Over sixty years and sixty pounds ago, I was typically the fastest guy in my school. In the city, there was only one other sprinter my age that was competitive with me in the hundred. We ran against each other frequently and it was always close. We began to develop a friendship because we knew we were the best. One spring afternoon we had a track meet that was open to some of the smaller rural schools in the Texas panhandle. I still remember lining up with eight of us in the blocks. My friend was two lanes to my left. The only question would be which of us would win that day as we showed the country boys how we ran in the city.
The gun sounded, we leaped from the starting blocks and as we crossed the finish line we both looked each other in the eyes as we humbly tied for last place. The country boys had smoked us…not by inches but by feet. We both recognized at the same time what had happened and could only laugh. We spent the rest of the afternoon in the stands licking our wounds. Here was the thing…we had measured ourselves against the track teams in our city and grade level and assumed every other track team in the country was like those we competed against each week. We had a false measure of comparison. It cost us a race.
From time to time, I visit with people who have a problem with God. They get how he might send really wicked people to hell, but cannot accept a God who would send “good people” to torment simply because they had not accepted Jesus. I think that issue is worth a response.
In the first place, God is not sending them to hell, but is feverishly trying to rescue them from the hell they are sending themselves to. Our problem is, like my friend and I, a false measure of comparison. We measure the righteousness of men against the righteousness of men rather than the righteousness of God.
We look at an Adolph Hitler or a Jeffrey Dahmer and determine that they were evil and deserve some form of extreme punishment. But then we look at our neighbors who work hard, pay their bills, go to the lake every weekend with their family, and volunteer to coach little league. These are “good people.” They give little thought to God and do not follow Jesus, but they are “good people.” We make that comparison on the basis of the other people we know who live in this very perverse world.
In doing so, we assume God grades on the curve and if you are in the top 30-40 %, you get in. But that is not how it works. The standard for righteousness is God’s holiness not ours and he is a God who dwells in unapproachable light. The judgment of heaven is that all have fallen short of the glory of God and that there is none righteous, no not one (Romans 3:10). In fact, Isaiah declares, “How then can we be saved? All of us have become like one who is unclean, and all our righteous acts are like filthy rags” (Isa. 64:5-6).
Isaiah is pointing out, that based on our own righteous acts none of us can come into the presence of God because the best that the best of us can do is like filthy rags (the rags women sat on during their menstrual cycle in the days of Isaiah) compared to God’s holiness. Isaiah should know because, even though he was a great man of God, he was overwhelmed with is own sense of sinfulness when he received a vision of God. He cried out, “Woe to me!” I cried. “I am ruined! For I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips, and my eyes have seen the King, the Lord Almighty” (Isa. 6:4-5). The word translated as “ruined” here means destroyed, devastated, or to cease. When Isaiah saw the Lord high and lifted up, he thought he was going to die because of his own sense of unworthiness and sinfulness compared to the holiness of God. Likewise, Ezekiel, Daniel and other prophets found themselves face down, unable to move or even breath when they encountered the holiness of God or even his representatives.
The point is that none of us are “good people” by the standards of heaven. We have just lived in the swamp so long we no longer smell or notice the decay all around us. Some parts stink less than others, but every part stinks. Even people who look good on the outside have all kinds of ungodliness on the inside and God judges not only our actions but our hearts and thoughts as well. Even the best of us have pockets of pride, lustful thoughts, judgmental hearts, selfish ambitions, jealousy, envy, unforgiveness, lies, and self-justifications. It is our fallen nature. So, by heaven’s standards of goodness and righteousness, none of us are “good people.”
But God, knowing that none of us could stand in his presence on the basis of our own righteousness, provided a righteousness by faith through Jesus Christ who became sin for us that we might be the righteousness of God in Christ Jesus (2 Cor. 5:21). By our own sin we condemned ourselves to hell, but God in his righteousness and love provided a way of escape, a rescue plan for those who would acknowledge that at their best they fall short, but who trust God to make a way through his Son.
Our own rebellion has condemned us. God has gone to extreme lengths to save us from our own wickedness. Our problem is we don’t know wickedness when we see it because we have never seen true holiness. And yet the grace of God is abundant and he has no desire to see anyone cast into hell. He declares, “Do I take any pleasure in the death of the wicked? declares the Sovereign Lord. Rather, am I not pleased when they turn from their ways and live? (Ezek.18:23). God is not the bad guy in this equation…Satan is. We need to remember the extent to which God has gone to save us from ourselves. For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son (Jn.3:16). There are no “good people” by heaven’s standards, but there is certainly a good God.