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The Plan Of Salvation
How do you view the Bible? Do you at least view it as a reasonable book or do you just dismiss it out of hand? If your personal view of the Bible is that in some sense it gives us information about the reality of God and of heaven then you are in good company.
How do you view the Bible? Do you at least view it as a reasonable book or do you just dismiss it out of hand? If your personal view of the Bible is that in some sense it gives us information about the reality of God and of heaven then you are in good company.
Having this as your context, that in a broad sense you believe in the God of the Bible and that heaven is real then you must have given some thought as to who goes to heaven when they die.
The majority opinion in the world is that since God is love that all good people when they die will go to heaven. The problem comes when we tried to define what is good. How can you defend the fact that you are a good person?
Many people think of themselves as good people because they compare themselves to friends and coworkers and family members. And, let’s be honest, compared to many of them you really are a relatively good person.
If that is your basis for defining a good person you unfortunately are using faulty reasoning. The fact is that God says in order to qualify as a good person that the only one that we can measure our lives against is him. So when you compare your life to God who is perfect, suddenly you don’t come off as being such a good person.
Naturally you want evidence to back this up and we don’t have to go any further than just looking briefly at the 10 Commandments. God wants us to have a clearer picture of how far we really are from being good people. Within society we are probably good people compared to others but the absolute of the 10 Commandments makes it clear to all of us that we do not measure up.
We know that we only need to see one white crow to know that all crows are not black. In the same way we only have to violate one of the 10 Commandments one time to know that we are not perfect. Few of us need to go any deeper into the 10 Commandments then two of them to realize that because we have told lies we are liars and because we have stolen things no matter how small, that we are thieves and do not measure up to God’s gold standard.
God’s desire for us is to measure ourselves against the 10 Commandments so that we can see clearly how far from him we are. His intention is that once we see ourselves for what we truly are that we will sincerely apologize to him, a sincere apology naturally involves a change of actions and that we would ask for his forgiveness in Christ. Obviously this is a deep subject and there is a lot more that can be said about it.