If you died tonight …

On my mind at the moment is a question that Christian writer and speaker Mark Cahill likes to ask the people he meets every day: If you died tonight, are you 100% certain that you would go to Heaven?

If this is not a question that you’ve ever thought about, don’t you think it’s a good idea to take some time to think about it?

[I finished reading two of Mark Cahill's books recently - One Thing You Can't Do in Heaven and One Heartbeat Away. Both of them made such an impact on me, and much of today's post is based on what I read in those two books.]

Most of us spend most of our lives trying to make sure that we provide for ourselves and our families the best we can in this life. But think about it: we’re only here on earth for a few years. After that comes eternity. What then? If you died tonight, are you 100% certain that you would go to Heaven? 

‘Eternity’ is longer than a hundred years. It’s longer than three hundred years. It’s longer than a thousand years. It’s longer than five hundred thousand years. It’s a longer time than most of our minds can process. If we work so hard to make sure that we’re okay for the 70, 80, 90  years we have in this life, isn’t it a good idea to make sure that we’re okay for all eternity? Isn’t it a good idea to make sure that the people we love will be okay for all eternity?

Well, assuming that people want to go to Heaven (and not its alternative, Hell), the next question is: What gets someone into Heaven?

In his books One Heartbeat Away and One Thing You Can’t Do in Heaven, Mark Cahill reports asking various people why they felt they would go to Heaven after they died, and one of the most common responses given by people was that they felt they had generally been ‘a good person’.

But what counts as ‘good’? Whose definition of ‘good’ will be used when we stand at the gates of Heaven? Well, Heaven is God’s domain, so we shouldn’t be surprised that His standard of ‘good’ is going to be used.

In the Old Testament of the Bible, we read about the Law that God gave to His people. Most people these days have heard something about this. This is known to many of us as ‘the Ten Commandments’. They are found in Exodus 20:1-17. I will number the following so it’s clear that there were ten: (These words were spoken by God)

 

1. “You shall have no other gods before me.” (Exodus 20:3)
2. “You shall not make for yourself an idol in the form of anything in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the waters below. You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I, the LORD your God, am a jealous God, punishing the children for the sin of the fathers to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me, but showing love to a thousand generations of those who love me and keep my commandments.” (Exodus 20:4-6)
3. “You shall not misuse the name of the LORD your God, for the LORD will not hold anyone guiltless who misuses his name.” (Exodus 20:7)
4. “Remember the Sabbath day by keeping it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the LORD your God. On it you shall not do any work, neither you, nor your son or daughter, nor your manservant or maidservant, nor your animals, nor the alien within your gates. For in six days the LORD made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but he rested on the seventh day. Therefore the LORD blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy.” (Exodus 20:8-11)
5. “Honor your father and your mother, so that you may live long in the land the LORD your God is giving you.” (Exodus 20:12)
6. “You shall not murder.” (Exodus 20:13)
7. “You shall not commit adultery.” (Exodus 20:14)
8. “You shall not steal.” (Exodus 20:15)
9. “You shall not give false testimony against your neighbor.” (Exodus 20:16)
10. “You shall not covet your neighbor’s house. You shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, or his manservant or maidservant, his ox or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbor.’” (Exodus 20:17)

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This is God’s Law. How would you fare if this is the standard with which God judges the people who stand before Him? Here is how I would fare:

1. What does God mean when He says that we must not have any other ‘god’ before Him? He means that we are not to worship anything or anyone else aside from Him. If we do, that becomes a ‘god’ to us. Have I ever let my life, my decisions, my feelings of security, my every waking thought be dominated and dictated by something or someone else? Not for long periods of time, but for some period of time, yes, I’m afraid so. So, that’s one against me.
2. Idols refer first and foremost to physical and visible ‘aids’ that people create to worship God, e.g. a cross, a stained-glass image, statue, or picture of Jesus. It’s not wrong to have these things but to worship God through them is wrong. This, I have never done. But, idols are also anything that we focus all our attention on – e.g. our possessions, money, movie stars, food, boyfriends, TV, our jobs. If we value something in our lives to such an extent that it causes us to make decisions that do not please God, that something is an idol to us. For example, if we know that a particular TV programme is not pleasing to God, but we choose to continue watching it anyway because we like it, TV has become an idol. Have I had idols in my life? Yes. Can any of us honestly answer ‘no’? That’s two against me.
3. If we have ever uttered God’s name as a casual exclamation, or irreverently, or in any context other than as an address to the Lord God Himself, then we’ve “misused the name of the Lord”. Have I ever done it? I’m sorry to say it, but yes. It’s not part of my everyday speech, but even once is once too many. The Bible has a name for such people. It’s ‘blasphemer’. That’s three against me.
4. For years, I didn’t observe a Sabbath day. So that’s four against me. (Keeping the Sabbath – a day of rest focused on God – is something that I started doing very recently, because I’ve come to realise and appreciate that God’s original plan is always the best.)
5. Do I always honour my father and mother? Have I always? Unfortunately, no. Can any of us honestly say that we have never been angry with our parents, never gone against something they advised, never complained about them? So that’s five against me.
6. Well, I haven’t physically killed anyone. But the thing about God is that He doesn’t just look at our outward, visible actions. He looks also at the motivations and desires of our hearts. In Matthew 5:21-22, we read: “You have heard that it was said to the people long ago, ‘Do not murder, and anyone who murders will be subject to judgment.’ But I tell you that anyone who is angry with his brother will be subject to judgment” and in 1 John 3:15, we read, “Anyone who hates his brother is a murderer”. Have I ever been angry, furious, livid with someone? Do I even need to answer that? So that’s six against me.
7. Adultery. The world has various ways of defining this, and if we take the most all-encompassing definition, this would be ‘sex with a person one is not married to’. At this point, some people could be breathing a sigh of relief, thinking that here at last is one commandment they haven’t broken. But … as I said above, God doesn’t just look at our actions. He looks also at our hearts. Matthew 5:27-28 tells us that if we so much as look at someone lustfully, we have already committed adultery with that person in our hearts. So that’s seven against me, then.
8. Have I ever stolen anything? Yes. An little incident when I was in primary school springs to mind. Where are we now? Eight?
9. Number Nine has to do with lying. Can any of us say that we’ve always told the absolute truth? So that’s nine against me.
10. Coveting – wanting what someone else has that isn’t ours to have. The Bible in 1 Timothy 6:6 tells us that “Godliness with contentment is great gain”. Have I ever looked at someone else and wished that I had some thing, some position, or some attribute that they had which I don’t have? Not very often, but yes, sometimes. Let’s see. How many is that? That’s ten against me.

 

Some people might say, “Well, but it’s not as if I break these commandments all the time. I hardly ever do. Maybe once in a long time.” And some others might fare better than me and say, “Well, actually, I’ve only broken three of these commandments. I’m okay for the other seven.”

Here’s what the Bible says: “whoever keeps the whole law and yet stumbles at just one point is guilty of breaking all of it” (James 2:10).

The people who say that they think they’ll go to Heaven because they’re generally “a good person” are operating with the belief that God has a balancing scale, and that He piles their good deeds on one side and their bad deeds on the other, and if the good deeds outweigh the bad deeds, then they’re fine and will be let into Heaven. I’m afraid it doesn’t work that way. When it comes to entry into Heaven, there’s only SINLESS or SINFUL. There is no cline. Either we have no sin, or we have sin. Whether we have one sin in our lives or fifty sins or ten thousand sins, we fall into the SINFUL category. I think it’s pretty safe to say that all of us, myself included, fall into the SINFUL category.

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So what next then? Did God give us humans The Law just to make us strive all our lives to live up to some impossible standard, only to feel miserable because we’ll never be good enough?

No. The Bible tells us in Romans 3:20: “Therefore no one will be declared righteous in God’s sight by the works of the law; rather, through the law we become conscious of our sin.” And in Galatians 3:24, we read: “So the law was put in charge to lead us to Christ that we might be justified by faith.”

In other words, God gave us the Law so that mankind would realise that we have done wrong in God’s eyes (i.e. sinned), and that it is impossible and hopeless for us to try to “earn” a place in Heaven by doing “righteous” things. We will always fall short of God’s holy standard. Thus, we are all in the same boat. We all need a Saviour, someone to save us, or we will not be going anywhere near to Heaven. The Law, according to the Bible, was meant to lead us to Jesus Christ.

God knew that we would all fall short of His perfect standard. As the Holy God, He has to uphold justice and cannot change His standards of righteousness for individual people. Where a wrong has been done, the just thing to do would be to punish it. We would expect no less even from a human judge. The punishment for sin, according to the Bible, is death (i.e. eternal separation from God, i.e. not Heaven, but Hell for all eternity).

BUT … God loves us so much that He decided to provide a way for us to be saved, by sending His only Son, Jesus, to take on our punishment for us. In the book of John (the fourth book of the New Testament), it is said,

“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” (John 3:16).

Read that again: Whoever believes in Jesus shall not perish, but have eternal life.

[This does not, of course, mean that those who believe in Jesus will not pass away from this earth, but rather that after our physical deaths, we will live with God in His presence eternally.]

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How is this possible? To understand this, it may help to know that in the old days (before Jesus came to earth), priests used to have to sacrifice animals to God in order to atone for (i.e. make amends for) the sins of the people. God gave very specific instructions to His people detailing how the sacrifices should be done. But the people understood that the shedding of the animals’ blood was only an interim measure until the time when God would send His true “Messiah”. (“Messiah” means someone who comes to “redeem” the people, to “buy back” for God the human race who had no way of making their own way back into God’s Kingdom.) The animals, being from this world which was in essence already fallen and sinful, could never be the perfect substitute for human lives, and hence in the old days, the priests used to have to sacrifice animals at regular intervals, to atone again and again for the sins of the people.

But the perfect substitute came in the form of Jesus, God’s only Son.

The Bible tells us that Jesus was born into this earth in human form through the virgin Mary, that Jesus was “in very nature, God” (Philippians 2: 6), and that Jesus led a sinless life (1 John 3:5). He is referred to in the New Testament of the Bible as “the Lamb of God”, and He was, because of His sinless nature, an acceptable and total substitute for our lives.

When the right time came, Jesus allowed himself to be crucified (i.e. killed by being nailed to a cross). When Jesus died on the cross, He took the punishment for sin that should have been ours. And because Jesus was perfect, pure, and holy, this one-time sacrifice was enough to pay the price for our sin for all eternity. There is a line in the song “Before the throne of God above” which I love and which sums this up perfectly: “Because the sinless Saviour died, my sinful soul is counted free, for God (the Just) is satisfied to look on Him and pardon me.”  Because of His selfless act, Jesus made available a way for us to be reconciled to God. It does not matter who we are or what wrongs we have done. Jesus paid the price for our sin in full. 

“For Christ died for sins once for all, the righteous for the unrighteous, to bring you to God” (1 Peter 3:18).

It would not be possible for us to become ”righteous” in God’s eyes through our own efforts at keeping God’s Law. I think it’s obvious that no human being could possibly keep all of God’s Law. But we are told in Romans 3:22 that we are GIVEN a righteousness through faith in Jesus: “This righteousness is given through faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe.”

In other words, we cannot work to earn a place in Heaven. We have to accept it as a gift that is bestowed on us when we believe in Jesus Christ.

Jesus says:

“I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me” (John 14:6).

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Each and every person who (a) chooses to acknowledge that they have sinned against God, (b) chooses to repent of those sins (i.e. turn away from the wrongs they have done in the past), and (c) accepts that they need Jesus to be their Saviour in order to be reconciled with God, is saved.

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Although Jesus died for everyone in the whole world, WE must make the decision to accept Him before we can benefit from His sacrifice. This is like someone holding out a gift to us. It’s there. It’s on the table. But we don’t “have” the gift, unless we choose to accept it. John 3:17-18 says:

“For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him. Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe stands condemned already because he has not believed in the name of God’s one and only Son.” (John 3:17-18)

Elsewhere, the Bible also says,

“Yet to all who received him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God” (John 1:12).

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The Christian faith is unique in that the one who believes is saved and will go to heaven entirely through God’s grace. There is no person on earth who “deserves” salvation more than someone else, because there are no works that we can do to “earn” our salvation. Salvation is freely given to those who choose to trust in Jesus as their Saviour.

However, it should not therefore be mistaken that Christianity is cheap. Our lives were ransomed at a very high price – the life of Jesus, God’s son. And although Christians are not saved by what we do, genuine repentence (which is part of “accepting Jesus” or “becoming a Christian”) will result in a changed life, as the Holy Spirit, whom God places in our hearts when we believe in Him, gradually reveals to us (through our prayer and Bible study) how to grow into the person God wants us to be. Just as Jesus died on the cross with the sins of the world upon His shoulders and then was raised to life again on the third day to reign with God in Heaven, so if we genuinely accept Jesus into our hearts, our old sinful nature should die and a new nature that desires to please God will start to live in us.

The Bible tells us in 2 Corinthians 5: 15, 17

“And [Jesus] died for all, that those who live should no longer live for themselves but for him who died for them and was raised again. … if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come!”

We believe that Jesus is just waiting for everyone to accept Him. The hand is out-stretched with the gift of salvation. It is up to us to step forward to take it.

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If you died tonight, are you 100% certain that you would go to Heaven?

If you aren’t, isn’t it time to make sure you are? You cannot be too busy to take time to sort out the most important decision that you will ever make, a decision that will affect your eternity. One day (and we really don’t know when that will be), it really will be our last night on this earth. Our project deadlines, our sales targets, our laundry, our financial investments, our favourite movies, all the things that seem so pressing and important now – none of that is going to matter then. Mark Cahill has a motto in his book One Thing You Can’t Do in Heaven that is well worth keeping in mind: “If it doesn’t matter on the day you die, it doesn’t matter.”

Make the time to sort out the important stuff. If you died tonight, are you 100% certain that you would go to Heaven?

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If you are a student, friend, or acquaintance of mine who has read this, and you would like to talk more, please please let me know.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS: This post borrows heavily from Mark Cahill’s One Thing You Can’t Do in Heaven, a truly inspirational book. Mark Cahill in turn credits Ray Comfort of Living Waters for the idea of using the Ten Commandments to help us see how we have all done wrong in God’s eyes and so are in need of God’s forgiveness and saving grace. You can find Mark Cahill at http://www.markcahill.org