what you believe God is.

The love that God is includes His holiness and His justice and His settled opposition to everything that ruins what He has made. A love that did nothing about what destroys its beloved would not be love. It would be indulgence. His wrath is not the opposite of His love. It is His love, in action.

Everything hangs on two commandments

When someone asked Jesus directly what the standard actually was, He communicated the same thing we have just identified, the standard is Love.

You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets.

Matthew 22:37-40

All the Law and the Prophets. Everything. Every instruction, every prohibition, every command, rooted in love.

If all of it hangs on love for God and love for neighbor, then every sin, traced back to its root, is a failure of one or both. Something got placed above God: comfort, reputation, a desire, a fear, selfish desire. Or something got placed above the person in front of me: my judgment of them, my indifference to their needs, my selfishness.

Often times both at once. And measured that way, nobody comes out on top. There is no one to compare favorably to, because the standard was never another person.

Said plainly, sin is the absence of love. Not the absence of any love, because plenty of sin is committed out of a greater love for ourselves than for God or anyone else. It is specifically the absence of godly love, love as God defines and expresses it. If you want to see what that actually looks like, 1 Corinthians 13 spells it out, one quality at a time.

The sins you cannot see

There is one more type of sin, an absence of Love that is more subtle.

So whoever knows the right thing to do and fails to do it, for him it is sin.

James 4:17

Sin is not only the wrong thing done. Sin is also the right thing known and not done.

My comparison only ever considered actions. It was a tally of things I had done. James is counting something else. He is counting the love I knew was needed and never gave.

The kindness I did not offer. The honesty I did not speak. The forgiveness I have been withholding. The person I avoided because helping would have cost me something. None of that shows up on a list of things I did. All of it, in James’s plain sentence, is sin.

Love is not optional in the Christian life.

Back to the cowardly

So I return to that first name on John’s list, and I find I cannot remove myself anymore.

Not because I have openly denied Christ. But because I know exactly what it is to stay quiet because speaking the truth in love would have cost me something. I know the small internal calculation that turns faithfulness into a managed risk to avoid conflict.

If you have given yourself over to comparative goodness as I have, the truth is there is no comparison available that makes any of us come out clean, because the measure was never another person. The measure is the God whose nature is love, and the standard was shown to us in person: the Christ who loved His Father and His neighbor perfectly, all the way to a cross. That is who I am actually being held beside. Not the difficult man three desks over.

Therefore be imitators of God, as beloved children. And walk in love, as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us, a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God.

Ephesians 5:1-2

So this is the standard. A heart turned toward God and toward the people He has put in front of me.

This is just the start and over the next several weeks we will continue to unpack sin.

Next, the beginning: Genesis 3, the first sin.