Does God Grade on a Curve?

Anyone who has ever gone to school or college for very long must be familiar with the idea of grading on a curve. This is a grading system in which students are graded relative to each other, and not necessarily by an objective grading scale in which one percentage of right answers always earns an A, and another a B, and so on. With a curve, what otherwise might have been a C or a D on a test might be turned into an A or a B if the whole class did relatively poorly. Just last semester, I had an accounting class in which I would have received at the most a B (or more likely a C) if I had been graded on my actual percentage of available points earned. But since the curve in that class turned out to be rather generous (it was a pretty difficult course), I got an A (and of course I didn’t complain one bit).
It’s nice to be graded on a curve once in a while when we’re in school, but once we head out into real life, we aren’t guaranteed those kinds of breaks. If we fail at something, we fail, and we don’t always get a second try or special consideration because we gave it our best or because we did better than some or even most. I suppose in some ways a curve can help us get through college but doesn’t really prepare us for some of the harsh realities of life.
But this gets me to thinking about an even bigger test than any semester final – and one bigger even than real life. It’s the test that comes after our life is over. That there is such a test is clear from God’s Word, the Bible. Hebrews 9:27 says, “And as it is appointed for men to die once, but after this the judgment”; and again, in Romans 14:10, 12, we read “For we shall all stand before the judgment seat of Christ…so then each of us shall give account of himself to God.”
Let’s take a moment and consider what this “ultimate final exam” might be like. What do you think God’s grading criteria are? Perhaps He has a great ledger or scale, on one side of which is heaped all of the bad things we’ve ever done, and on the other is gathered all of our good deeds. If the good deeds outweigh the bad deeds, then we get to go to heaven, but if it’s the other way around, we would then be thrown into hell.
But perhaps it’s not that simple. Maybe it’s more complex than that. Maybe more good works than bad aren’t enough. Maybe God also weighs our good works relative other people’s; perhaps He expects our good works to not just outweigh the bad ones, but to be exceptionally good. Maybe only then will He let us into heaven. Or maybe God will give us second chances or “bonus points”. Maybe if our good works are good, but not quite enough to get us in on the first try, He will send us back to earth in a reincarnation of sorts to complete what was lacking; or maybe He will send us to some place in between heaven and hell until we are completely purified from what was keeping us from getting into heaven at first. Perhaps it may be that God only lets an exclusive group into heaven, like members of a certain religion or denomination, or those who were baptized as infants, or those who walked down an aisle and said a prayer.
On the other hand, maybe God has lower standards than we may think; perhaps He will let in everyone who’s at least tried very hard to keep the Ten Commandments, or everyone except murderers, or maybe even, in His great goodness, everyone!
What would you say if I told you that, according to the Bible, none of these hypothetical scenarios are true? They couldn’t be, if what the Bible says is true. God teaches us in His Word that His standard for passing is a perfect 100% score. Habakkuk 1:13 says of our Creator, “You are of purer eyes than to behold evil, and cannot look on wickedness.” Jesus said in Matthew 5:48, “Therefore you shall be perfect just as your Father in heaven is perfect”, echoing God’s Old Testament command to “Be holy, even as I am holy.” That doesn’t leave much room for error, does it? Perfect is perfect, and holy is holy – spotless and without blame.
You may say to this, “God doesn’t expect anybody to really be perfect. I keep the Ten Commandments – don’t I get credit for that?” But do we really keep the Ten Commandments? Have you ever told a lie, even once? Have you ever put anything in your life before God in importance? Have you ever stolen (or just coveted) something that belonged to someone else? Jesus Himself drove past the “letter” of these commandments and penetrated to the very spirit of them. In Matthew 5, in His Sermon on the Mount, Jesus said these things – “You have heard it said, ‘You shall not murder…but I say to you that whoever is angry with his brother without a cause shall be in danger of the judgment” and “You have heard that it was said to those of old, ‘You shall not commit adultery’, but I say to you that whoever looks at a woman to lust for her has already committed adultery with her in his heart.” If the Ten Commandments are looked at in this way, we are all guilty of breaking at least one of them. And James 2:10 tells us bluntly, “For whoever shall keep the whole law, and yet stumble in one point, he is guilty of all.” 1 John 3:4 sums it up this way – “Whoever commits sin also transgresses the law; for sin is the transgression of the law.”
But you may reply, “Yes, but God knows that nobody is perfect! That’s just the goal, and if we try our hardest to get there, He will understand.” Consider what Jesus says in Matthew 7:21-23 – “Not everyone who says to Me, ‘Lord, Lord’, shall enter the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will of My Father in heaven. Many will say to Me in that day, ‘Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in Your name, cast out demons in Your name, and done many wonders in Your name?’ And then I will declare to them, ‘I never knew you; depart from Me, you who practice lawlessness.’”
How can this be? How can Jesus cast out from His kingdom those who had done such wonderful works – and in His name, no less? Perhaps this is puzzling because we are looking at heaven and how to get there the wrong way, and perhaps if we looked at it the way the Bible teaches us, much of the confusion would vanish.
You see, according to the Bible, heaven is not a reward for good people. Heaven is the dwelling place of Almighty God. We saw a verse earlier that says that God is of purer eyes than to look upon sin; 1 John 1:5 adds, “God is light, and in Him is no darkness at all.” Sin is darkness, and ever since our first forefather Adam sinned, and since each of us have followed in his footsteps, God cannot allow sinful man into His presence. Jeremiah 17:9 gives us a bleak diagnosis – “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked; who can know it?” This applies to all people, no matter how good we think we may be compared to others. Isaiah 64:6 tells us how our personal “righteousness” compares with God’s standard, the only one that counts – “But we are all as an unclean thing, and all our righteousnesses are as filthy rags; and we all fade as a leaf; and our iniquities, like the wind, have taken us away.” Psalm 14:3 adds to the bleak picture – “They are all gone aside, they are all together become filthy; there is none that does good – no, not one.”
You may choose to disagree with the Bible’s assessment of the human condition, but God has said all of these things in His Word, and He cannot lie. Proverbs 20:9 says, “Who can say, ‘I have made my heart clean, I am pure from my sin’?” And 1 John 1:8 bluntly states, “If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.” Sin is not merely a matter of “nobody’s perfect”; it is a matter of life and death. God has no choice but to assess on all of us, regardless of what we may believe our merit is, the penalty due our sin. Isaiah 59:2 says, “But your iniquities have separated between you and your God, and your sins have hid His face from you, so that He will not hear.” Romans 6:23 says, “For the wages of sin is death.” Sin is the reason why our earthly lives are cut short by death in the first place, and the reason why we are separated from our Creator both in this life and the next.
It is vitally important for us to understand that we cannot get to heaven by our good works. The Apostle Paul writes in Romans 3:20 – “Therefore by the deeds of the law there shall no flesh be justified in His sight; for by the law is the knowledge of sin.” Paul was referring to the Law given to the nation of Israel, which included the Ten Commandments. His point is that no amount of our trying to keep God’s rules can make us righteous before Him, because the very reason for the Law was to show us that we cannot keep it – and therefore we cannot become truly righteous by our effort.
Is there any hope, then? Ah, but there is, and that is the greatest news of all! The same just God that cannot look upon sin and must punish it is the same God who loves the people He created and does not want any of them to perish. So what can He do? He will not – cannot – turn a blind eye to our sin. Therefore, God made a way so that His perfect justice could be satisfied while at the same time making a way for us to be saved. How? By sending His Son Jesus to earth to be a man, live a perfect sinless life, and die on a cross for your sin and mine. Christ accomplished what none of our works could ever do by taking on Himself the punishment of death that we rightfully deserved. In return for taking our “failing grade”, Jesus transferred His perfect righteousness to our behalf! 2 Corinthians 5:21 says, “For He (God) made Him (Jesus) who knew no sin to be sin for us, that we might be made the righteousness of God in Him.” Three days after Jesus died, God raised Him from the dead, proving to all of the universe that His work of redeeming mankind was complete and fully accepted by a holy God.
There remains only one thing that each of us can do. John 3:16, perhaps, the most familiar of all Bible verses, tells us what it is – “For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes on Him should not perish but have everlasting life.” Our part is simply to put our faith in what Christ has already done for us. Romans 10:9 says, “If you confess with your mouth the Lord Jesus, and believe in your heart that God has raised Him from the dead, you will be saved. For with the heart man believes unto righteousness, and with the mouth confession is made unto salvation.”
Consider what Jesus said in John 5:28-29: “Then they said to Him, ‘What shall we do, that we may work the works of God?’ Jesus answered and said to them, ‘This is the work of God, that you believe in Him whom He sent.’” This “belief”, however, is not merely a head-knowledge or an assent in the same way that you believe very strongly and sincerely that Barack Obama is the President of the United States. It is a belief that changes your very life. It is an agreement with God about your own lost condition without Him and a full faith and trust that what Jesus did on the cross for you is in and of itself the only way for you to be reconciled to God and be set free from sin and its wages.
So you see, salvation can never come by our effort. On the contrary, we are never closer to salvation than when we see our own utter sinfulness in God’s sight, our inability to please Him, and our helplessness and need for a Savior. God has supplied that Savior for us, and our part is only to turn from the sin that separates us from God and place our faith wholeheartedly in what God has done for us. God does the rest, as Titus 3:5 says, “Not by works of righteousness which we have done, but according to His mercy He saved us, by the washing of regeneration and renewing of the Holy Spirit”; and as Ephesians 2:8-9 proclaims, “For by grace you have been saved, and that not of yourselves; it is the gift of God, not of works, lest anyone should boast.”
All of this is why Jesus could say to those who were religious (they did good works in Jesus’ name) and did good works “I never knew you; depart from Me, you who practice lawlessness.” You see, sin separates us from a right relationship with God. The only way we can “know” God in any way is to be reconciled with Him, and the only way to be reconciled to God is through Jesus and His redeeming work on the cross. Jesus said in John 14:6, “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life; no man can come to the Father except through Me.” We can do many things we believe are good enough to get us into heaven, and we can even do them in God’s name, but if we have not trusted in the Way that He has provided for us to come to Him, then He will have no choice but to say to us, too, “I never knew you.” If we do not come to God His way, we are still in our sin and separated from God. But when we come to God through faith alone in Jesus alone, our sins – past, present, and future – can be fully and rightfully forgiven and our relationship with our Creator will be restored forever. Then we can truly have a personal relationship with the One who created us and gave all to save us.
You may say to all of this, “I just can’t believe that good people can’t get to heaven. Are you saying that good works are worthless? Are you saying that a serial killer can be saved by trusting in Christ on his deathbed, but someone who has tried all of their life to do good will never make it to heaven?” This is exactly what I am saying. God does not save people based on works, but based on His own mercy and grace. The very definition of “mercy” is “not getting what we deserve”, and “grace” means “getting what we do not deserve”. As I have attempted to show, God’s standards are very different from ours, and to be saved we must first come to the understanding – given only by God – that we cannot make it on our own. Because of what Christ did, God can justly spare us the eternal death we deserve because of our sin, and give us the eternal life with Him that we could never deserve by our own merit.
This does not mean that good works are of no value at all, nor that once a person has been saved he or she becomes perfect. God commands us throughout the pages of His Word – and shows us how – to live righteously and to turn from sin; furthermore, He gives those who are saved His Spirit to live with them and enable them to keep God’s ways (and to notify them and help them correct their ways when they do not). However, the key is in the understanding of what saves us, and the realization that our own effort is not enough for salvation in God’s sight. Only Jesus alone – not Jesus plus our good works, or Jesus plus anything else – can save. The good works that we do are not done to obtain salvation or God’s favor, but to show our love for and obedience to the One who paid it all for us.
So, in closing, the answer is no, God does not grade on a curve. He demands 100% from all of His “students” in order for them to pass – which, of course, they can never do. The good news is that God has made a way for those students to pass by taking on Himself their failing grade and giving them the perfect one He has purchased for them. Have you placed your trust in Jesus? “For there is no other name under heaven given among men whereby we must be saved” (Acts 4:12); “Believe on the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, and you shall be saved” (Acts 16:31).