Most people have a moderate view of the Bible. They have not necessarily read enough to consider themselves to be experts but, at least in the United States, most people do have at least a vague picture of God and the Bible being as legitimate concepts.

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.

The majority opinion in the world is that since God is love that all good people when they die will go to heaven. The problem comes when we tried to define what is good. How can you defend the fact that you are a good person?

Do you consider yourself to be a good person because compared to your family, and friends, and coworkers, and people that you see you on television you definitely are a good person?

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.

We know that we only need to see one white crow to know that all crows are not black. In the same way we only have to violate one of the 10 Commandments one time to know that we are not perfect. Few of us need to go any deeper into the 10 Commandments then two of them to realize that because we have told lies we are liars and because we have stolen things no matter how small, that we are thieves and do not measure up to God’s gold standard.

God’s purpose in giving us the 10 Commandments is so that we can see our failures clearly. His hope for us is that we become sensitive to how far we have drifted away from God and come back to him with a sincere apology for specific actions. As with any sincere apology there is also a change in our actions and, again as with any sincere apology, we’d normally ask for the individual’s forgiveness. When we ask for that forgiveness properly he has guaranteed that the forgiveness will be granted.