Historically, Adventists linked their concern for the importance and authority of the law with another concept we called the "investigative judgment." The idea of God closely investigating everything you've ever thought or done was pretty scary. But as we have continued to study the Bible's teaching about judgment, we have found that judgment is not just a scary reminder that God is watching when we are pursuing mischief. It is also a strong statement about the justice of God. It assures us that ultimate salvation is not based on arbitrary decisions by God or "the luck" of being born in the right place at the right time.

Janet's heart was utterly broken. While he was alive, she had prayed and hoped. But how do you live with no hope? Her son had died several weeks earlier in an auto accident. The ache of losing him in this life was unbearable. But since he wasn't a believer, she knew she would never see him again. Ever. "He left the church when he was a teenager," she told me, "and made no pretense of being a Christian. And the accident was so sudden. He never had a chance."

Bill had been speeding through the Santa Monica Mountains in his Miata. He missed a turn and hit a massive live oak just feet from the pavement. No time for a last-minute conversion.

At the funeral, people said all kinds of nice things. When someone needed help, Bill was there. When someone was in jail and needed a friend to come and pick them up, who did they call? Bill. When someone broke up with his girlfriend and had to move out of his apartment on short notice, whose couch did he land on? Bill's. When Bill's dad had an accident that put him in bed for 6 months, who took off work and waited on him hand and foot? And who kept his mom's swimming pool immaculately clean and her lawn manicured after her husband dumped her to chase a shorter skirt? Bill. I figured all this was just funeral talk, the nice things people feel obliged to say in the face of the darkness of death. But talking with people after the funeral, I heard repeated private validation of the public statements.

I recounted some of this to Janet, then asked, "Was Bill really like that?"

"Yes, he was."

"Then you can hope to see him again."

"How? How can you say I can see him again when he was so far away from God?"

"What do you mean, ‘when he was so far away from God?'"

"Well, the fact that he left the church and wasn't a Christian and didn't believe in God, as far as I know, and had no use for the church or religion."

The Bible celebrates faith. It even declares that without faith it is impossible to please God (Heb 11:6). But it also teaches God is able to make very sophisticated judgments about faith.

The Bible explicitly states that if a person talks like an angel, but acts like a devil, his actions mean more than his words (Matt 7; James 2). And the opposite is also true. A person may deny with their words a faith that is evident in their lives.

This is illustrated in the ministry of Jesus. Once, a Roman officer came asking for help for a favorite servant who was at home sick. The officer told Jesus, You don't need to come, "Just say the word, and my servant will be healed" (Matt 8:8). Even though this man was not Jewish, Jesus declared the officer's faith superior to anything he had seen among the people of God. On other occasions, Jesus encountered people who were possessed by demons. In every case, these folk "expressed their faith" by shouting at Jesus and protesting his approach to torture them. Jesus ignored their words and responded to some unspoken cry of their heart and saved them from the demons.

In the judgment, God will be able to read the hearts of many who left the church (or never were part of it) and see the real faith hidden in their lives. Their words may be no more expressive of faith than were the protestations of the people who were possessed by demons, but God will read the faith expressed in their deeds of mercy.

Often those who say they reject God are actually rejecting a caricature of God–a caricature that we, too, reject. In Bill's case, it was easy to make sense of his actions. His dad had made a great show of religion, then dumped Bill's mom for someone else. During Bill's teen years, the pastor and the youth leader at his church became involved in scandalous affairs. Then the Bible teacher at the parochial high school he attended went off the deep end theologically and, finally, psychologically. Almost every man Bill knew who would have appropriately served as a model for God violated Bill's trust. When Bill turned his back on God and the church, he wasn't rejecting the true God who is faithful and compassionate. He was rejecting pretense, hypocrisy and dishonesty. He refused to believe in a god who would condone injustice and faithlessness.

In the crucifixion of Christ, God demonstrated the strength of his intention to save people (Rom 5:8; 1 Pet 3:9). Though no one can pay his or her own moral indebtedness and live (Ps 49), through the crucifixion Jesus paid the moral debt of every human (1 John 2:2). So it would be appropriate to ask why would anyone be excluded from heaven? The judgment is the public, visible process of determining who will fit into the society of heaven, who will enjoy a culture of service. Many who call themselves nonbelievers will discover, when all the misunderstandings have been swept away, that God is precisely the ideal to which they devoted their lives.

The most famous picture of the judgment is a story Jesus told. He pictures God as a shepherd separating his sheep and goats. The sheep are the good people and the goats are the bad people. The sheep are commended for their goodness, which consisted of giving God food when he was hungry, water when he was thirsty and visits when he was incarcerated. The sheep protest they never saw God hungry, thirsty or in jail. God responds, "What you did to the lowliest persons, you did to me" (Matt 25). The goats are excluded because they refused to give care. The great divide between the saved and lost is how they responded to down-to-earth human need, not how spiritual were their words.

The story of the sheep and goats does not contradict the theory that we are saved by faith, but it does qualify it. In reality, neither faith nor works is the fundamental cause of our salvation; rather, we are saved by grace–the generous, merciful activity of God. "Faith" and "works" are different ways of describing the human yielding to grace. God has given us a number of ways to express our faith: baptism, the Lord's Supper, Sabbath-keeping, and, of course, words. But trumping all of these is the gift of opportunities to serve.

Ultimately God is judge. But because of Jesus' words about the sheep and goats, I could offer strong hope to Janet about Bill. And we are confident many who are not Christians will be saved at last. They will be in heaven because God will read their hearts and see that what they rejected was not him but a false god. God will demonstrate to the universe that through their care for people in need these "unbelievers" were, in fact, serving Jesus in camouflage. Their real loyalty is to the values of heaven. They have not "earned" heaven by their good deeds, but they have demonstrated a wordless faith in the God who saves. And God will take great delight in astonishing them with his invitation: "Come, you who are blessed by my Father; take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world" (Matt 25:34).