Do Good People go to Hell?

Or for that mat­ter, do bad peo­ple go to heaven? In both cases I believe the answer is a clear no. And I think the rea­son this ques­tion comes up often, and is equally as mis­un­der­stood, is because we tend to think that actions define char­ac­ter — which to an extent is true — but that this is it. I’m sure this belief arises from the pop­u­lar notion that peo­ple are inher­ently nei­ther ‘good’ or ‘bad,’ but through the choices we make lean to one side or the other. Of course, the caveat would be added that no per­son is com­pletely good or com­pletely bad. Peo­ple are some­thing of a “gray area,” where as long as one set of actions out­weighs the oth­ers, we are iden­ti­fied as ‘good’ or ‘bad’.

That’s the problem.

I once heard an illus­tra­tion com­par­ing Billy Gra­ham and Hitler, it goes some­thing like this. If God’s stan­dard for being con­sid­ered right­eous and “mak­ing it” to heaven is a 20 on a check­list (and only a 20) of items, our most right­eous per­son — in this instance, Billy Gra­ham — would score, at most, a 19, whereas our most unright­eous per­son  in this instance, Hitler — would score a 1. Now whether you’ve scored a 1, a 7, a 14 or a 19 is sec­ondary to this fact: you haven’t scored a 20. You may be more or less right­eous in com­par­i­son to another per­son, but when com­pared to God’s stan­dard, you’re still unright­eous. That’s the point Isa­iah is mak­ing when he com­pares our good works to “filthy rags” (Isa­iah 64:6), or to make his point the way he would–used men­strual rags.

Because when it comes to being good or bad it is not only our actions that define us, our essence has its part to play. We are “basi­cally” sin­ners (ever won­der why its so easy to see the bad in oth­ers, but not in our­selves?). It’s this sin, inde­pen­dent of any of our actions, which sep­a­rates us from God and makes it impos­si­ble to be right­eous on our own. Con­sider, good peo­ple don’t do bad things, and bad peo­ple don’t do good things. The only way we can be right­eous is by fol­low­ing Jesus.

So do good peo­ple go to hell? No, bad unright­eous peo­ple who per­form good actions go to Hell. And bad peo­ple don’t go to heaven, those who fol­low Jesus do, even if on occa­sion they per­form bad actions.

In other words, we are defined by our essence, not our function.

Related posts:

1. What is Hell?
2. Hell: Why don’t Chris­tians do more?