Board index ‹ Heaven and Hell

[Russell the Muscle]

Prior to Christianity, people were polytheistic or worshiped different monotheistic gods. Are all these people burning in hell right now since they didn't believe in the Christian/Jewish god?

[jimwalton]

No. Abraham is in heaven (Galatians 3.6-9). Moses and Elijah are both in heaven (Matthew 17.1-5).

In the book of Romans (5.13), Paul says people will only be held accountable for the information they had and what they did with it. They will not be judged according to a law they didn't have, and we can also assume they won't be judged because they didn't know a person they had no possibility of knowing. There is a principal of reasonable accountability. According to Romans 5.13, people are not held accountable for what they had no possibility of knowing or knowing about. In Deuteronomy 1.39, the children who were too young to make a realistic decision are not judged, but are shown mercy; their level of accountability was directly related to their moral awareness. Isa. 7.15-16 teaches the same thing: God deals differently with people based on their knowledge. So we're getting a sense of the fairness of God, and that he takes many things into consideration as he makes his perfect decisions. So people who had no way of knowing Jesus because of where they lived, or people who were prior to Christianity, will be judged according to a fair standard.

So what about people who lived in Asia, or on Papua New Guinea, or South Africa, or Alaska, who never heard of Jesus but lived and died? They will be judged fairly given their own motivations and actions. People will be judged according to the information they had, what they did with it, and their motives behind it. Every judgment will be fair based on what information people had, what they knew, what their motives were, and how they behaved given what they had access to. Otherwise, it wouldn't be fair. So if someone hasn't heard of Christianity, they can't be held accountable for Christianity. But they will be held accountable for what they do know.

C.S. Lewis said, "Here is another thing that used to puzzle me. Is it not frightfully unfair that this should be confined to people who have heard of Christ and have been able to believe in him? But the truth is God has not told us what his arrangements about the other people are. We do know that no man can be saved except through Christ; we do not know that only those who know Him can be saved through Him. But in the meantime, if you are worried about the people outside, the most unreasonable thing you can do is to remain outside yourself. ... If you want to help those outside you must add your own little cell to the body of Christ who alone can help them. Cutting off a man's fingers would be an odd way of getting him to do more work. ..."

[Russell the Muscle]

What about the people who have heard of God's message but simply don't believe it? Like your Jews, Muslims, buddhists, Hindus, and agnostics?

[jimwalton]

That's a different question than you asked at first, but the Bible says they will go to hell. People who have heard the truth and willfully reject it are choosing against truth and against the true God.

[Russell the Muscle]

Well it's hard for me to believe in one god my whole life and then some missionary out of nowhere comes and tells me that his god is the true god and that I must accept it or I go to hell. I mean people can't just jump up and say "oh okay I believe in the Christian god now!"

[jimwalton]

> I mean people can't just jump up and say "oh okay I believe in the Christian god now!"

Actually, people do that all the time. The issue is this: all religions can't be true. Some beliefs are false (this is quite obvious sometimes). So it's just nonsense to say that all beliefs are true, for the simple reason that to deny that statement would also then be true (if we believed it). So if the denial of that statement is true, then all religions aren't true. So we basically have only two choices: no religion is true, or one is true and the others are not.

Another reason all religions can't be true is because they contradict each other, and even simple logic tells us that A cannot equal non-A. We have the same two choices: either none are true, or one is true and the others are not. It's impossible by logic and reasoning that all religions are true.

Some might claim "they are belief systems, and they all lead to the same place." But that can't be so, either. God, if He exists, is not a place, an experience, or a feeling. We try to get around that by claiming we all get to determiner our own truth. But in no other discipline or intellectual pursuit are we so naive as to claim such a thing. It's a catastrophic error of logic to think that all religions are the same, or all are right, and that not a single one can lay claim to objective truth.

The truth is obvious: all religions are not the same. Not even the religions themselves say all religions are the same. No one says that except those who try to marginalize religions. At the heart of every religion is a distinct way of defining God and truth. Every religion at its core is exclusive.

We have to be discerning of the truth. It takes both courage and conviction to recognize that one may have been believing the wrong things one's whole life and to make a change. Millions do it. No one is born a Christian. Some commit their lives to Christ after having grown up in a Christian environment, but millions upon millions turn to Christ out of other belief systems.