usually, when i scroll all the way down to the bottom of somebody's page of content or whatever, that means i like their stuff, and if i wanted to say something to somebody that does that to my stuff, then i'd want to tell them about the gospel of Jesus Christ. also thx for hanging around!
soooo... good people go to heaven, sure. problem, "none of us is good, no, not one"*. this is something the bible says in the book of romans. let's take that a little further. if you've ever lied, if you've ever lusted, if you've ever cheated or taken the Lord's name in vain, or any of the other tons and tons of things the bible talks about, then that means that you've sinned.
now, any sane person can agree "all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God"**. well, the bible also says, "the wages of sin is death"***. in other words, death (and eventually hell) is what we all deserve for falling short of heaven's standard of goodness, and none of us can be perfect no matter how hard we try. not good, nobody's trying to go to hell, and well if they are, they don't really know what kind of game they're playing.
God still wants to be with His children in heaven (He's so passionate about it, He even wrote an itty-bitty book, you may have heard). sin, unfortunately, is no joke. He's declared that to erase sin, you need a perfect, innocent life to die. a scapegoat, one life taking the punishment from someone else, otherwise the punishment will go through without interruption.
(((a little off topic. the answer to "why?" is pretty longgg, but tl;dr God and sin/impurities cannot and will not mix. in the bible, there's actually a fair few amount of ppl that physically got too close to big G God and instantly died. not even because they were bad people either, i think most of the people who made that list were normal priests. "God and sin don't mix" is basically a rule of the universe, it is never broken. this includes earth, and more importantly, this includes heaven)))
scapegoating is really hard though because this life must be perfect according to His standard: perfect like God. 2,000 years ago he foot the bill himself. God came to earth as a man named Jesus, and He never did anything wrong. if you remember, the wages of sin is death, so He didn't technically have to die
but He chose to anyway. kicker here is that His death can erase the sin of more than just one person; since God is infinite, any innocent sacrifice he makes himself has the power to erase the sins of anybody and everybody. that means my sin, and that also means your sin.
so that's the "good news" everyone talks about. it's wild, kinda long, and pretty easy to forget. so here's the important part.
while He was on earth, He said
1) He was the only way to get to heaven
2) He would rise from the dead.
after He died, hundreds of the people that listened to Him while he was alive said (and were reported by third parties saying) that they saw Him after He was crucified (you know, the dying for our sins part). this is the main reason i personally believe the Jesus story.
Jesus, through the bible, has given the world a moral system, it takes a while to learn and there are a lot of topics that are hotly debated, widely hated, and underrated if im being honest. all that aside...
"if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you will be saved" (romans 10:9)
thx for reading
uhh sources ig lol
*romans 3:10
**romans 3:23
***romans 6:23
ya if you haven't guessed by now, romans is a wild ride of a read