Transcript:

“What happens to the people who have never heard of the gospel? Yes, I actually struggled with this one myself for a while. I did a teaching on it a few years back, and so I’ll put a link to the video down below for the full teaching on this. I actually surveyed through scriptures to try to support each point where I talk about, so I’ll just summarize a few things. Here’s some principles to have in mind: Nobody’s condemned because they’re ignorant of the gospel, like they’ve never heard the name of Jesus, now they’re condemned. That never happens. That’s not a biblical idea. They’re only judged for what they do know. God judges us based on what we do know. Jesus even talks about this, that being judged according to our knowledge, the judgment for His generation was greater because they had seen Him and experienced His miracles, so it was a bigger deal. But they do know stuff. Everybody does know stuff, so they know that God exists. They know that sin is real, and they’ve sinned against God. This is stuff everyone knows. I say ‘know’ loosely here because it’s stuff everybody is accountable for knowing. That’s the real term I should use here, like creation makes it obvious to us, but I can choose to reject that knowledge of God. And so, I may not retain it; I may not currently be like, ‘I don’t think atheists really know God exists, like they’re just lying when they say they’re atheists.’ I’m not saying that, but there’s accountability—they should know God exists. And then how they respond to this knowledge is something that they are going to be judged for when they stand before God. So, I also know God wants people to be saved, and people can respond to general revelation, and I also know that biblically, God responds to people who are seeking Him. So, if someone reaches out to God like, ‘Ah, I know there’s a God, I know I’ve got sin issues, like help,’ and they don’t know anything about Jesus, I think there’s a chance God reveals more to them than they get, and they actually end up being saved. And we have Old Testament examples of this, like guys like Naaman in 2 Kings 5. He comes to Israel; he does not become a Jew, but he sees that the God of Israel is true, and so he rejects all the pagan gods and decides he’s going to only worship Yahweh. But he’s not even becoming Jewish; he’s not part of the covenant, but it seems as though he’s saved. And there’s other examples of this, where they have, I’ll use the term, they have partial faith or partial knowledge. They have actual faith, but it’s faith with partial knowledge. Like they know the true God and they’re trusting in Him for grace, but they don’t know all the details about Jesus. And I get into this in more detail in my longer study, but basically, when Jesus shows up, He reveals that how people responded to the things already revealed is how they’ll respond when they get more information about Jesus. In John, He’s like, ‘Hey, if you believed Moses, you would have believed Me. If you believed the revelation you were already given, you would have believed Me.’ So those people like Naaman, who didn’t know about Jesus, when they encounter Christ later, they’re already trusting in Him—they just didn’t know His name, they didn’t know the details. And so, Jesus is the only way to salvation, but for those who’ve never heard, they’re only judged based on their response to what they did hear. And there’s a chance that, yeah, there’s a chance to be saved. Sadly, it seems like humans generally don’t take that route, right? They tend to not turn to the God that is revealed in creation. And I would say there’s a nuance here that I’d like to add just to make sure that my point isn’t misunderstood, which is that saying that there’s a way for people to be saved if they haven’t heard of Jesus, I want to be careful here and say it’s Jesus—He’s the way. Can you access Jesus by responding to partial revelation properly? And the answer I would say is yes, you can, but that doesn’t mean it’s an automatic pass—’I never heard the gospel, I’m saved.’ That’s not the answer I’m giving actually at all. I’m saying there’s a potential, but it seems that people generally speaking end up rejecting. And when the light of the gospel goes out, that’s more light, that’s more knowledge, and it’s more opportunity for them to receive, so it does increase the number of people who end up being saved. And that people worshipping false gods is evidence that they rejected the revelation of God, so that’s a condemning thing. Yeah, so this is where I get into my—I’m a bit twisted, and at times, I want these kinds of things to bother people. You know, I want these kinds of questions to just really eat at people and realize that this is—again, I said it before—life and death. This is important stuff we’re talking about dealing with here. And if you’re bothered by this question, if you’re not sure what you’ve heard about Jesus and you need to, you know, it’s eating at you, good. It’s time to figure that out. Find somebody you can talk to about this and get to the bottom of it. It’s important stuff.”

See original video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=geMXJX3Q6sE