A story is told of an angel who appeared to a man and granted him any single wish he desired. He thought for a long time, contemplating how he might use this fortunate event to gain a lifetime of wealth. He finally said, “Let me see tomorrow’s newspaper.” He imagined turning to the stock report and learning what stocks had gained a significant profit overnight. All he had to do was invest his life savings in those stocks and he would make a “killing.” The angel obliged, handing him the following day’s newspaper. As he turned the pages to find the stock market report, his eyes caught a glance of the obituaries. There was his name!
Few of us plan our days as if we are going to die tomorrow. We frequently joke about it, but we don’t take it seriously. Neither do we seriously consider what happens to us after death. We plan our retirement far more conscientiously than we do the “retirement” that follows our retirement. If we think about the afterlife at all, we assure ourselves that we are better than most others and deserve to be in heaven—if it exists.
I once sat on an airplane next to an older man with whom I struck up a conversation. Eventually our discussion led to spiritual things. “On a scale of 1 to 100,” I asked, “how sure are you that you are going to heaven?” With a certain confidence, he said, “Oh, 95 percent, I think.” It’s natural for us to place our confidence in our own goodness and rank ourselves as a viable candidate for heaven. After all, we think, there are so many other immoral, irreligious, and violent people around us, some even close friends. Compared to such less-than-admirable people, we come out ahead. God must “grade on a curve,” and that means I will be in heaven.
In conversations like the one I had with this older man, I rarely find anyone who is 100 percent confident about going to heaven. We would think that a 95 percent assurance—or better, a 99 percent assurance—is well worth the risk. But is it? Would you get on an airplane at Chicago’s O’Hare airport—most often ranked the busiest airport in the world—with that kind of risk? If there was a 99 percent chance that your plane would make it to its destination, and only a 1 percent chance it would crash and everyone on board would be killed, would you board that plane? Doesn’t that sound like a very good risk?
Statistics show that over 2,400 planes go in and out of O’Hare each day. If 99 percent of those flights arrived or departed safely, and only 1 percent actually crashed, then everyone on board twenty-four flights would die each day! Does that sound like good odds? Not really. So why would you or I ever trust our eternal destiny to 99 percent odds? I know I won’t. Jesus said that everyone who believes in him could be completely confident—100 percent confident—that they were bound for heaven. Now that is good odds!
There is one condition to get to heaven, and one condition only: to believe in Jesus as the one who can forgive your rebellion against God and take you to heaven when you die. We tend to look at people by their nationality, color of skin, background, talents, or any number of other things. But God looks at the world as two groups: those who believe in Jesus as their only hope for heaven, and those who do not.
It is surprising in our culture how loose we are with the word believe. We insist that we should just “believe,” giving no real content to what we should believe—just do it. But what good is a faith that has no object or content? It is a faith in the obscure, the indefinite, in nothingness. Others insist that we must just believe in ourselves. But no matter how much I believe in myself, I’m not going to dunk a basketball. I’m five feet six inches, and I can’t even touch the net when I jump for it.
The Bible, however, not only warns us against believing in ourselves—it also implies that we need to believe we are sinful, and that we frequently move away from God rather than toward him. The Old Testament prophet Jeremiah said, “The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure. Who can understand it?” (Jer. 17:9). Even when we participate in altruistic endeavors, we may deceive ourselves and do so to gain selfish recognition. The prophet Isaiah understood that when he wrote, “all our [self-]righteous acts are like filthy rags” (Isa. 64:6).
So the answer to the question, “Who goes to heaven?” is the one who believes in Jesus as the Savior and the Christ. Actually, heaven is yet future, when I die. I can’t go to heaven before then. But I can have eternal life the moment I believe. Jesus made this claim: “Very truly I tell you, whoever hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life and will not be judged but has crossed over from death to life” (John 5:24). He “has” eternal life, not he “will get” eternal life. So in some sense, heaven is here and now—internally, spiritually, personally—and coming later as well.
FOR FURTHER STUDY
John 3:18; 5:46–47; 6:40, 47; 8:24; 9:35–38; 20:29–31; Acts 16:31; Romans 1:16; Ephesians 2:8–9