One way that has been expressed is: "What about people who do what Jesus teaches but don't believe in Jesus? Shouldn't God cut them a break?"1 Why do you have to believe in Jesus or even God? Why isn't it good enough to live they way Jesus wants people to live? How should we answer that?
First, let's acknowledge that to a certain extent, it is good enough. "When Gentiles, who do not have the law, do by nature things required by the law, they are a law for themselves, even though they do not have the law" (Rom 2:14). If someone obeyed God perfectly from their first breath to their last, they wouldn't need Jesus. (Let's not get into original sin in this hypothetical.) The problem is no one has ever actually done that.
But some people are still "basically good", according to our skeptic. They still try to help people and tell the truth, and they don't steal or kill or anything like that. Why isn't that good enough?
I think this comes from the idea that our good deeds will be weighed against our bad deeds in some kind of cosmic scale. That doesn't help us.
First, your good deeds are not as good as you think. Your good deeds are too often done out of guilt or a desire to feel good or the hope that someone will notice. And many of the sins you avoid aren't as avoided as you think. You haven't killed anyone, but there were times you would have if you thought you could get away with it (cf, Matt 5:21-22). You haven't committed adultery, but there were times you wanted to (cf, Matt 5:27-28).
Second, you do more bad deeds than you think. Jesus said the greatest commandment is to love God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength (Mark 12:29-30). We all fail to do that daily. The second commandment, according to Jesus, is "love your neighbor as yourself" (Mark 12:31). For every person you've helped, there is another you didn't when you could have. People frequently steal "little, inconsequential things" yet don't think of themselves as a thief. They tell "little white lies" and don't think of themselves as a liar. But they are. If someone only sinned once a day, they'd seem like an absolute saint. But in the average lifetime, that would add up to more than 25,000 sins. What do you think would happen to a person who stood before a judge guilty of 25,000 individual criminal acts? This isn't someone with a little peccadillo; this is a hardened criminal.
Third, even if you did a lot of absolutely pure good deeds and you didn't have very many sins at all, you're still in trouble: There is no scale. God doesn't use a scale to measure your good deeds; he uses a ruler.
Picture it this way: You have a pile of checkers. Each checker represents a choice you have to make, doing right or not. God has a ruler. God is fair; the ruler isn't extreme. If you stack up all of your checkers, it's the exact height of the ruler. Every time you make the right choice, you add a checker to your stack.
"Will I tell the truth or not?" You tell the truth, a checker goes on the stack. "Will I fill my cup with soda when I asked for water?" You drink water, a checker goes on the stack. "This little old lady is broken down on the side of the road. Will I help her or not?" But you're running late, and there are so many other people on the road; surely someone else will help her. That checker is thrown away. It cannot go on the stack.
How do you get that checker back? You can't. Next time you get the opportunity to help someone, that's a new checker. If you help them, that's what you were supposed to do. There's no making up for your wrong choice before. You can't get it back by not lying or not stealing — that's what you were supposed to do. You can't get it back by running into a burning house to save someone because that's what "love your neighbor as yourself" requires.
One wrong choice and you can never measure up. And we all make far more than one wrong choice in our lives. We don't fall one choice short. We fall thousands of choices short.
There's one more reason the scale doesn't work. The problem isn't just that we've committed a sin or two. The problem is we're in rebellion against God. We are "hostile to God" and so "cannot please God" (Rom 8:7-8) no matter what we do. As CS Lewis said, the unsaved man in "not simply an imperfect creature who needs improvement: he is a rebel who must lay down his arms."2 If our good deeds vastly outnumbered the bad, the bad would still prove that we are rebels, hostile to God; we are not only unsuitable for his Kingdom, we don't even desire it.
And so we need the gospel. We need the forgiveness of sins and the "washing of rebirth and renewal by the Holy Spirit" (Titus 3:5) that only comes through faith, by hanging our hope for righteousness before God solely on the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.
1 This came from a video podcast that hosted Wes Huff, the Bible scholar who has lately been thrust into the spotlight as an apologist and evangelist. This particular podcast took the form of a three-hour conversation between Wes and four men who are supposed to be comedians, at least two of which are not Christian. I recommend listening to the whole thing; it's both instructive and interesting (those 3 hours went by quickly) — though be advised of foul language. Wes did a great job answering their questions thoughtfully and winsomely. With one exception. Not to criticize him at all; in a three-hour unscripted conversation there was one place near the end where he wasn't able to really land his point. It happens. But since the issue raised by the host is a common one, it's worth returning to the topic and taking a crack at what Wes would probably have said if he'd had a little more time (or hadn't been talking for nearly three hours!).
2 The Problem of Pain
Scale image via Pexels
Checkers image is homemade because I got some hilariously bad results trying an AI image generator
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