Dissing Nice-Guy Thinking

I’ve been to a few funerals over the course of my lifetime, and it seems like I always hear words to the effect of, “He was a really, really nice guy,” referring to the guest of honor. Being a nice guy may be a nice compliment to hear, but from a Christian perspective, it’s not an automatic ticket to heaven. In other words, being a good person isn’t enough. When you read the New Testament and listen to the words of Jesus, you begin to discover that everyone, even really, really nice guys, needs the saving grace of Jesus Christ. (Check out Chapter 3 for more on this.)

Although the idea that a person’s goodness earns salvation isn’t biblical, it sure comes naturally to people. In fact, it seems to me that most everyone would opt for individuals getting what they deserve as the best way to deal with eternal fate. In general, this idea says that if you’re a good person, you should be rewarded. But if you’re a bad person, you deserve to be punished. Society loves fairness, and this way of thinking seems the fairest way to deal with a person.

I see the principle of getting what you deserve lived out on an everyday basis. Upon misbehaving, each of my boys is quite observant as to whether his punishment is in proportion to his brother’s. And in the movies, so many films – The Count of Monte Cristo, The Unforgiven, Tombstone, and The Italian Job, to name a few – portray someone getting even with a bad person after he or she commits an evil deed. In fact, usually the loudest cheers in a crowded theater come when the hero ultimately kills the bad guy in the film’s climax. This whole notion of getting what’s coming to us seems to be in human blood. Despite this fact, Christianity sees it as a flawed perspective and one that’s fundamentally at odds with the message of Jesus Christ.

Pointing out fundamental flaws of the Nice Guy approach

Modern-day society embraces the idea of getting what we deserve as the basis for explaining eternity. I call this perspective Nice Guy Thinking; the basic gist of this belief is that most people are generally good, and for the good folks, heaven awaits, because God wouldn’t send someone good to hell. However, the bad people – the murdering, molesting, tyrannical types – will be punished for their evil deeds. The idea of good people being rewarded and bad people being punished may be the most instinctive of all solutions, but Christianity says that you better not stake your eternity on it.

Christians identify three fundamental flaws to this line of thinking, which I discuss in this section.

Nice Guy Thinking has too narrow a view of what’s good

If you asked the average person what makes someone good, the typical response would be something like: “A good guy is someone who’s a fine neighbor, father, and husband. He helps out his neighbors and friends during times of trouble, raises his family the best he can, and is a hard, dedicated worker.” In this case, morality is restricted to meaning decent, kind behavior toward others. These people wink at other actions that don’t seem to hurt anyone else. The deeds may be mischievous, but they’re not anything to get worked up over.

The problem with this perspective is that it defines goodness in terms of other people – I am either better or worse than my neighbor. In doing so, it completely ignores how one treats God and dismisses the notion that one’s behavior toward God even matters.

Consider a parallel: Suppose that I have neighbors who I’ve lived next to for years and have become close friends with. When my wife runs short on sugar, we don’t hesitate to run over and ask to borrow some from them. I see the couple being actively involved with their children, attending PTA meetings, coaching soccer and baseball teams, and even helping to raise money for needy families during the Christmas season. The couple have seemingly met every criteria for being good and moral people. However, one morning, when I turn on CNN, I’m shocked to discover that my neighbors were arrested as spies working for a terrorist group from the Middle East.

Although the couple were good neighbors, I couldn’t call them good citizens of the country, because they were flat-out traitors. My earlier notion of what good meant was inadequate, because it failed to take into account the bigger picture – my neighbors’ loyalty to their country. When my neighbors stand trial, I could testify on behalf of their neighborliness, but my testimony is ultimately irrelevant to their traitorous actions.

In the same way, a woman may truly be a good neighbor, mother, and wife, but those qualities alone don’t make her good before God. Instead, goodness from God’s perspective only comes through his grace.

Nice Guy Thinking grades on a curve

One of my biggest tendencies when I slip up is to compare myself with someone else. Sure, I did something bad, but I justify that I’m at least a better person than that guy down the street or in the next pew. Like others, I prefer to grade my behavior on a curve. Billy Graham and Mother Teresa are the A+’s, and Hitler and Stalin are the Fs. As long as I measure up closer to Mr. Graham and Mother Theresa, I’m all set.

But Christianity forces you to look beyond the Hitlers and Stalins, because God doesn’t grade on a curve. Christians believe that God is completely holy and can’t even look upon sin. Therefore, although a 99 percent is good enough in human terms, from God’s standpoint, it’s still fundamentally flawed, because it’s less than perfect.

On first take, it seems like God is overly picky, but this is only because it’s tough to realize how deeply sin affects one’s nature. To illustrate, imagine a 16-ounce glass of pure water. Suppose someone poured a single drop of super-duper lethal poison into the glass and offered you a drink. The person tells you not to worry about the poison, because it’s just a drop, which you can overlook. But if you know what’s good for you, you know that reality is different: The single drop changes the entire nature of the liquid. You can’t just drink the 99.9 percent of pure water and ignore the 0.1 percent of poison. They’ve merged – the glass is now 100 percent poison. In the same way, as Chapter 4 details, sin isn’t just a series of isolated acts that can be overlooked. Instead, it changes a person’s very nature into something a holy God can’t be near without a thorough cleansing of those sins.

Therefore, in Christianity, grading on a curve makes no sense. It’s all or nothing from God’s standpoint. If I’m thirsty, I want to know whether water is poison or not. In the same way, God looks on a person as either sin-free (through Jesus Christ) or not.

Nice Guy Thinking says that consequences are proportional to their causes

The expression “The punishment should fit the crime” is common sense wisdom today, whether the situation involves a parent trying to determine the discipline for a missing cookie or a jailor dealing with a prisoner who tried to break out. Most people naturally think that an action should have a direct, proportional relationship with its consequence. Therefore, it only makes sense to send a mass murderer to hell, but to send my really-really-nice-guy-of-a-friend to the same place just doesn’t make any sense.

As logical as this may seem, this proportional relationship between action and consequence doesn’t often exist even in fairy tales, let alone the real world. A small kiss turns a frog into a handsome prince. The prick of a needle causes a beautiful lady to sleep for decades. A single lottery ticket gives a lazy woman millions, while her hard-working sister struggles to make her mortgage payment. A boy chases a small ball into the street, but does so at the very moment a semi barrels down the road. In each of these scenarios, the causes were minor, almost trivial. But the results of these small actions had life-changing consequences. In the same way, a single sin, no matter how trivial it appears, has devastating costs.