What is the fate of those who have never heard the gospel? What about the innocent person in a far-away land that has never heard of Jesus? Are they thrown into hell even if they haven’t heard of Jesus? Another way of asking this question is this: how does God deal with people who have different levels of exposure to the truth? This is an issue of ultimate seriousness and I hope to treat it as such.
Three Kinds of Responses
1) Exclusivism – Faith in Jesus through the gospel is necessary for salvation.
2) Inclusivism – Faith in God in general revelation is sufficient. Postmortem Evangelism - Those who have never heard the gospel will have an opportunity to trust Christ after death. This view is traditionally called “postmortem evangelism.” It concurs with exclusivism when it stresses that faith is a conscious and explicit trust in Christ but sides with inclusivism when it contends that the love and justice of God require that everyone be given an opportunity to trust Christ.
3) Pluralism – all paths are valid and true.
Universalism – Here the thought is that everyone will ultimately be saved. According to this view, every human being God has created will finally come to enjoy everlasting salvation. Here’s how the Bible responds to this important and solemn question (and how I hope you learn to deal with it as well)… There are four steps to Paul’s argument in Romans 1:19-21. I want to show you Paul’s conclusion first and then work backwards.
1. All People Have Heard of God
“For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. 20 For 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” (Romans 1:19–20).
Paul’s conclusion is found in verse twenty: “So they are without excuse” (Romans 1:20). So, the Bible says, they do know God. And how does everyone know God? Because God made the world. He created - like a potter, or a sculptor or a poet, except he created out of nothing. In verse twenty, when it says that God is “[has] been clearly perceived,” through “the things that have been made” stand for one Greek word (which you will all recognize), the word poiema. It’s the word from which we get “poem.” The point is that in a poem there is manifest design and intention and wisdom and power. The wind might create a letter in the sand, but not a poem. That’s the point: God acted, God planned, God designed, and God crafted. And by doing that, Paul says in verse nineteen, God made himself evident to all mankind. The universe is a poem about God. What can be known is evident among them – God’s eternal power and God’s divine nature are known by everyone. This means that you and every person you will meet in this city are the creation of God and designed by God for a purpose, namely, to communicate God. You are God’s poem. The conclusion is people are without excuse.
1. All People Have Heard of God
2. All People Have Rejected God
“For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened. 22 Claiming to be wise, they became fools, 23 and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things. 24 Therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves, because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever! Amen” (Romans 1:21–25).
Then look at Paul’s three steps to this conclusion…
Step #2 is in verse 21: “they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him”
People are without excuse and are deserving of the wrath of God… because there’s no one that honors God as God. People are without excuse and are deserving of the wrath of God… because there’s no one that gives God thanks. People know there’s a God and they suppress the truth and the result of such suppression is… People become “futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened” (Romans 1:21b). The Bible calls this act idolatry.
1. All People Have Heard of God
2. All People Have Rejected God
3. All People Are Guilty Before God
Step #3 is in verse: the failure to worship is not because of their ignorance. The failure to worship is in spite of sufficient knowledge of God. But look also in Romans 2:14: “For when Gentiles, who do not have the law, by nature do what the law requires, they are a law to themselves, even though they do not have the law” (Romans 2:14). All human beings have the moral law of God stamped on their hearts. We see this teaching before back in Romans 1:32: “Though they know God’s righteous decree that those who practice such things deserve to die, they not only do them but give approval to those who practice them” (Romans 1:32).
And again in Romans 1:26: “For this reason God gave them up to dishonorable passions. For their women exchanged natural relations for those that are contrary to nature” (Romans 1:26). And again in Romans 1:21: “they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him.” And the point of it all is to stress that every human being is guilty before God because everyone suppresses (1:18) the truth and none lives up to even the demands of his own conscience, let alone all the demands of God known to him. The simple truth is this: the heart doesn’t want God as its ruler.
1. All People Have Heard of God
2. All People Have Rejected God
3. All People Are Guilty Before God
4. All of Us Need Jesus to Save Us
So now we have four steps:
Step 4: The conclusion - All men are without excuse and deserve the wrath of God.
Step 3: This is because they do not glorify God as God or give him thanks.
Step 2: This failure of worship is not because of innocent ignorance, but in the face of sufficient knowledge about God.
Step #4 is at the end of verse 19: “God has shown it to them.” “For God shows no partiality” (Romans 2:11). The Truth about God is that He is not partial. This means is that God judges not on the assumption that we all have access to the same amount of truth… but that we all have the truth we need to be held accountable, and that we will be judged by our response to what we do have, not what we don’t have. God always punishes people because of what they know and fail to believe. In other words, no one will be condemned for not believing in Jesus who has never heard of Jesus. Does that mean that people will be saved and go to heaven if they have never heard of Jesus? No, that is not what God tells us in the Bible. I know of no other text that so clearly lays out the process of salvation as this text does. “How then will they call on him in whom they have not believed? And how are they to believe in him of whom they have never heard? And how are they to hear without someone preaching? 15 And how are they to preach unless they are sent” (Romans 10:14-15a)?
We are given Five Steps toward Faith in verses fourteen and fifteen. These steps outline the necessary progression before anyone can call upon the name of the Lord. Each step is described with a series of rhetorical questions. The culmination of the series of questions is expressed first in the list: “How then will they call on him in whom they have not believed” (Romans 10:14a)? While the last question, located at the beginning of verse fifteen, is the foundation of all the questions: “And how are they to preach unless they are sent”(Romans 10:15a)? we have a series of four questions in these two verses that form a logical chain.
And again, THE QUESTIONS FORM A SEQUENCE. Only Paul gives this sequence in reverse order. So the result is given at the beginning while the first step is given last. So if you were to see this sequence fleshed out where a person comes to Christ as His Savior and Lord… it would work this way:
1. A Christian is sent (verse 15a);
2. This Christian is sent to tell the Gospel (verse 14c);
3. People hear the Gospel because of this Gospel-telling Christian (verse 14b);
4. People believe in the message they have heard (verse 14a);
5. The people who believe will then call upon the name of the Lord (verse 13).
If we put the six verbs Paul uses in these verses together in reverse order, we see the Bible’s logic for evangelism and missions:
Christ sends evangelists;
Evangelists preach;
People hear;
Hearers believe;
Believers call;
And in verse thirteen, those who call are saved.
Verse seventeen sums up Paul’s argument: “So faith comes from hearing, and hearing through the word of Christ” (Romans 10:17).
Our job description is tied up in this series of four questions. It is impossible for anyone to call upon the name of the Lord until a Christian is sent. They can only call upon the name of Christ, if they have already believed in Him. They can only believe in Him, if they have heard of Him. And they can only hear of Him, if a person proclaims the message. And the message can only be proclaimed, if a Christian is sent.
We must go across our community… across the country… or across the continents. People must be sent. The Latin word for sent is the word “missa” and it’s where we get the word missionary. Missionaries are people who are sent. Apart from the preaching of the Gospel, and the awakening work of the Holy Spirit that leads to faith in Christ, nobody is saved today. That’s Paul’s point in these first two-and-a-half chapters of Romans. The reason for this - the reason no one is saved in this way, apart from hearing the gospel of Christ - is that everyone without Christ “suppresses the truth in unrighteousness” (Romans 1:18). Everyone hardens his heart against repentance (Romans 2:5). Charles Spurgeon was once asked his opinion about those who had never heard of Jesus or the gospel. His response sting rings true today: “How can they be saved without ever hearing about Jesus? We should rather ask, how can we be saved if we do nothing to take the gospel to them?”
