8 If you really keep the royal law found in Scripture, “Love your neighbor as yourself,” you are doing right. 9 But if you show favoritism, you sin and are convicted by the law as lawbreakers. 10 For whoever keeps the whole law and yet stumbles at just one point is guilty of breaking all of it. 11 For he who said, “Do not commit adultery,” also said, “Do not murder.” If you do not commit adultery but do commit murder, you have become a lawbreaker.

Verse 10 is teaching us if we stumble at just one point we are guilty of breaking all of the law because the law is the reflection of the character and holiness of God and if we are going to dwell in an eternal relationship with Him then we need to be perfect in character as well. We need to be holy.

Unfortunately we tend to have a different points system than the holiness of God and we tend to think of our lack of perfection like a piles of bricks. Some people have bigger piles and have just made more mistakes. Like lying is 2-3 bricks, gossip is like 5-10 bricks, adultery is 25-30 bricks, and murder would be 100 bricks. We tend to have a scale that weighs the bricks to determine how bad off we are in our relationship with God. If a pile is 3-5 bricks then God will probably forgive us, because after all it is just 3-5 bricks. I mean, heck, look at that guys’ pile of bricks. If the pile of bricks is bigger, 75-100 bricks, then we tend to think there is no way God could forgive those people. How could He?

What verses 10-11 are teaching us is the image we should have of the Holiness of God isn’t a pile of bricks, but a pain of glass and if we stumble at just one point we will shatter the whole glass and the holiness of God has been offended. If we miss it one time we have become lawbreakers, we have become murderers, adulterers, rapist, pedophiles, and our relationship with God is shattered.

Perhaps some of us are wondering if that is really true…have I shattered my relationship with God because I made one mistake? The Bible teaches us that when we do it, even if we don’t realize it, that the result is that our bodies are injected with death and it is slowly going to consume us. God didn’t create us to die. He created us to live eternally, however, in our mistakes, death is injected. Many of us already see the effects. Our teeth are starting to decay, our eye sight is fading, our hair is falling out…

That is why God came to us and Jesus died on the cross for our death and through faith in Him we can escape death. Most of us will still experience death, but it won’t be able to hold us, because Jesus has conquered death and through Him we can live eternally with Him. The way He intended it from the very beginning.