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.

Since you do believe that the Bible is reasonably accurate and there is someone that is God and Heaven is real you must have your opinions about who goes to heaven when they die.

Most people simply believe that since God is the God of love that naturally if you're a good person you will go to heaven when you die. The only problem comes when we try to define how to recognize a good person.

A lot of people consider themselves to be good people because they compare themselves to the evil people that they see on television and read about in the newspapers and on the Internet. And, really, compared to those evil people most people in the world would be considered good people.

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.

Considering that we are all human beings and have our weaknesses it is certainly more than reasonable to assume that all of us have told at least one lie in the course of our lifetime and have stolen at least one thing, no matter how small that thing was, we are suddenly, according to the 10 Commandments, liars and thieves and worse.

God simply wants us to realize that we are far from meeting his absolute standard of goodness. He shows us this in love knowing that many of us, once we see ourselves as God sees us, will truly be sorry and come to him with an apology. In that sincere apology, naturally there will also be as with any apology a change in our actions. And as part of any sincere apology we always also ask for forgiveness. When we ask for that forgiveness in the name of Jesus the Christ you will not only be forgiven but the penalty for the sins will also be erased. Of course, this is only scratching the surface of this issue there is much more that can be written about it.

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