Ok, I hate to admit it, but I watched that show on Lifetime called Drop Dead Diva, and I kinda liked it. It is about this cute model who dies, and when a gate keeper is trying to decide whether she should go to heaven or hell, the girl hits a button to make her go back to earth. The twist is that she returns into the body of an overweight, not as cute, girl, Jane. Now, she has to pretend that she is Jane, who is smart and a lawyer. It is actually a pretty cute and funny show. The actress who plays Jane does a really good job of trying to be this self-centered model trapped in a plus-sized woman’s body.
When the girl first dies on the show, the gate keeper looks on a computer and can’t determine where she should go because she has done just as many good things as bad things, so there is this straight line across the computer screen. I know I used to think that that’s how it worked: you do more good than bad, you go to heaven. The only problem with that is, who decides what’s good enough and what’s bad enough? If it’s us, well, we can always find someone worse than us. And if it’s God, well, we could never reach the perfection of God. Thankfully for us, that’s not how it works! We do not work for our spot in heaven. Grace is given to us by our Father.
In Bible, it says, “For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this not from yourselves, it is the gift of God— not by works, so that no one can boast.” (Ephesians 2:8-9).
So, what the show really should have looked like is this. The gatekeeper looks at the computer, and he doesn’t see “Was she good or bad?” He turns on the screen, and looks: “Did she love Jesus?”