The New Testament defines the gospel of Jesus Christ clearly. Jesus speaking of himself said that those who believe will be saved and those who don’t believe will be lost (John 3:18). This black and white, either-or, “binary” option is repeated many times over in the New Testament, so that one profound question often posed by skeptics and believers alike concerns the destiny of millions who’ve never even heard the gospel of Jesus Christ. They were born at a time or in a culture where the gospel did not reach. Will they be rejected by God at the judgment, and sent to hell?
SKIP A BIT BROTHER! Hi to all my wonderful readers. This is a VERY long article in two parts! Part 2 will be published the day after part 1. Scroll to subheadings if you want to, but you may miss useful information. This article is not a hard and fast statement of doctrine and it’s not complete or refined by any means – it’s more a collection of observations designed to point us to the answer. My direction in this matter is taken entirely from the Bible, with a little common sense thrown in. If you try to come at this question outside of the Bible you are just speculating. Please forgive me for any ugly ads or gaps inserted by WordPress.
MY POINT. In this article I argue that while Jesus Christ is the only source of salvation for all who believe, Biblical Scripture does not block the inclusion of far-off and uninformed people into the eternal home we call “heaven”.
IS HEAVEN FOR CHRISTIANS ONLY? Under the umbrella of Christianity are varying degrees of conviction as to the necessity of faith in Jesus Christ alone, but to the Bible-believer and the serious evangelical Christ alone is the author and the finisher of our salvation. He alone paid the price of our sin, and there is no other name under heaven by which we can be saved (Acts 4:12). Without Christ, we are all lost. This was his own teaching:
“I am the way the truth and the life. No-one comes to the Father but by me” (John 14:6).
CREATING GOD. What does this say about all those millions and billions of people who have lived and who live now in far away and remote places? Are they rejected and sent to hell by God because they never hear the gospel before they die? The skeptic or unbeliever rejects the Christian message sometimes with the excuse that our gospel is too narrow and only applies to specific people groups, leaving huge and important cultures and civilizations out of the picture. Ironically the same people oppose the preaching of the gospel. God, or the universe, or whatever is above us spiritually cannot possibly be so uncaring as to reject those who don’t even hear the good news, goes the agnostic and multicultural reasoning, and so the Christian gospel is thrown aside or altered to fit a more acceptable and palatable view.
One of the downfalls of this antagonism is in assuming that “if” there’s a God, He must be completely fair and not at all judgmental. How do we know that’s the case? Perhaps He’s totally arbitrary in His views, and perhaps He’s an ogre and a despot: who’s to know? If He is, what can we do about it? Can God only be that which fits a humanistic view of fairness? Are we free to create God, if God is real? No, God created us, and we cannot and should not try to re-create Him. If God were to send every one of us to Hell, that’s His prerogative, since He is our maker and we have no rights other than what He allows us. We certainly have no power to stop Him. The sin of pride is in assuming that we know better or can know better than God, or that we can somehow make God in our own image.
OUR ETERNAL DESTINY IS NOT FORCED UPON US. The Bible tells us that “God is love”, and it tells us that God so loved the world that He sent His only son to die as a sacrifice for our sin. The gospel is God’s message of love to us through Jesus Christ. What do we do, then, with the question of those who have never heard the gospel? Does God not love those people? Extreme Reformists will insist that God is being “loving” even when He sends the lost to Hell by His own will and without their say-so: that is most definitely not my position at all, and I’m convinced it isn’t Biblical. Christ died for the whole world, not just for some. Does this mean that everyone will go to God’s heaven? No, it does not, and neither, as our Reformist brothers and sisters believe, can we be “good” enough to get there on our own. Our eternal destiny is conditioned upon God’s mercy, our faith, the state of our hearts and the testimony of our lives.
GOD’S FILTER. Do some people face judgment because they’re more sinful, while some are so good that God gives them an eternity in heaven? That isn’t the message of Scripture. Instead, Paul clarified the New Testament message that we all fall short of pleasing God, and none of us are good enough to claim a place in heaven. We’re all dependent on the mercy of God, and we can find that mercy through the life and sacrifice of Jesus Christ. Think of the parable of two men in the temple, told by Jesus. One, an important religious figure, took pride in himself and thanked God that he wasn’t a “sinner” like the other. The other beat his chest and begged God for mercy, recognizing his sin. Jesus tells us that the man asking for mercy received it, while the self-righteous priest didn’t. There is no free pass to heaven for those who are “righteous”, because no-one is righteous enough to please a perfect God.
MERCY. Mercy is the kingpin of God’s plan of salvation, through the sacrifice of Christ. We could use that other powerful word “grace” which represents the generous lengths to which God is prepared to go to freely forgive us of our sin. However, God’s grace and mercy must be accepted, and without that acceptance on our part we are still lost in our sin. God wishes to give us His mercy, but expects our contrition, our repentance and our request for His mercy, be it conscious or not. The alternative is pride, which God hates.
“God has bound everyone over to disobedience so that he may have mercy on them all” (Romans 11:32).
Grace is not license. We can’t ask for mercy and then just live any old way we want to. That’s hypocrisy – the one thing Jesus Christ got angry about in his earthly ministry. If we flaunt God’s mercy there is no other recourse; no other way to salvation from our sinful state (Galatians 6:7). With this principle in mind, we can begin to piece together from Scripture how God deals with those who have never heard the gospel of Jesus Christ.
GOOD IGNORANCE? Our first example is the conversion of Paul the apostle. Initially he knew some facts about Jesus’ life and about those who followed Jesus, but he knew far more about the Law of Moses, because he was trained in the Law by experts. He was locked into a hard and fast commitment to the Law and a zealous anger against anyone deviating from that Law. But then he had a very remarkable conversion experience with Jesus, who he had previously not believed to be anything other than a man, and an impostor. This was one of the things he later observed about his own conversion:
“Even though I was once a blasphemer and a persecutor and a violent man, I was shown mercy because I acted in ignorance and unbelief….” (1Timothy 1:13-16).
The point I want to draw attention to is that Paul was shown mercy by God because he had acted in “ignorance and unbelief”! We look upon these things negatively; as being the very enemies of God’s grace, but they weren’t enough to hold back the mercy of God! Ignorance means being unaware of certain knowledge: there was something Paul didn’t know. He was zealous for God, but his zeal was misdirected because of his ignorance. He didn’t see divinity in Jesus and oppose it – he was ignorant of it. Notice that he didn’t have to fulfill any formula or to get his theology right before Jesus appeared to him, and before God showed him mercy through the gospel. God saw Paul’s heart and revealed himself to him while Paul was living in sin and rebellion against the Church. God worked in his life to bring him to the truth.
JESUS DIED FOR THE WHOLE WORLD. Is it not possible that others in “ignorance” and “unbelief” can also be the recipients of God’s mercy? Is His mercy even available to people who are totally ignorant of Christ’s life and sacrifice? Does it apply in other cultures to people who have no Mosaic Law and no Bible to guide them? Perhaps at this point it’s helpful to remember that Christ didn’t just die for Jews or for the people of Asia Minor who Paul preached to, he died for the whole world.
“He is the atoning sacrifice for our sins, and not only for ours but also for the sins of the whole world” (1 John2:2).
Remember also that “God so loved the world that he gave his only son” (John 3:16). We should not shrink “the world” into our own human mold for the sake of a theological position. God loves his creation, fallen as it is.
THE GOSPEL BEFORE CHRIST. What happened to all those who lived before the time of Christ? And what about the millions who were still in ignorance while Paul, Peter and the others were working their way around the Roman Empire in the first century? Were they all lost in sin, having never heard the gospel of Jesus Christ? Not according to the record of the Old Testament. Enoch “walked with God” thousands of years before Christ lived and before the Law and was taken to heaven (Heb. 11:5-6). Abraham was considered to be righteous long before the gospel of Christ:
“Abraham believed God, and it was credited to him as righteousness” (Romans 4:3).
David, a thousand years before Christ, recognised that people are saved from sin by faith (Romans 4:6-8). He knew one thousand years before Christ and the Christian gospel that God required faith:
“If you, O Lord, kept a record of sins,
O Lord, who could stand?
But with you there is forgiveness;
Therefore you are feared” (Psalm 130:3-4).
Melchizedek was the “priest of God most high” and a type of Christ even before the Mosaic law came along and certainly long before Jesus (Hebrews 7:1-3). Noah, two and half millennia before Christ, was considered righteous and so was delivered from the Flood, along with his family. Peter called him “a preacher of righteousness” (2 Peter 2:5) even though Noah had never heard of Jesus or the gospel of Christ or the Law. Moses, long before Christ and the Law was considered by God to be righteous. Hebrews even tells us that “Moses accepted disgrace for the sake of Christ” (Hebrews 11:26). Space and time doesn’t permit me to go into this reference to Christ being acknowledged before his incarnation.
ONCE FOR ALL. Here, then, we must consider another huge Biblical fact in our line of thought, which is that Christ didn’t just die for people of his time – the first century – and not just for those who would come after him, but for people of all time. Abraham, Moses and all the great characters of the Old Testament profited from the sacrifice of Christ, so that they were saved by faith, thanks to the mercy of God through Jesus Christ. Skeptics make a fundamental mistake when they accuse the Christian gospel of coming along “late” in time, after their preferred philosophers and deities. Jesus didn’t appear on the earth “late” in time:
“And by that will, we have been made holy through the sacrifice of the body of Jesus Christ once for all” (Hebrews 10:10).
“…he has appeared once for all at the culmination of the ages to do away with sin by the sacrifice of himself. Just as people are destined to die once, and after that to face judgment, so Christ was sacrificed once to take away the sins of many” (Hebrews 9:26-28).
The blood of bulls and goats could not take away sin under the Law: they were a representation of the sacrifice of Christ which was yet future. The sins of past generations were atoned for by the sacrifice of Jesus on the cross.
HUMANS ARE JUDGED BY WHAT THEY ARE GIVEN, NOT BY FIXED CRITERIA. Jesus described how apart from the revealed mercy of God people are judged in accordance with what they’re given, not by a fixed set of criteria, so that those who are enlightened and informed have less excuse than those who are not. The servant who knows his masters will but doesn’t do it will be judged more severely than the one who doesn’t know his master’s will (Luke 14:47-48). Paul said that those who rejected the Law of Moses died without mercy (Romans 10:28). Paul also defined the flip side of his point:
“…because the law brings wrath. And where there is no law there is no transgression” (Rom 4:15).
No transgression! It seems logical to assume, then, that God is less likely to condemn a man or woman living in complete ignorance of His word, living in the outer reaches of the world perhaps in the fifth century, than He is to condemn someone who has heard the gospel of Christ in the twenty-first century but goes his own way anyway. Luke notes the principle that God expects more from those who are given more, and therefore less from those who are given less:
“But the one who does not know and does things deserving punishment will be beaten with few blows. From everyone who has been given much, much will be demanded; and from the one who has been entrusted with much, much more will be asked” (Luke 12:48).
If we apply this principle to the extent of our knowledge of God it seems that those enlightened and tutored in the ways of God must deliver accordingly. If we extrapolate in the opposite direction, it seems that if someone knows very little about God, has never even seen a Bible, never heard a sermon or been told about Jesus, less will be expected of him or her.
BETTER WITHOUT KNOWLEDGE?
Someone may argue, given the above, that it’s better to not to be enlightened, so that you would be less likely to be judged. On the contrary, rather than leave to chance the salvation of a soul, so that a man or woman goes his own lost way without spiritual direction, the light of truth should be available to help those who will love it and follow it to more truth.
Thank you for reading! Part two contains some important material. It will be published 24 hours after this one.
Fuel for Faith, Food for Thought 