Is It a Sin if I Don’t Get Caught?

By Rev. Paul R. Harris

If you don't get caught in a lie, did you really sin? If you don't get caught stealing, is it really breaking the Seventh Commandment? Sometimes we don't think those private cruises we book on the Lust Boat really matter. No harm, no foul. We might be able to live this way if God had just stopped at eight commandments.

In the Large Catechism, Luther says God gave the last two commandments especially to people like you: people who go to church, who are involved in youth group, and who haven’t been zapped by the first eight commandments. The last two commandments tell us that sinful desires alone qualify as sin. Even if you never acted on that lustful thought you had, even if you got away with it, it’s still sin before God and subject to punishment both now and in eternity.

You’ve probably wondered why God has two commandments saying, “You shall not covet.” Maybe your Baptist friends, who combine the Ninth and Tenth Commandments into one, are right about this. The Reformed way is intriguing. What real difference is there between coveting your neighbor’s house, wife, workers, or animals?

The difference is in the Hebrew word for covet. The word covet in the Ninth Commandment means “You shall not cause yourself to covet.” In other words, don’t play with a single sinful desire in your mind. Don’t act as if it really doesn’t matter because it seems that no one else know s about it. That lust, that covetous desire to want one thing more, is sin in all its ugliness and damnableness. Even if you were a quadriplegic and unable to lift a hand or speak a word, having one single lewd thought in your life is enough to damn you to hell for all eternity.

But it never stops at one, does it? Once that one little thought of lust pops in to your mind, there’s a cascading effect. It’s like someone launched a computer virus in your mind. Thought after thought rushes in, and you become tainted, ruined, defiled by lust after lust. This is what our Lord points out in the two commandments that expose the sin of coveting. The Ninth Commandment tells us not to covet a single thing. The Tenth Commandment says that we’re not to go along with those lustful thoughts, since they get out of hand so quickly.

How convicted you are! You didn’t resist the first impulse to sin. You went along with it, and it exploded into a hundred others. It’s like when you were five years old in the grocery store and touched that one can. You weren’t prepared for the a valanche of cans that followed. You were scared by it.

It’s the same with sin. The Tenth Commandment makes a lie out of the belief that it’s not a sin if you get away with it. You can’t believe you got away with something when your own mind convicts you. Indulging in one secret lust allows a dozen more to multiply. How do you get those thoughts out of your mind?

Here’s where you can take a fatal step. It’s illustrated by this overused story. A woman keeps interrupting the Sunday service by praying out loud, “Clear the cobwebs out of my mind, Lord. Clear the cobwebs out of my mind.” She does this for several weeks. Finally, after pleading with God to get the cobwebs out of her mind yet again, a man in the back says loudly, “No, Lord, don’t clear the cobwebs out. Just kill the spider.” So far, so good. It’s not enough to clear the cobwebs of lusts out of your mind. The spider that causes them must also be killed. The problem comes when you start to think that you can kill the spider yourself. You’re convinced that if you just think good thoughts, then you won’t have lusts, or that if you just repent of thinking it’s not a sin if you get away with it, then the spider will be killed.

But whenever we’re thrown back on our own works—whether we try harder, repent more sincerely, or attempt to believe more—we’re being thrown to the Law, and it will have its way with us. Law that’s not answered by Gospel does one of two things. It either makes us self-righteous, and we think that we have killed the spider, or we begin to despair and start to believe that the spider is too big to kill.

Sometimes the devil likes us to know what sin looks like before we commit it, and he makes that sin appear small. It seems like it’s a tiny spider that you can kill anytime you want. He might even lead us to believe that it’s not really a spider at all, since no one else can see it.

The devil also operates in a second way. He makes the sin appear to be bigger after we commit it. When we see that our sin has been magnified, we despair that it’s such a big spider that even God can’t kill or forgive it. So now that secret little sin of yours, that one you thought you could get away with, is a big, honking, furry spider. What now?

The answer is not for you to kill the spider but for God to take care of it. Sin is damnable whether you get away with it or not and whether others know you committed it or not. But no sin is so big, so lewd, so strong that the blood Jesus shed on Calvary cannot cover it, forgive it, or free you from it. No sin of yours can withstand the blood of Jesus sprinkled on you in Baptism, put into your ears by Absolution, or put in your mouth in Communion.

God tells you one thing about all your sins that can be applied two different ways. First, you are never alone with your sin. Second, in the Law, no sins are ever so small they are not seen by Him, and in the Gospel, no sin is left unpaid for or unforgiven. When sin looks like a small spider, hear the Law. When sin looks like a giant one, hear the Gospel.

Rev. Paul R. Harris is the pastor of Trinity Lutheran Church in Austin,Texas. He is the father of one college student, two teens, and one wannabe. All he loves; none he understands; all he rejoices over.You can e-mail him at pastorharris@trinityaustin.com.