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Everyone goes to heaven. God loves us and would not really subject anyone to eternal punishment.

God loves us. Many people believe we'll all get to heaven (except for a few really bad people). They say, after all, most of us are basically good.

Here are the facts: God makes it very clear that He is just and fair. He doesn't make a set of rules and then later change them. He doesn't promise one thing and then do something different. What God has said right from the beginning (Genesis) is that there is a penalty that needs to be paid if we break His law (commands). That penalty is death.

We have two options:

1) If we never break any of God's laws, in other words if we perfectly obey all of God's commands, we'll have eternal life with God in heaven. There is a problem, however. NO ONE has ever been able to do it. My guess is that not one person reading this has even obeyed just the Ten Commandments. This means we are all under the death penalty.

2) If we can find someone else to die in our place (pay our penalty for us) that solves our problem. However, every other person is already responsible for paying the death penalty for their own breaking of God's laws.

God saw this problem and He provided a solution. God does not change the rules--that wouldn't be fair--so someone had to die to pay our penalty for sin (law breaking). God decided that He would die--and so Jesus Christ died in our place taking the penalty for our sins.

So we have two alternatives: We can accept God's gift to us--that Jesus died in our place, or we have the only other alternative, which is eternity in hell.

We choose: If we disobey God, then God let's us. It's our choice. He even says that those who disobey Him will get their reward here on earth. This means, for example, that those who spend their time building earthly treasure can enjoy that treasure here on earth. In America we have a lot of earthly treasure and we spend a lot of time enjoying it.

But, our time on earth to enjoy our earthly treasure is, at most, about 100 years. That is a very brief time compared with eternity.

If while we are here on earth we recognize we are breaking God's law (we sin), that the penalty is death, and God (Jesus) has paid that penalty for us, then our reward will be throughout eternity -- which is a very long time.

Let's look at this from a slightly different perspective.