One nerd moment I had recently occurred as I was trying to explain to a student that God views all sin the same way, whether the sin in question is a white lie or a murder. Intuitively, this doesn't really make sense because a white lie seems so harmless and even justifiable - I didn't want to hurt her feelings, or he didn't really need to know. But murder -- everyone knows that's just wrong. Why then, should God's punishment for all sins be the same when their severities vary so much?
As I thought about it, I realized that the claim that all sins are equal in God's eyes is just about as counter-intuitive as Galileo's claim that all objects accelerate at the same rate, which was radically different from Arisotle's claim that heavy objects accelerate faster than light objects. This claim doesn't make sense because we've seen feathers fall and bowling balls fall and we know that if we were to drop them at the same time, the bowling ball would hit the ground first, and if we had a choice to be hit with one of them, we'd definitely choose the feather.
However, upon further study in physics, we learn that the reason why the ball hits the ground first is not because of a difference in gravitational acceleration, but because of air resistance and drag effects. Once you enter an airless environment (in a vacuum or on the moon), then you remove the drag effects and gravity is the only force left to act on the feather, so it should reach the ground at the same time as a heavier object. Apollo 15 astronaut Dave Scott actually proved this in the video below, where he drops a hammer and a feather on the moon.
This is just speculation, but perhaps the reason why the perceived effects of sins vary so much, even when the Bible makes it very clear that the wages of [all] sin is death (Romans 6:23), is because there is some equivalent of a drag force that mitigates the effects that we experience in this life? I have no idea what the parallel would be, but whatever it is, it will not be there when we stand before God's throne and he calls us to account for all that we have ever said, thought, or done. To be in the presence of a perfect and perfectly good God will lead us to realize how pitifully short our own "goodness" stands in contrast and by extension, how terribly wicked our shortcomings really are. When we understand how infinitely more good God is, then maybe we can start to understand how any sin is the same in his eyes.
