Reality—we all have a soul, and that soul will live somewhere for eternity.  The question is, where? 

With God, in His eternal kingdom (i.e., heaven), or away from God because we rejected Him?  If away from God, it will also be absent of anything good, since good originates with God.

Eccles. 3:11 tells us that God “…has set eternity in the human heart…”—that’s so we won’t and can’t ever be satisfied until we’ve recognized and prepared for it.

So how do we prepare for it?  How do we make sure we go to heaven, to live with God and enjoy all things good and nothing bad, for eternity?

Here’s the hard truth—we have to be perfectly clean to enter.  But why?

Why do we have to be perfectly clean to get into heaven? What about all the really good people who do their best to follow the Ten Commandments and hardly ever do anything bad?

First of all, even the best people bring a boatload of sins to heaven’s gates by the time they reach that point in eternity.  Some of those boats may be smaller than others, but they still contain a sizable cargo!  “Sin” means wrong thinking, wrong action, and/or not doing the right thing we need to.  Imagine—if you have even only one of these a day, what does that add up to in a lifetime?!

Second, heaven has to stay holy—as in totally pure—untouched by anything unclean, to remain heaven. Think of each of our sins as a bit of mud, each with its own foul odor. Imagine if the Lord lets even one person into heaven with what we think is “a little bit” of “mud”—by the time millions, maybe billions, come in, heaven wouldn’t be heaven anymore!  It would be like earth or maybe worse—with all the evil in the world that hurts everyone here!

If it seems unfair for the Lord to not let people into heaven with anything less than perfect “track records”, imagine you own a home with beautiful white, shag, carpet—wall to wall—in every room. 

Your friend knocks on the door and says “can I come in with my boots on?  I can’t get them off.  But, don’t worry, I only have a couple specks of mud on them.”  You may, reluctantly, decide to let him in.  But then, after that, in order to be “fair”, you’d have to let everyone else in who “only has a couple specks of mud” on their non-removable boots.  After a while, no one would be able to tell the difference between your house and the muddy ground outside!

Or, if someone hands you a glass of water with a drop of ink in it—would you drink it?  They could say “it only has one drop!  The rest is pure mountain water!”  But that doesn’t change the fact that the water has turned black and poison has spread all through it.

This is why Romans 3:23 tells us that “All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.”  If we, who are impure, ask for cleanliness in our house and pure drinking water, doesn’t God, who is pure, have the right to ask for that same standard of purity in His house?

So—how do we get perfectly clean?  We can’t clean ourselves—we’re already dirty.  Nothing or no one else that’s dirty can clean us.  We need someone sterile, pure, to clean our hearts and erase the dirt. 

That would have to be God Himself.  But in order to do that, He’d have to find a way to “touch” us without contaminating Himself.

He did.  He did it by coming, as promised, as a person, to touch and represent all humankind while still remaining pure.

A lot more can be said about that, as to the reasoning and details.  For now, it’s enough to know that there IS a way to fulfill the requirement of being perfectly clean to get into heaven. Connect with God Incarnate—Jesus—let Him do the cleaning and erasing 🙂

What do you think?  Let’s “talk” about it.