To God, the cutting words I let fly out of my mouth in an argument are as bad as molesting any child. There is no such thing as an excusable sin. Oh yes, we justify our sins all day long and expect God to judge us according to our internal motivations and the pressures we were under while we demand that He judge others harshly based only on their final actions. This is hardly Christlike. God knows that humans always have reasons for the things they do—reasons that make sense to them. The child molester keeps assaulting children for the same reason the caffeine addict keeps frequenting coffee shops: both are driven by strong internal hungers that they feel they cannot control. It’s easy enough for us to say “just stop” to the molester, but at the same time we refuse to “just stop” drinking caffeine or watching television because we secretly know we can’t. We’ve become slaves to our biological desires just as much as the molester has and we feed our addictions far more often than he does, yet we still argue that the molester is in a completely different category. This is hypocritical, self-serving judging that will not get us any nearer to Christ. To gain intimacy with God, we must learn to see sin and sinners from His perspective, and we won’t do this until we see Him as the ultimate cause of all pain.