When I was in about 7th 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
[1] It may be more appropriate to call it eternal life instead of Heaven. (See future post on misconceptions about Heaven.)
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