When I was in high school, I had an English teacher who gave what seemed to me to be tricky test questions. She wanted the best answer among several answers that were technically all correct. Well, “How good must a person be to get to heaven?” is a question like that. It has two answers. The first answer is the negative, the bad news: no one, not even the very best of us, is good enough to get to heaven.
The Bible is clear that we have all failed God extensively, multiple times. We have repeatedly violated his holy standards, purposefully making self-centered, egocentric choices in what we say and how we live. The apostle Paul in his letter to the Roman Christians repeats numerous times that everyone has committed heinous acts and spoken slanderous words that show how evil we are. “There is no one who is righteous, no one who is wise or who worships God. All have turned away from God; they have all gone wrong; no one does what is right, not even one” (Rom. 3:10–12 TEV). Next Paul highlights how our speech shows this to be true. “Their words are full of deadly deceit; wicked lies roll off their tongues, and dangerous threats, like snake’s poison, from their lips; their speech is filled with bitter curses” (Rom. 3:13–14 TEV). The only exception to Paul’s universal outlook of people is Jesus. He alone was righteous and without sin (see Heb. 4:15).
But there is another answer to this question. It is this: One has to be as good as Jesus to get to heaven. That doesn’t sound like good news, but it is. Let me explain. God doesn’t grade on a curve. Even the one who gets a 99 percent score on goodness doesn’t get into heaven. Sin is like a cancer. One percent cancer in a vital organ of your body is still a body that is radically unhealthy. And 1 percent sinfulness in a person (if that minimum were even possible!) still makes for an ungodly person. Sin is an addiction, so we do it repeatedly. So how does anyone get as good as Jesus?
The answer is that God declares us to be righteous—just as righteous as Jesus is—when we believe that Jesus is the only one who can forgive us and wipe our slate clean. Like a heavenly bank account that we have far overdrawn, God both cancels our debt (forgiveness) and then deposits a huge payment (justification and eternal life). By placing our faith in Jesus as the only one who can forgive our sin, God looks at us the way he looks at his Son: fully and perfectly Righteous (with a capital R).
Doing good works has nothing to do with getting to heaven. Good works are to be done by the Christian in gratitude that he has already been given eternal life, not in order to get it. Paul said he no longer has “a righteousness of my own from the law, but one that is through faith in Christ—the righteousness from God based on faith” (Phil. 3:9 HCSB). In fact, in order to believe in Jesus Christ in the way Paul describes it (“to the one who does not work,” Rom. 4:5), we must abandon all hope of any part of our goodness as contributing in even the smallest way to what Jesus has done for us in his death on the cross and in his resurrection.
If you wanted to become a billionaire but were already in debt by billions of dollars, you would first need to pay off your debt. Then you would need to earn or gain a great amount of wealth. That’s what Jesus did for us. First, he paid off our sin debt that was billions in the red with God. But even though that debt was canceled, we still had no wealth or assets. So by faith in Jesus, he put billions into our account. He gives us a righteousness placed in our heavenly bank account that makes us acceptable to God. But what kind of person does God do this for? It is not the person who is good or holy but the ungodly person. Part of believing in Jesus as the only one who can get us to heaven is seeing ourselves as “ungodly.” Do you see yourself that way?
Forgiving our sins is certainly part of God’s plan to get us to heaven. But it is only part. To “justify” us, God adds something to us. He adds his righteousness to us, declaring us to be completely good in his sight. Receiving God’s righteousness also means that we have eternal life. Eternal life is something that we have in the future, but it is also something that we get here and now. It is sometimes difficult for us to understand that eternal life is received as a free gift in this life when we come to faith in Jesus Christ. Someone has said, “Eternal life does not begin with death, it begins with faith.”
Jesus said something very similar: “The one who believes in the Son has [right now] eternal life” (John 3:36 HCSB). Eternal life is the present possession of the one who believes, not just a future anticipation. Justification and eternal life come as one package. The one who has eternal life and justification will one day live with Jesus and God forever on the new earth.
Eternal life and justification (being declared righteous even though we aren’t fully righteous while on earth) is a free gift. It is not something we get by changing our life or doing good deeds to help others. The Bible makes this clear, even though so many people have twisted the Bible on this subject. Many verses in the New Testament make it clear that acts of kindness do not get us to heaven.
Paul said it over and over again. One expanded Bible translation of Ephesians 2:8–9 says this:
For it is by free grace (God’s unmerited favor) that you are saved (delivered from judgment and made partakers of Christ’s salvation) through [your] faith. And this [salvation] is not of yourselves [of your own doing, it came not through your own striving], but it is the gift of God; Not because of works [not the fulfillment of the Law’s demands], lest any man should boast. [It is not the result of what anyone can possibly do, so no one can pride himself in it or take glory to himself]. (AMP)
The book of Revelation closes out the Bible. Two clear statements about the free gift of life appear in its last two chapters. It is as if God were making a final appeal to everyone to receive Jesus who alone can give the never-ending satisfaction of eternal “water” to the spiritually thirsty person. In the first verse, Jesus himself is talking from heaven. “It is done! I am the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the End. I will give water as a gift to the thirsty from the spring of life” (Rev. 21:6 HCSB). John is the writer in this last remark. “And let the one who is thirsty come; let the one who wants it take the water of life free of charge” (Rev. 22:17 NET).
The message of the New Testament is that God sent his own Son to earth to take on a human body and human nature. The plan was to rescue all humans by punishing his sinless Son, Jesus, on a Roman cross, an ancient method of capital punishment. Jesus was a substitute sacrifice for all people who have ever lived—his undeserved punishment for our deserved punishment. God requires only that one believe in Jesus as the one sent from the Father in heaven as a sacrifice on your behalf.
John 3:16 is probably the most famous verse in the Bible. It tells the good news of eternal life in one sentence. “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.”
FOR FURTHER STUDY
Isaiah 55:6–7; John 1:12–13; 6:35; 10:7–9; Romans 4:5; 6:23; Ephesians 2:1–10