Tuesday, September 20, 2011

What of those who haven't heard of Jesus? The Christian Answer

In John 14:6 Jesus declared, “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through Me.” Jesus’ words make it clear that He alone has brought God’s gift of salvation to the world. But do His words also mean that everyone who hasn’t heard of Him will be condemned to hell?


Abraham lived long before Christ. When he told Isaac that God would provide a sacrifice, his words were strikingly prophetic, but he could not possibly understand their true significance. He knew nothing about the Lamb of God who would die on a cross nearly 2,000 years later. People like Abel, Enoch, Noah, Job, Melchizedek, Abraham, Sarah, and Jacob never heard the gospel, yet Hebrews 11:13 leaves no doubt that they are all in heaven.


No one in Old Testament had a clear understanding of the role that Jesus Christ would someday play in atoning for sin. But 2,000 years before the gospel was revealed, the faith of Old Testament believers was already “credited to them as righteousness” (Genesis 15:6; Psalm 106:31; Galatians 3:6).


Faith in God always involved confidence that God would somehow provide for the forgiveness of sins. Faith always anticipated the coming of Christ and His sacrifice on our behalf. Old Testament believers offered sacrifices as an expression of their faith.  By themselves, sacrificial offerings could never take away sin.  When they were offered in faith, however, God accepted them because they pointed to Jesus Christ, the one sacrifice worthy to atone for all the sins of the world (Hebrews 10:1-17 ).


One of the most amazing missionary stories of the 20th century was the martyrdom of five young missionaries (including Jim Elliot and Nate Saint) in Ecuador and the conversion of the Auca Indians.  The first convert from the Auca tribe was a young woman named Dayuma.  Remarkably, Dayuma was predisposed to accept the gospel because of her father’s influence.  Although he had never heard the name of Jesus, he spoke out against the blood feuds that were an Auca way of life.  Unlike the others of his tribe, he was deeply conscious of his sinful nature and knew that he and his people needed forgiveness.  He told Dayuma that some day God would send a messenger to the Aucas to tell them the way of salvation.  Like Old Testament believers, Dayuma’s father was still living by faith when he died ( Hebrews 11:13 ). The witness of his life implies that he would have been overjoyed to hear the gospel, but he died before missionaries came.


Does the Bible give us grounds for insisting that Dayuma’s father is any different in God’s eyes than the believers of the Old Testament?   Clearly, Dayuma’s father, like Abraham, would face eternal damnation apart from Christ’s shed blood.   Apparent, too, is the deep spiritual need of those, like the Auca people, who live in fear and spiritual darkness.   The fact that Christ is the only way to God places on us the responsibility to make Him known to all.


Paul, the apostle to the Gentiles asked:
for, “Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.”  How, then, can they call on the one they have not believed in? And how can they believe in the one of whom they have not heard? And how can they hear without someone preaching to them? Romans 10:13-14


But there isn’t a passage of Scripture that proves that God looks upon Dayuma’s father differently than He looked upon Old Testament believers who had only a faint idea of the nature of coming redemption.   The apostle Paul had this issue in mind when he wrote the first chapters of Romans, declaring that God has revealed Himself in creation “The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of people, who suppress the truth by their wickedness, since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them.  For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse.”  Romans 1:18-20 and in human conscience  “All who sin apart from the law will also perish apart from the law, and all who sin under the law will be judged by the law. For it is not those who hear the law who are righteous in God’s sight, but it is those who obey the law who will be declared righteous. (Indeed, when Gentiles, who do not have the law, do by nature things required by the law, they are a law for themselves, even though they do not have the law.  They show that the requirements of the law are written on their hearts, their consciences also bearing witness, and their thoughts sometimes accusing them and at other times even defending them.) This will take place on the day when God judges people’s secrets through Jesus Christ, as my gospel declares.  Romans 2:12-16 


The gospel clearly states that each individual will be judged according to his response to these two revelations of God.  To those who respond positively, God gives more knowledge—as He did to the Ethiopian eunuch and the Roman centurion, Cornelius (see Acts 8,10 ).  Those who are lost will be judged according to their response to the spiritual light they have received ( Hebrews 4:12-13). 


I believe that God will extend His grace to Dayuma’s father on the basis of Christ’s shed blood, just as He did to Enoch, Melchizedek, Job, Abraham, and Sarah—people who had only the faintest intimation of the means by which God would provide for their redemption. In the final analysis, we must leave this matter in God’s keeping.  He is both just and loving.  We can be assured that the Judge of all the earth will do right.


To learn more about Jim Elliot and the Auca tribe watch one of two movies  “ End of the Spear” or the documentary “Beyond the Gates of Splendor



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