Misconception #2: You Can Earn Your Way to Heaven through Good Deeds

When I was in about 7^th grade, I remember hearing an interview with Megadeth lead singer, Dave Mustaine, on one of the local radio stations. How the interview went where it did, I have no idea, but somewhere in the midst of talking about guitars, tours, and long hair, Mustaine ended up on a tangent about how if you were a basically good person, that would “get you into” Heaven.

I was no theologian at the time (I’m still not, to be fair) but I remember emphatically agreeing with Mustaine’s beliefs and wasn’t afraid to tell my Bible-believing mother about it!

While I don’t think most people are getting their doctrinal views from a washed-up heavy metal star, this idea of being a good person as your ticket into Heaven is one which permeates American culture. According to a Barna study in 2009, 72% of Americans believe that it is at least possible to earn one’s salvation through good works, and even more disturbing is that over 50% of “born again Christians” also leave that possibility open.

Out of all of the misconceptions about Christianity that exist, perhaps none are more dangerous than this one, and anyone that has ever read and understood even a part of the Bible can tell you that you won’t find this type of theology anywhere in the Bible. Not the Old Testament, not the New Testament. Nowhere.

So where does this idea come from?

When I look back on why I believed this kind of theology when I was younger, I think it’s because I was raised in a Christian family and in a Christian culture and was very used to the idea of a God who created the universe. That much I firmly believed.

But having never read a lick of the Bible and having no Biblical foundation surrounding Heaven and Hell on which to fall back on, I had constructed my own view and my own religion based on what I wanted to be true, not on truth itself.

There are both logical and Biblical issues with the idea that you can earn your way to Heaven through good deeds.

Here are a few of the logical ones:

-Who decides the standard for a “good” person? What if you get to the “gates of Heaven” so to speak, God runs his report card on you, and you score a 78. The cut-off was an 80. This would be incredibly subjective.

-Who says our “goodness” would be judged in relation to other human beings? Maybe God’s standard is higher than our traffic laws. God doesn’t grade on a bell curve, and this kind of test is impossibly hard. There’s no grading on a curve when it comes to eternity.

-Enough good works don’t necessarily cancel out all the bad ones. If we can “earn” Heaven by our good deeds, what do we earn with our bad ones?

Hopefully you’re starting to see the problems with this and we haven’t even touched what the Bible has to say. Let’s jump in.

Most of us probably think that we’re pretty good people. Besides, we don’t really break any laws (besides speeding of course…and maybe pirating movies, music, or software).

But Scripture says that we all have sin in our lives, or more simply put, that we miss the mark of God’s standard and fall short of His perfection. This could be something that we do like stealing from our neighbor or lashing out in anger at our spouse, but it could also be the lust, pride, violence, or greed that’s in our hearts.

I’d like to think that I’m a better person than 7 years ago when I became a Christian, yet I know that my own mind and heart is twisted and messed up. If people really knew the real me and could see the things in my heart, no one would want to be near me.

The Bible puts it this way. “We're all sin-infected, sin-contaminated.
Our best efforts are grease-stained rags.
We dry up like autumn leaves--
sin-dried, we're blown off by the wind.” (Isaiah 64:6, The Message)

Grease-stained rags. Our best attempts at doing good are like filthy rags compared to God’s perfection and standard. This means that there is absolutely no earning our own way to God and to Heaven, even through our best efforts.

In fact, though many of us never consider the consequences of our sin and pridefully think that we’re both good enough to white out our mistakes and earn our own salvation, the Bible says that there are very real, devastating consequences to our sin. In Romans 6:23, the Apostle Paul says, “The wages of sin is death.”

This is not good news. Not good news at all. But there is good news – great news, and it comes in the person of Jesus Christ.

Paul continues, “The wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Jesus Christ our Lord.”

We have no way of dealing with the problem of sin on our own, but lucky for us, God came down to us in the form of a man, Jesus Christ, to rescue us from our sin and to take on His shoulders the consequences of our sin that we should have been responsible for. Three days after He was killed, He rose from the dead and appeared to His disciples and hundreds of other people.

This is all free. We’ve done nothing to earn it and never will. It’s called grace.

The Bible makes it pretty clear that it’s only through faith in Jesus and the work that He did on the Cross that we are able to be forgiven of our sins and have access to God and to Heaven[1]. “I do not set aside the grace of God, for if righteousness could be gained through [good works], Christ died for nothing!” (Galatians 2:21, NIV, translation changes mine)

The tragedy in all of this is that there will be a lot of “nice” people that missed the point and pursued earning their salvation through their own efforts when eternal life and the offer of a relationship with the all-powerful, Creator God was available to them at absolutely no cost.

So who’s responsible for your sin? Is it you? Or have you allowed God to pay for it through the death of his Son, Jesus Christ?

The offer of His free and abounding love and grace is yours for the taking. Take it.

-CK

Recommended Reading –

Book: What’s So Amazing About Grace, Philip Yancey

Scripture: Ephesians 2

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[1] It may be more appropriate to call it eternal life instead of Heaven. (See future post on misconceptions about Heaven.)

Misconception #1: Christianity is about following a list of rules

If I had a dollar for every person I’ve encountered that has essentially summed up what it means to be a Christian by something similar to these words, I would have a lot of dollars.

The reason I start with this misconception is because everything that will follow is more or less meaningless unless we can clear up this point and everything else will depend upon what will come in the next page or two being true or you can do away with Christianity altogether.

I can certainly see how people outside of the Christian religion and even those exploring it might think that being a Christian is all about doing the right things and avoiding the wrong things. Many churches are certainly guilty of furthering this and often times conveying that morals and ethics are more important than people and what’s at the heart of Biblical Christianity.

It seems that the belief that Christianity is all about following a list of rules is a direct result of people not correctly understanding who Jesus is and what He came to do. Many people throughout history, even well meaning Christians, have believed that Jesus came to be a moral example that we should try to imitate. He gives us rules and guidelines by which we should live, we follow them.

This view of Jesus, however, is wrong. You can’t get more than a chapter into the Gospel of Mark without realizing that Jesus had a much different agenda than this.

Others perhaps believe that Jesus was simply crazy, or a liar. Even many of the Jews during Jesus’ time believed this. Someone claiming to be not just a prophet but actually divine, actually God, had gone completely mad. The Jews were expecting a Messiah, but that didn’t mean someone claiming to be God.

But something happened that would put an end to the debate and validate every claim that Jesus had ever made about Himself, and this is what Christianity is all about.

A hill on the outskirts of town, a cross, and an empty tomb.

Christianity centers on an historical event – the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

That people were unable to follow the rules wasn’t really the problem. Many people in Jesus’ day were great at following rules. They were so good, in fact, that they thought they would add some extra rules that weren’t even in the Bible. Yet it’s these very people, the Pharisees, that Jesus often rails against during his short ministry, not the rule-breaking Pagans.

Many Jews followed the rules as closely as possible, yet they missed the whole point.

The Jews and the country of Israel were supposed to bring peace and justice, renewal and the coming of God’s Kingdom, all of which would only be possible through a community that was deeply in love with their God.

This didn’t happen, so God decided to intervene in a way that no one would have ever imagined.

God, in the form of a man, Jesus Christ, came down to us, not so that we might imitate his every move and strive for perfection, but to reveal what the Father’s character, coming Kingdom, and future looked like. He came to renew and restore all things, including humans, both physically and in their relationship to the Father.

Jesus’ ministry and His death on the Cross demonstrated all of this. The poor, lame, and lost were shown love and justice in a way that Israel was supposed to do, and Jesus humbled Himself and allowed Himself to be crucified, bearing on His shoulders the weight of the world’s sin so that we would not have to bear it ourselves.

Yet all men die. What was different about this one was that, three days later, Jesus rose from the dead, substantiating His claim to be God and defeating death forever.

And when Jesus was resurrected, something which no one, even his closest followers would have foreseen happening in the way that it did, God’s Heavenly sphere and our Earthly, human sphere intersected for the first time, and once and for all. With the resurrection came God’s inauguration of His coming Kingdom where there would be peace, justice, love, joy, and the absence of everything evil.

I’ll leave you with how scholar N.T. Wright sums up what happened on the Cross:

The pain and tears of all the years were met together on Calvary. The sorrow of heaven joined with the anguish of earth; the forgiving love stored up in God’s future was poured out into the present; the voices that echo in a million human hearts, crying for justice, longing for spirituality, eager for relationship, yearning for beauty, drew themselves together into a final scream of desolation.

The death of Jesus of Nazareth as the king of the Jews, the bearer of Israel’s destiny, the fulfillment of God’s promises to his people of old, is either the most stupid, senseless waste and misunderstanding the world has ever seen, or it is the fulcrum around which world history turns.

Christianity is based on the belief that it was and is the latter. (Wright, Simply Christian)

-CK

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“So What!?”

If this is new to you, maybe you’re wondering where to go from here. The point is that in some ways, Christianity isn’t about following rules or even a Man at all, but about letting that man, Jesus, guide our lives.

Through faith in Jesus and what He’s accomplished on the Cross, both in forgiving our sins and beginning to restore the whole world, including our relationships with the Father, we can know God in an intimate way, similar to how a husband knows his wife. In the context of that relationship, we allow God to lead and direct our lives in such a way that will continue to further the coming of God’s Kingdom, bringing peace, justice, beauty and love.

Watch for the next blog as I explore the misconception that “getting into Heaven” is about being a good person. I encourage you to dialogue with me and others about anything you might agree, disagree, or have questions or comments about.

Recommended reading –

Book: The King’s Cross, Timothy Keller

Scripture: Matthew 9:1-13, Colossians 1:15-23

Misconceptions about Christianity

Do Christians actually believe that’s true?

Where’s that in the Bible?

How can Christianity be relevant to me today?

What’s the big deal about this whole Christianity thing anyway?

Christianity and...

Politics, Science, Rules, Earth, Resurrection, Works, Evolution, Heaven, Republican, Bible, Eternity, Jesus.

If you’ve ever found yourself wondering about any of these things or have questions about Christianity in general, stay tuned.

In the next 10 blogs or so, I’m going to explore some of the things that everyone believes about Christianity but aren’t actually true. The intent behind writing about these misconceptions is to help clear the air a bit and provide an entry point for conversation into what Christianity is really about.

Ask me questions, ask other people questions, agree, disagree – but enter into the discussion.

As author and scholar N.T. Wright says,

“Faith can’t be forced, but unfaith can be challenged.”

May we all be challenged to set aside our preconceptions of what Christianity is and what it’s not and let truth lead where it will.

Let's get started.

-CK