Theological Thursday --- The Ugliness of Sin

I know I have made comments on here several times that we are all sinners and from a spiritual standpoint they all point us to our need for a Savior no matter how big or how small. So if we commit murder or tell a little white lie, even though from society's view one is far worse than the other, from God's view it just shows us that we need Him.

I never knew how to illustrate that well as many unbelievers have a hard time understanding that their sin is "bad" as people love to compare themselves to other "worse sinners". But these last 2 months I have been reading a lot of books that I've never had time to, and although I love to give my own thoughts and perspectives on things, I have to quote 2 paragraphs from Jerry Bridges book, Respectable Sins. He spells out the ugliness of sin (no matter how "big" or "small") with the best illustration I've ever heard:

If I spill black indelible ink on a rug you bought at the local discount store, that's bad. But if I spill the same ink on your very expensive Persian rug, that's really bad. Why? My act is the same and the ink is the same, but the value of the two rugs are vastly different. The extent of the damage is determined not by the size of the ink blobs on the two rugs but by the respective value of each of them.

This is how we should think of our sin against God. Every sin we commit, regardless of how insignificant it seems to us, is an assault on His infinite glory. And the value of an expensive rug, even if it is millions of dollars, is nothing compared to the value of God's glory.

So society views our sins from the perspective of the size of the ink blob. Did we make a big spill (murder) or a little spill (white lie)? But the Christian should view their sin in respect to what their spill (sin) is falling on --- God's infinite glory. And as we mature in the Christian faith, hopefully our spills get smaller and smaller, but our recognition of what we are spilling onto never ceases to grow.

It makes it so much clearer Paul's view of himself as a sinner. In 1 Corinthians (55 AD) he saw himself as the "worst of the Apostles" (15:9). Five years later (60 AD) when he wrote Ephesians, he called himself the "very least of the saints" (3:8). Finally, 3 years later (63 AD) when writing 2 Timothy, Paul called himself the "worst of all sinners" (1:15). So as Paul matured in his Christian walk, his view of his sin got worse and worse. It is not because his spills were getting bigger and bigger, but because his view of his awesome, perfect, and powerful God to which his spills were falling upon were getting clearer and clearer. May we do the same.