“Thank you...” Words I love to hear. They were from a college student who had just survived tremendous pressure to abandon her belief in God. A college professor and class mates pressed her hard to question the reality of Christ but she was able to answer each question and objection thrown at her. Why? She had asked me those same questions years before in High School.
The number one question she asked as a teenager and her college class mates asked was this: “Why wouldn’t a good person go to heaven?”
Although I can answer this question, I have gone deeper into my own understanding of the crisis of faith in America because of what the question reveals about the person asking. Anyone who asks this question is a religious person, but not a born again Christian. Many people who claim to be Christian are asking this question, but if they really understood the truth about Christ, they wouldn’t ask.
Answer: “There are no good people. Only sinners go to hell, and we are all sinners.”
Christianity can not make sense to anyone who believes that good people are rewarded with heaven and bad people with hell. We will look for God to punish the wicked here and reward the good if we believe that is how the justice of God is dispensed.
In my last Blog I shared William Lobdells’ story in the L.A. times and his crisis of faith. The key question he is asking, the turning point of his faith, is this question. This is the crisis of a religious person realizing that it doesn’t work with a Christian God. Here is the quote from his article:
The questions that I thought I had come to peace with started to bubble up again. Why do bad things happen to good people? Why does God get credit for answered prayers but no blame for unanswered ones? Why do we believe in the miraculous healing power of God when he's never been able to regenerate a limb or heal a severed spinal chord?
In one e-mail, I asked John (a pastor), who had lost a daughter to cancer, why an atheist businessman prospers and the child of devout Christian parents dies. Why would a loving God make this impossible for us to understand?
The answer he got back, the one he heard, was: "My ultimate affirmation is let God be God and acknowledge that He is in charge. He knows what I don't know.” William respects this pastor but says “...but he couldn't reach me.”
This question is ancient. I remember seminary professors telling me it was not answerable. They were wrong. The bible is very clear about this question. Evil, suffering, and death is in this world because of sin, the fall of humanity. In the New Testament we are told...
for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God,
Romans 3:23
Therefore, just as sin entered the world through one man, and death through sin, and in this way death came to all men, because all sinned—
Romans 5:12
If you can accept this premise, that everyone is guilty of sin, then the answer to the question is that none of us can get into heaven by trying to be good, because we will never be good enough. We are all sinners.
If you can’t accept that we are all sinners, but believe instead that some are good and some bad, then you are a religious person who cannot accept the message of Jesus Christ. The Christian faith does not make sense to a person who demands a sorting out of the good and bad people of this world.
Some of you are scratching your heads wondering if you ever really understood the Christian faith. Good. Let help you. You may have thought that Christ rewards the good and punishes the evil and when life turns out very different a crisis faith results. The truth that Christ came to bring us is this:
We are all sinners and Christ came to pay the cost of our sin. We are saved from the judgment of sin not because we are good but because Jesus (the only good person to walk this earth) paid the price for us.
All religions of the world argue that we must work at being good and earn our way into heaven. People who are not good enough are sent to a judgment and those who did their homework get into heaven. We expect a loving God to treat us that way now while we are on earth. The Christian faith has always taught that it is only by the grace of Christ, not by your good works, that you enter heaven, because no one is good enough.
Conviction of our sinful heart is the starting point of a saving faith. You can’t skip this and think that a life with Christ will work for you, because it won’t. His death on the cross is an answer to the sinfulness of all, but if we are not asking the question, “How can I a sinner be right with God?” this his death is useless and meaningless.
The Bible says that there is no true salvation without a true repentance. Their can be no true repentance with out a God inspired conviction (Psalm 51).
I will stop here and ask you to consider these words. They are not mine. I am only sharing what God has shown us in the Bible. If you want to disagree I am not insulted for I am not defending my opinion. I am only being true to the teachings of Jesus Christ.
So this leads to the important question: Are you Christian or religious?
