Sin is not apostasy.

Back in my junior year of high school, the emphasis of our English class was on British literature… so we read four of William Shakespeare’s plays: Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, Macbeth, and Julius Cæsar. None of his comedies; I guess comedy was saved for the Oscar Wilde plays.

Anyway, there’s a bit in act 1 of Hamlet in which young Prince Hamlet encounters the ghost of his father, dead King Hamlet, who’s been granted a nightly break from his torments in purgatory. I’ll quote the Folger Shakespeare Library’s version:

GHOST. I am thy father’s spirit,

Doomed for a certain term to walk the night

And for the day confined to fast in fires

Till the foul crimes done in my days of nature

Are burnt and purged away. But that I am forbid

To tell the secrets of my prison house,

I could a tale unfold whose lightest word

Would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood,

Make thy two eyes, like stars, start from their spheres,

Thy knotted and combinèd locks to part,

And each particular hair to stand an end,

Like quills upon the fearful porpentine.

But this eternal blazon must not be

To ears of flesh and blood. List, list, O list! 1.5.14-28

Why’s the good king in purgatory? Well, he wasn’t all that good. And before he had the chance to repent and beg forgiveness for “the foul crimes done in my days of nature,” his brother Claudius murdered him. Do not write me a peeved email about this 426-year-old spoiler; Hamlet is older than the King James Version and you should’ve read it yourself by now.

Anyway, because the king never made things right with God before he snuffed it, no grace for him. Now he has to suffer for his sins.

Cut off, even in the blossoms of my sin,

Unhouseled, disappointed, unaneled,

No reck’ning made, but sent to my account

With all my imperfections on my head. 1.5.83-86

Considering King Hamlet comes back to the land of the living, only to demand his son take bloody vengeance on his behalf, it feels like the guy really deserves to be burning in torment. Really all the people in this play are terrible Christians. Well, maybe not Ophelia.

I didn’t believe in purgatory at the time. I still don’t believe it exists as the Church of England described it in Shakespeare’s day—as a sort of “light hell” where you’re tormented for a few ages until you’re clean enough to enter heaven. And there are plenty of Christians who figure unrepentant or not-yet-repentant sinners don’t even get purgatory: They head straight into hell. They spend their afterlife in torment, same as Dives did in Jesus’s story. Because if they were Christian, but sinned and didn’t repent—or didn’t get the chance to repent ’cause they died in the middle of sinning—it undid their Christianity. Whoops!

We see this idea again in Hamlet, when young Hamlet, who’d been waffling all the play long about murdering his murderous uncle, finally gets the chance to sneak up and stab him… and finds him praying, and thinks, “Wait, not now.”

HAMLET Now might I do it pat, now he is a-praying,

And now I’ll do ’t. [He draws his sword.]

And so he goes to heaven,

And so am I revenged. That would be scanned:

A villain kills my father, and for that,

I, his sole son, do this same villain send

To heaven.

Why, this is hire and salary, not revenge.

He took my father grossly, full of bread,

With all his crimes broad blown, as flush as May;

And how his audit stands who knows save heaven.

But in our circumstance and course of thought

’Tis heavy with him. And am I then revenged

To take him in the purging of his soul,

When he is fit and seasoned for his passage?

No.

Up sword, and know thou a more horrid hent.

[He sheathes his sword.]

When he is drunk asleep, or in his rage,

Or in th’ incestuous pleasure of his bed,

At game, a-swearing, or about some act

That has no relish of salvation in ’t—

Then trip him, that his heels may kick at heaven,

And that his soul may be as damned and black

As hell, whereto it goes. My mother stays.

This physic but prolongs thy sickly days. 3.3.77-101

If Claudius is praying, he’s going to heaven. So Hamlet’s gonna wait till Claudius is sinning, then assassinate him, and that’ll send him to hell. Right? And Shakespeare’s audience would largely have said, “Right.”

But it’s not. We’re saved by grace. If we sin, we have Jesus. 1Jn 2.2 If we sin, it does not mean we’ve renounced Jesus and are bound for hell until we renounce our renunciation. We’re not on some ridiculous spiritual teeter-totter where one moment our actions are sending us to hell, and the next they’re sending us to heaven.

Yet we find this idea, not just in Shakespeare, but everywhere.

Insidious karmic thinking.

There are preachers who know we’re saved by grace not works. Sunday school teachers who know we don’t earn God’s kingdom through our good deeds. Parents who certainly don’t mean to threaten their kids with the flames of Gehenna whenever they forget to take out the trash… although to be fair, some of ’em totally do. But all these people will, from time to time, thoughtlessly drop the hint sin, any sin, is the first step down the wide road to perdition.

Karma is just that far ingrained in humanity.

Whether you call it karma, fate, just deserts, reciprocity, kismet, merit, or something else, it’s the common human belief we earn heaven by being good. And hell by being bad. And purgatory by being somewhere inbetween, like apathetically neutral. These karmic ideas have leaked into Christianity a thousand different ways. They regularly warp it into legalism: Our righteousness and relationship with God must be maintained by our good behavior. We can't just trust in Jesus.

It's why whenever Christians talk about righteousness, about holiness, we don't talk about faith and uniqueness like the scriptures do: We talk about goodness. Not that goodness isn't expected of Christians!—it’s a fruit of the Spirit after all. But we're not saved by it. Therefore we don’t maintain our salvation by maintaining goodness. If we sin—and let’s avoid sinning, but still—if we sin, we have Jesus.

Our goodness doesn’t keep us saved. Jesus does.

You’re gonna meet people who think they’re too far gone to be saved; they’ve sinned just so much. And maybe they have sinned quite a lot; maybe they’ve done horrifying things. But Jesus atoned for the sins of the world. The guy who thinks he’s sinned too much?—his sins have already been defeated, ages ago. All he now has to do is turn to Jesus and be saved. Yes, even him.

And if he trips up and sins again? If he has Jesus, he didn’t undo his salvation: He has Jesus.

You do realize God is everywhere, and that includes the future: He’s already seen all our future screw-ups. None of our sins take him by surprise, because he’s already right there, watching us do them. When we first turned to Jesus, he knew all the things we’d do, good and bad, really good and really bad. And still accepts us. Still adopts us. Isn’t undoing our adoption. We’re still inheriting his kingdom. His grace is amazing like that.

So the next time you find yourself thinking you’ve just blown it so bad, you’re going to hell: No you haven’t; no you’re not. Your sins are in no way mightier than God’s forgiveness. Not remotely. Repent, then go and sin no more.