Thoughts on James 2

Today’s reading: Isaiah 11-12; James 2

How good is good enough to get to Heaven without Jesus?

When you ask people if they think they will go to Heaven when they die, very often they will tell you something like, “I think so, yeah. I mean, I’ve never killed anyone or anything. I’m no Mother Theresa, but I’m also no Hitler, so I think God will probably let me in.” Responses like this betray a kind of thinking like God is grading on a curve with half of humanity going to Heaven and half going to Hell, so you just have to be in the “better” half to be good enough to go to Heaven. Or, maybe more accurate to a lot of people’s thinking on it, if you aren’t a heinous sinner like a serial killer or something, you’re probably good enough for Heaven. But what does the Bible actually have to say about it?

James tells us:

“For whoever keeps the whole law but fails in one point has become accountable for all of it. For he who said, ‘Do not commit adultery,’ also said, ‘Do not murder.’If you do not commit adultery but you do murder, you have become a transgressor of the law.”

Elsewhere we are told that God’s standard is not just “good,” but is moral perfection, but I really like the way James draws that out here. Imagine that you have a young child and you tell him, “You can have dessert tonight if you don’t color on the walls and don’t hit your little brother.” A little while later your younger son is screaming because his older brother hit him. Come time for dessert your son tries to argue, “I should get dessert though because I didn’t color on the walls!” Does that cut it? Of course not! He may have kept one of your instructions, but he failed in the other one, so he is guilty and doesn’t get dessert.

James is not saying that if you commit adultery but don’t murder you are still guilty as a murderer, nor is he saying that all sins you could commit are the same, or are just as bad as one another. What James is saying is that the same God has given us the whole moral law, so to break any of it, to sin in any way, makes you a transgressor of the law. To take it a step further, Paul tells us in Romans 2, speaking of people who do not know God’s law, “They show that they work of the law is written on their hearts, while their conscience also bears witness, and their conflicting thoughts accuse or even excuse them…” His point is that even if you don’t know God’s particular commands and instructions, if/when you violate your own conscience, that is enough for you to know you are guilty.

So if you want to know if you are good enough to get to Heaven on your own merit, have you ever done anything wrong in your life at all? Have you ever lied, cheated, stolen, slandered, etc? Have you done anything that violated your own conscience? If so, you are a transgressor of the law and are not good enough to get to Heaven on your own merit, it’s as simple as that.

The good news though, if you are in that segment of humanity which has done at least one thing wrong and therefore does not deserve to go to Heaven on your own merit (i.e. everyone except Jesus Himself), is that that is exactly why Jesus came. All of us have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, but God did not want to leave us in that state of alienation from Him because He loves us and created us to be in relationship with Himself. In our sin, there is nothing we can do to reconcile ourselves to God, so He took it upon Himself to create a way for us to come home. Jesus, fully God and fully man, came to earth and lived the perfect, sinless life we are called to live, and then went to the cross and died a death He did not deserve to die. Death is the penalty for sin, but Jesus had no sins of His own to pay for, so His death could pay for the sins of another person, but because He is God, and God is infinite, His death is able to pay for the sins of all people for all time. As a result, God tells us, if we place our faith in Christ, if we trust that His death was sufficient to cover our sins, then we have our entrance into Heaven when we die, not on our own merits, but on the perfect merits of Jesus Himself.

As Paul says in Ephesians 2, “For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the git of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast.”

None of us will ever be good enough to go to Heaven when we die, but if our faith is in Jesus, rather than in ourselves, for our salvation, then we can know for certain that on the day we stand before the Lord at the end of this life, it will be to be welcomed into His eternal kingdom!