“I’m OK with God Because I’m A Good Person”

One of my favorite Bible teachers is Greg Koukl of Stand to Reason.

He’s been doing a series of “rapid-fire” critiques to common pushbacks to Christianity that you might face in conversations with others.

This post features one of the most common misunderstandings that most people have:

“I’m Basically A Good Person.”

The vast majority of Americans believe in Hell, apparently, but almost no one thinks they’re going there. Their reason? “I’m basically a good person,” they say. They’re only little sinners, by their reckoning, since their good deeds vastly outweigh their bad ones. Their misplaced confidence is based on two points of confusion.

The first confusion comes from defining “basically good” according to human standards. God, on this view, is concerned with what kind of individual one is “on average.” If there’s more good than bad—if good is predominant—then God winks at the occasional moral lapse.

But justice never works that way, does it? The law demands that each person obey every law always, not most laws most of the time. No amount of good behavior can pay for bad behavior. Period. Law requires consistent compliance, and that which is already owed—obedience—cannot be used to pay for past errors.

A person may be an upstanding citizen all his life, but one single crime is still going to bring him before the court. He’ll never get a letter from the DA saying, “You’ve been a good, law-abiding citizen for five years. Go out and beat up a few innocent bystanders and rob a few gas stations—on us. You’ve got credit in your account.”

If you’re still not clear on this point, ask yourself what commandment of God—or any law of any country, for that matter—one can violate with impunity without fear of punishment.

God, like all lawgivers, requires nothing less than moral perfection. “But that’s impossible,” you say. You’re right. That is why we need a Savior. That’s the only way we can be right with God when we’re not thoroughly good.

The second confusion is tied to math. The “basically good” person simply hasn’t run the numbers and needs to do the calculus. For example, counting only the sins he’s committed from, say, his tenth birthday to his sixtieth—just fifty years—how many sins would he have committed if he’d only sinned ten times a day?

Of course, ten sins a day is a modest projection. Keep in mind we’re not only talking about rape, pillaging, murder, and theft. Sin includes the full range of human moral failings before God—heart attitudes and motives as well as actions, including failing to love God with our whole heart, mind, soul, and strength and failing to love others as ourselves.

If a person sinned just ten times a day for only 50 years, what would his rap sheet look like? He would have amassed 182,500 infractions of the law. What judge would turn anyone loose with a record like that? And that is a best-case scenario. In reality, each of us would fare much worse.

Whenever you’re tempted to trust in your own ability, take a good look at the standard, God’s Law (you’ll find it in Exodus 20), then look at your own rap sheet. To use Paul’s words, the Law “has shut up everyone under sin” (Gal. 3:22). It’s closed our mouths, and we all have become accountable to God (Rom. 3:19).

The psalmist says, “If you, Lord, should mark iniquities, O Lord, who could stand?”
(Ps. 130:3). Saved by our own goodness? Hardly. God’s Law gives us no hope.

EDITOR’S NOTE:
For more great Bible teaching from Greg Koukl and his team at Stand to Reason, visit www.str.org.

I highly recommend his books, Tactics: A Game Plan for Discussing Your Christian Convictions and Street Smarts: Using Questions to Answer Christianity’s Toughest Challenges (available on Amazon). If you’re serious about engaging non-Christians in substantive conversations about the gospel, and need help doing so, these books will give you a boatload of biblically based strategies for effective evangelism.