Someone always asks “What about those who never heard of Jesus, would God be so unjust as to send them to hell when they never heard the gospel?
Let’s draw an analogy using the recent tragedy in Haiti where, because of an earthquake, thousands of people are sick, injured, dying, and homeless on a scale we in America can hardly imagine. Countries are doing their very best to send aid, medical supplies, and food, to alleviate suffering.
Has any sane person asked if America would be so unfair to let those people in Haiti die just because they did not get the aid? Has anyone said the Haitians were doing fine until those aid workers came to their villages? Will the history books record that the Haitians were living peaceably, making their own way, living in their own houses with joy in their hearts until those ugly Americans came in and made them live in tents, and forced them to stand for hours in line just to get food and water!
To do so would show either a gross ignorance of the earthquake and what it did or would show a hidden agenda on the part of the historian to make America look bad. To ask similar questions about the aid God has sent and the missionary effort likewise shows either a gross ignorance of the “earthquake” of sin that has devastated all mankind, or it reveals a hidden agenda.
John Piper put it very succinctly:
God is not unjust. No one will be condemned for not believing a message he has never heard. Those who have never heard the gospel will be judged by their failure to own up to the light of God’s grace and power in nature and in their own conscience. This is the point of Romans 1:20-21. His invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse. For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him.
Apart from the special, saving grace of God, people are dead in sin, darkened in their understanding, alienated from the life of God, and hardened in heart (Ephesians 2:1; 4:18). And the means God has ordained to administer that special saving grace is the preaching of the gospel of Jesus Christ. – Desiring God Meditations of a Christian Hedonist, page 227
For us to understand what God is doing we need a paradigm shift – to recognize the indoctrination we have accepted as truth, and to choose a biblical point of view.
fritz@langgang.com
