by Ken Roebuck

Created on: February 08, 2009

At first blush you would think the answer of course is yes. After all if God expects us to be good and we do good, at least more good than bad, doesn't He have to let us into heaven? It almost goes without saying if we do more good than bad God will reward us with heaven. Isn't that what the church teaches? But before we get too far ahead of ourselves let's first define our terms: What do we mean by the concepts of "heaven" and "good"? Heaven can be thought of as the blissful eternal state of being in the presence of God. Heaven is not so much a place as it is a state of existence or being. Good, from which our word God is derived, can be thought as the state of being like God, in other words doing God's will. When we are doing God's will we are being good. Thus, "good" in relation to heaven has to be understood not from our human perspective but from God's perspective, His revelation. So with our terms defined it certainly is true that the good will go to heaven but the problem for us is that there is no one that is truly good at least not from God's perspective. Paul in Romans (3:10) says, "there is no one who is righteous, not even one." Given human history this would seem to indicate that heaven is and will be a very lonely place.

Now I can hear you vociferously protesting that NO you indeed ARE good and deserve to go to heaven. Sure we all do a lot of good things. We are descent members of society. We are helpful escorting old ladies across the street; we are patriotic paying our taxes; we are generous donating to good causes. However, despite all the good we do for others and society, Paul in Romans (3:23) tell us "for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God." God knows our true motivations and our deepest secrets; He knows what is in our heart; what we actually think; what we do when no one is around. If we are honest with ourselves we also know with a little introspection that we are indeed NOT good. After all as the cliche goes we are only human. As fallible humans we all do things we ought not and don't do things we ought. That by definition means morally we are NOT in fact good. We desire to be good; we desperately crave to be good but it seems no matter how hard we try to be good we fail and come up short of our expectations, our own ideals: that is our moral dilemma that is our common struggle that is the human condition.

With the question settled I could stop here but I am sure you want to know the rest of the story. You want to know

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