God’s Bell Curve

The world came to an end on December 21^st, 2012.

At least it was supposed to.  Once again, we avoided a long-prophesied disaster!  How do we keep doing it?  There are tons of doomsday prophecies out there, but this one got some serious attention.  They even made a movie about it.  According to the legend, December 21^st, 2012 coincided with the end of the Mayan calendar which was going to trigger a massive apocalypse.  Many different theories emerged about how that was going to happen.  Some believed the gravitational effects of an alignment between the Sun and a massive super black hole would rip the earth apart.  Some believed the Earth’s magnetic poles would suddenly be reversed, releasing energy equal to 100 billion atomic bombs.  And some believed the mysterious planet Nibiru would come crashing into our planet.[1]  Needless to say, none of those things happened.  “End of the world” hypotheses are a dime a dozen.  Everyone from Pat Robertson to Pope Innocent III back in 1284 has predicted the Earth’s demise. Even Sir Isaac Newton, the gravity guy, predicted the end of the Earth in the year 2060.[2]  The end of the world has special significance for Christians because it’s linked to the return of Christ.  Some believe prior to Jesus’ return, God’s chosen people will be taken up to Heaven in an event called the Rapture where literally people will simply disappear.  There was even a service that would take care of your pets in case you were taken.  It was called Eternal Earthbound Pets USA and they were a group of loving atheists who, for the small fee of $135 dollars to cover travel costs, would take care of your pet in case of rapture.[3]  You know, in case God didn’t take pets. You could rest easy knowing your pet would be well taken care of by a loving atheist.[4]  Unfortunately, the business was a hoax.  But it does make us ponder the question “Where will you go and how do you know?[5]”

We don’t often like to think about death.

Maybe because we are afraid.  Maybe because we don’t have a lot of answers. And maybe because we are pretty confident about where we are headed.  According to an ABC News poll done in 2005, about 89% of people believe in Heaven and 85% of people believe they are going there.[6]  Why are they so sure?  It’s because we cling to the belief that good people go to Heaven and most of us believe we are good people.  And to be honest, it’s a premise that makes sense.  I mean if you live a good life and you do good things and we believe in a good God, then you’ve earned a good spot, right?  We tend to believe that rule applies to just about everyone, whether or not they are Christian.  We figure the answer to the question, “Where will you go and how do you know?” is pretty simple.  We’re going to heaven.  But maybe we shouldn’t be so confident in that assessment.

First of all, how good is good enough?

That’s the question Andy Stanley asks in his book of the same title.  How good is good enough?  What level do we need to achieve to make it into Heaven?  Believe it or not God doesn’t tell us.  You would think for something as important as this, God would have told somebody or written it down somewhere, but nowhere does God tell us what qualifies as “good enough.” In our heads we have a cosmic balance sheet going on with a running total of good things we’ve done and bad things we’ve done, and we feel that as long as we’re in the plus column, we’ll be okay.  But is that true?  I mean, what’s the percentage?  Do you have to be 51% good, you know just barely tip the scales in your favor?  Or is it higher, because on most tests 51% would be a failing grade. Is it 70%?  If you’re good 70% of the time do you pass? And if we’re all bad anyway, does God grade on a curve?  I mean maybe 70% is too hard for most of us to achieve. “Okay, everyone above this percentage, you all get in.  Sorry 59%.  The cut off was 60%.”  When you take a test at the DMV you know they’re not letting you behind the wheel with a score lower than 70% and considering how bad some drivers are on the road, maybe they should raise that score.  Seems 70% is too lax.  But at least you know.  Surely God is fairer than the DMV.  But he doesn’t tell us anywhere how “good” we have to be.

Some would argue God gives us an internal barometer of right and wrong.

We seem to instinctively know what is good and what is bad.  But how reliable is that barometer?  Some things are obvious. Everyone knows it’s wrong to cheat, steal, lie, and kill.  But is that an all-encompassing rule?  We tell “white lies” to save someone’s feelings.  We kill animals for food but which animals are okay to kill and which are not varies from culture to culture.  And these concepts of right and wrong change not just between different cultures, but over time.  We’ve labeled everything from being a woman, to being dark-skinned, to being left-handed as bad, evil, or wrong at some point. In the 2000 years Christianity has been around it was only in the last 50 interracial marriage became widely acceptable, and still there are hold outs who haven’t come around.  When I was living in Georgia, my friend Jon mentioned he didn’t go to church anymore and it was the “anymore” that caught my attention.  I asked him about it and he looked at me, pointed to a mixed race couple sitting a few tables away from us and said, “If they walked into your church and asked you to marry them, what would you say?”  I told him, “I’d say that was fine.  Why wouldn’t I?”  But I already suspected the answer.  He told me a friend of his who was black wanted to marry a woman who was white.  When they went to her pastor to ask him to perform the ceremony, he told her he wouldn’t do it because it was “an abomination in God’s eyes.”  Jon said, “And after that, I wouldn’t step foot in a church.”  What we believe is right and wrong isn’t even consistent within cultures let alone between cultures or across time.  So how reliable is our internal barometer?

You might say, “Well, at least we can rely on the Bible to tell us what God considers good.”

But let’s look at what God says about us and about his standard of being good.  In his letter to the Romans, Paul addresses a perception among the Jewish Christians that they are somehow a step up or more advantaged than the Gentiles because of their heritage and Paul brings them back down to Earth.  He tells them because they ARE Jewish not only do they not have a step up, but they have a greater responsibility toward the law than the Gentiles do.  He tells them that just because by birth they are part of God’s chosen people does not make them any different than the Gentiles who have accepted Christ as their savior because both are equally unrighteous.  And that’s where we pick up in our reading today. 

What shall we conclude then? Do we have any advantage? Not at all! For we have already made the charge that Jews and Gentiles alike are all under the power of sin. ¹⁰ As it is written:

“There is no one righteous, not even one; there is no one who understands; there is no one who seeks God. ¹² All have turned away, they have together become worthless; there is no one who does good, not even one.”
¹³ “Their throats are open graves; their tongues practice deceit.”
“The poison of vipers is on their lips.”
¹⁴     “Their mouths are full of cursing and bitterness.”
¹⁵ “Their feet are swift to shed blood; ruin and misery mark their ways, and the way of peace they do not know.”
¹⁸     “There is no fear of God before their eyes.” – Romans 3:9-18

There is no one righteous.  Not even one.

Not Jewish or Roman or Greek. Not Mother Theresa.  Not Billy Graham.  Not the Pope.  Paul is trying to impress upon us we are flawed.  None of us can escape the fact we are sinners.  At one time or another each of us has done something that would disappoint God and that something drives a wedge between us and God.  You might think, “Yeah, but I’ve never done anything THAT bad.  Sure I might not be perfect, but it’s not like I’m a killer or anything.”  But that is God’s standard.  Perfection.  Jesus tells us himself in the Sermon on the Mount.  He tells the crowds, “Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect (Matthew 5:48).”  That’s why no one can live up to the standard that good people go to Heaven because the standard is just too tough. 

So how do we know?

How do we know how good is good enough?  If we can’t tell from God’s word, if we can’t use our own internal compass or barometer, and if we can’t even use the Bible, then how do we know how good is good enough?  And that’s what God is challenging us to think about today.  Despite all the predictions, the world isn’t likely to end any time soon, but we should still keep in mind those two eternal questions – where do you go and how do you know?  As we talked about today, the assumption good people go to heaven is riddled with difficulty.  So, what can we believe in then?  Here’s something else Andy Stanley wrote, “Good people don’t go to Heaven. Forgiven people do.”  We’ll talk more about that next week.  But for today, let us come to the realization no matter how “good” we are, we are not perfect. We all need forgiveness. Thankfully we worship a forgiving God who gives us hope in Christ for something more than this life. 

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[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_phenomenon#Planet_X.2FNibiru

[2] https://isaac-newton.org/statement-on-the-date-2060/

[3] http://eternal-earthbound-pets.com/

[4] Unfortunately, they didn’t get enough business and had to close up shop.  

[5] I’m pretty sure I heard Andy Stanley share this phrase either in his sermon or his book How Good Is Good Enough?

[6] http://abcnews.go.com/US/Beliefs/story?id=1422658