I remember a John Piper sermon where he answered a question, “If my sin is temporal and finite, how can I deserve an eternal punishment?” Piper said the sin itself is temporal, but the sin is against an eternal and infinite God, so an eternal punishment is fitting. In other words, the punishment is not based entirely on the sin itself, but on the magnitude of the one sinned against.
Meditations on this Topic:
“For I know my transgressions, and my sin is ever before me. Against you, you only, have I sinned and done what is evil in your sight, so that you may be justified in your words and blameless in your judgment.” Psalm 51: 3-4
The non-inspired title of Psalm 51 in the ESV is “A Psalm of David, when Nathan the prophet went to him, after he had gone in to Bathsheba.” When Nathan confronts David, David had committed adultery with Bathsheba, murdered Uriah, and attempted to cover up the whole thing. Surely David had sinned against Uriah, Bathsheba, his men he made complicit in murder, and his servants he made complicit in adultery. Yet there is some special way where David can say “Against you, you only, have I sinned…”. What can I learn from this? What about the nature of sin is being acknowledged in this powerful Psalm of repentance?
“If you really fulfill the royal law according to the Scripture, 'You shall love your neighbor as yourself,' you are doing well. But if you show partiality, you are committing sin and are convicted by the law as transgressors. For whoever keeps the whole law but fails in one point has become guilty of all of it. For he who said, 'Do not commit adultery,' also said, 'Do not murder.' If you do not commit adultery but do murder, you have become a transgressor of the law.” James 2: 8-11
I see something similar in James. It is natural to assume partiality is not as great of sin as murder or adultery, and perhaps we can affirm this in some sense. Yet James says a failure in one point is to bear the guilt of all, why? Because God is the one who gave both commandments. So again, the depth of our sin seems tied not simply to this or that command, but the God who gave the command.
Illustration:
I imagine our sin like holes in the ground. Maybe holes in an imaginary foundation of our lives. Perhaps a “small” sin is the width of a coffee cup, while a “huge” sin is so big it could swallow a car. But, while their width varies, no matter how small the hole is, it is always infinitely deep. If I imagine my infinitely deep coffee-cup hole, I could line up a million spiritual concrete trucks and each in turn pour concrete in, but they would never fill the hole. In fact, no matter how many trucks there are, they could never fill .00001% of the hole. There will always remain an infinite volume remaining.
Well, I can comfortably work around such a small hole. I might stumble slightly if I step right on it, but my life will likely continue as normal. A larger sin would surely begin swallowing and destroying parts of my life. But such a hole can never stay small. Surely, the edges will start to cave in, and the sin will grow and grow and grow until it begins to swallow and destroy.
So I imagine sin as having a fixed width, infinite depth, and infinite volume.
So what about the grace of God?
The grace of God is infinitely deep and infinitely wide. It can fill the depth of any sin and is as wide as the East is from the West. No matter how great the size of sin, His grace is sufficient for us.