In the weeks since the newspapers started publishing my e-mail address, reader response to my columns has shot up.
That’s good. Every writer I know is delighted to hear from a reader.
In one of those e-mail responses a reader took me to task for picking on Baptists. He obviously misunderstood my column that week. I was really picking on preachers, and the two I chose to lampoon just happened to be Baptists.
As this same reader set about to rewrite my column correctly, he said, “Of course, you and I know that in the sight of the Lord every sin is equal.”
No, I responded to him, I don’t know that. Although I have heard this idea expressed hundreds of times in Bible studies and discussion groups, and I can’t imagine where anybody ever hatched such an off-the-wall idea.
If by “every sin is equal” folks are saying that any sin is enough to make us deserve to be lost and, therefore, to make us need the blood of Jesus to redeem us, I might agree. Partially.
But nobody could ever convince me that driving three miles an hour over the speed limit is as serious an offense as sexually abusing a child. Those two sins are decidedly not equal. Nor would any just person—God included—make their punishment equally severe.
Ogling the half-naked ladies on the Oscar stage is wicked, but would anybody in his right mind claim it was as bad a sin as mugging and raping one of them?
My reader assumed that I would agree him, but he was wrong. To me, his idea seems outlandish.
For many years I worked alongside a person who had a maddening habit of espousing some utterly wacky concept in a public meeting and then sweetly asking whoever was presiding, “That is right, isn’t it?”
How do you handle a hot potato like that? Any answer you give will leave you sounding either rude or stupid. Rude, if you disagree. Stupid, if you don’t.
Thank God that he does not expect us to agree with all the flaky ideas of his other sons and daughters. Romans 14 tells us we can hold widely varying ideas on many subjects as long as we obey two simple rules: 1) Don’t judge each other. 2) Keep your ideas to yourself.