Two avid golfers are discussing whether there’ll be golf in Heaven. They decide that the first one to die should come back and inform the second one if there is or not. One of the golfers dies and later comes back to the second one and says, “I’ve got good news and I’ve got bad news about golf in Heaven. Which do you want first?”
“Tell me the good news first,” the second one says.
“There is amazing, absolutely incredible golf in Heaven! The courses here are beyond belief. We can play all the time – the weather is always perfect!”
“What’s the bad news?” the first one asks. The second one responds, “You tee off tomorrow morning at 9!”
In the Bible we read that when Jesus began His earthly ministry He went everywhere “preaching the good news”. What was the “good news” Jesus came to give?
Well, to best understand it, we have to look at it against the background of the “bad news”. In the Bible, the bad news is that we all are separated from God by our sin. We read: “For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” Each of us has at one time or another exercised our free will and made choices contrary to that which God would have us to do. For example, instead of being always totally and completely truthful like God is, we all from time to time will fudge the truth or even lie, if that best serves our purposes.
By saying “all have sinned” the Bible does not imply that we all are as bad as we could be. It doesn’t mean we are always and in every way bad. Or that we are all equally bad as people.
But in relation to a holy and sovereign God we all come short of the perfection that is His. He is our measuring rod and He is infinitely good and right and pure. Unfortunately none of us measure up. Paul Little, in his book “Know What You Believe”, says, “Suppose we were to compare one person’s morals to being in Death Valley, 280 feet below sea level; another person’s morals to being in Denver, the mile high city; and another person’s morals to the peak of Mount Everest, altitude 29,000 feet.
“The person in Death Valley represents the most ruthless low life in society. The person in Denver is the average man and the person Mount Everest in the best person you can imagine. The enormous differences in their elevation are apparent.”
But Little goes on to say, “By comparison, God’s standard of holiness (100 percent perfect) is represented by the earth’s distance to the moon. If we saw how Mount Everest, Denver and Death Valley all look from the moon, we would see they look the same.”
The good news, however, is that Jesus came and died on the cross. In dying, He paid the penalty that our sins justly deserved – death. His death satisfied the anger of God against our sin and made it possible for us to receive God’s forgiveness and stand accepted by Him in His presence.
So while the bad news is that we have sinned and deserve condemnation, the good news is that we can be completely and absolutely forgiven of our sins.
I am so glad that there was a day in my life that though I realized the bad news, I came to understand the good news and I responded in faith to God. That day, I prayed and received Jesus as my personal saviour from all my sins.
Now I look forward to golfing in Heaven – even if I should have to tee off tomorrow morning at 9 a.m.
