Proverbs 14:16 ESV
One who is wise is cautious and turns away from evil, but a fool is reckless and careless.
[https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=proverbs+14%3A16&version=ESV]
The trap of ‘just a little bit’ is a potent one. Just a little bit of sin, after all, seems so harmless. Stealing a banana at the grocery store, being just a little mean to your spouse because you wanted the cupcake, looking just a little too long at an attractive stranger… they all seem to be harmless or, if not actually harmless, basically harmless, given how small they are. They are small, in some ways, it is true. All three of these together would be preferrable to, say, a single murder. They’re still sin, though, and sin is never truly a small matter, never truly harmless, never truly something you can brush under the rug.
Small sins lead into great sins. They are small acceptances of temptation, steps moving bare inches towards destruction. Proverbs warns of nearing temptation; in chapter 5, the book warns of adultery, of the tempting woman (as the audience is a man- the advice is hardly specific only to males). It warns, “Keep your way far from her, and do not go near the door of her house…”, drawing a direct connection from that to the sin of adultery, saying, “lest you give your honor to others” (8-9). Indeed, this behavior is directly linked even to the dire end of that sin, to a death in despair (5:11).
So are small sins to the more lurid, story-maker sins, or even to the mundane, dreary sins, the bad habits and ruts of worldliness we’re all prone to. We let ourselves listen to the temptation once, then again, then again; each time, perhaps, the surrender is small, momentary, even quickly forgotten. It may take ten times, or a hundred, or a thousand, but in the end, unless quashed, unless we repent, those surrenders will grow larger. We start being unkind to people more regularly, not just when we’re crabby or tired. We start indulging longer, more prolonged thoughts of anger or lust or selfishness or envy. Those thoughts leak into our actions, coloring what we do and what we love. Maybe these thoughts even poison our relationships, eat away at our worship, and we turn to them even more, looking for cure, as we are wont to do, in the disease.
Another problem too should warn us off of these small sins, should motivate us to turn away from evil: no sin is truly, in the eternal scheme, small. James 2:10 states, “For whoever keeps the whole law but fails in one point has become guilty of all of it.” This, at first blush, seems bizarre, even impossible. How can stealing a banana implicate you in blasphemy, murder, idolatry, and all the rest of the catalogue of horrific sins we could reel off? Well, that’s because it, technically, doesn’t. Breaking any part of the law, though, is essentially similar to breaking the whole of the law, because the underlying problem of any sin is the same: it is a transgression of one’s duty to God, either through commission or omission.
Stealing a banana is a declaration that God doesn’t have the right to tell you not to steal a banana; taking the Lord’s name in vain is a declaration that God doesn’t have the right to tell you not to take His name in vain; shivving your best friend fifteen times and running screaming off into the night is a declaration that God doesn’t have the right to tell you not to… you get the picture. At their core, they are all a rebellion against God’s authority, and therefore in breaking any one part of the law, you, in principle (and because God’s authority is inherently and integrally total), declare that you only refrain from breaking its whole out of your own autonomous mercy, itself a sin of self-idolatry.
Wisdom is the application of righteousness, discernment, and faithfulness to life. Wisdom, therefore, requires us to abhor even the smallest sin as a deviation from the character of God, as being a gateway into yet more and greater of its ilk, and as a break in the consistent duty we have to glorify Him. We cannot merely call sins ‘small’ and excuse them so; they are still sins, still to be avoided and still to be condemned. Small sins, though their effects on us and upon the world are undoubtedly less than the effects of large sins, are sin. Only the grace of God allows us to turn away from them; only the grace of God gave us a hope of forgiveness, in the death of His Son, in the death of Christ to bear our sin. Let us therefore turn to Him in repentance, even for the smallest of sins, and lay our faith upon Him, not upon a foolish denial of the gravity of our situation.
God bless.
Sanctuary Functional Medicine, under the direction of Dr Eric Potter, IFMCP MD, provides functional medicine services to Nashville, Middle Tennessee and beyond. We frequently treat patients from Kentucky, Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, Ohio, Indiana, and more... offering the hope of healthier more abundant lives to those with chronic illness.
