The following is from Midtown Fellowship: Lexington’s Q+A sermon on 2/23/2020.
The general flow of thought with this question goes something like this. It looks at passages like Romans 10 which says:
For “everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.” 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? . . . So faith comes from hearing, and hearing through the word of Christ. (Rom. 10:13–15, 17)
The chain of logic in Paul’s mind seems pretty straightforward:
The only way to be saved is to call on Christ’s name.
The only way to call on Christ’s name is to believe the gospel.
The only way to believe the gospel is to hear the gospel.
The only way to hear the gospel is to be told the gospel.
So, the person is asking, “If this is true, what about people who, for one reason or another, never have the opportunity to hear it? Perhaps, due how and when and where they were born or died? Is this fair?”
Personally, I think this is a really, really good question… and really difficult one - not just because of the intellectual and theological issues it raises, but because of the emotion behind it. These are questions rooted in love and care for the disadvantaged and a desire for fairness and understanding.
So, I think it’s wisest to respond to this in a couple of different ways. So let’s start here:
Why do people go to hell - or why do people receive God’s judgment - in the first place?
Romans 1:18–23 [18] For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth. [19] 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. [21] 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. (ESV)
No one receives God’s judgment because they haven’t had the chance to hear about Jesus. And that’s important. Humans receive God’s judgment because they reject God. They choose to define right and wrong for themselves - or in the language of the Bible, they choose to do what is right in their own eyes. They choose to treat things that aren’t God as though they were God - whether that be idols crafted to resemble created things like animals or other humans like in non-Western portions of the world - or just how we do it by devoting our lives to the little gods of money, or success, or comfort or kids. This is what the Bible would call sin.
And the Bible is clear - we’ve got enough evidence to know God is God by what’s around us. You can go back and check out week 1 of this series where we made that case. So, no one is without excuse.
At this point, I think it’s important for us to recognize some assumptions that lie at the base at how this question is sometimes asked - especially when it’s posed about a tribesman in a far off land. There is a latent assumption built into it that perhaps someone might be inherently good and have a God-ward disposition but simply be ignorant… and the question becomes, “Well, obviously this tribesman means well - he just didn’t know! Will God hold him accountable for his ignorance?
The problem is that assumption violates the reality of the human condition and fails to see sin as God sees sin. It posits that humanity is basically good… that sin is more akin to little foolish mistakes than an affront to a holy King. It’s a very white, Western way of thinking about humanity… that humans are merely the victims of their own context and would make the right decisions if they had access to the right education.
But, the Bible and really all of human history tell us that it is fantasy. Like Romans 3 (quoting the Psalms says) There is no one who does good. There is none who seeks after God.” Would God condemn an innocent tribesman? Absolutely not… there simply are no innocent tribesmen.
Now there are some who will argue that if the tribesman knows he is unrighteous and trusts in God’s mercy over his own righteousness for salvation - even though he has no specific knowledge of Jesus - like the tax collector in Luke 18 or certain individuals from the Old Testament - then God will save them based on their faith via the limited revelation they’ve been given.
There’s an argument to be made there… but the Bible presents a lot of problems with that view. The least of which is not Romans 10 which we read earlier and the account of Cornelius in Acts 10 - who was as devout as a guy who didn’t specifically know Jesus could be… and yet to save him the Spirit had to come to him in a dream and tell him to be on the lookout for someone to come tell him about Jesus…
But that begs the question:
What about babies and the mentally-handicapped?
And it gets a bit trickier because unlike the tribesman, this category of person can’t consciously suppress the truth about anything - they don’t possess that ability… so what does God do in these circumstances?
Now, Christian opinion varies depending on who you talk to - and the truth is - we don’t entirely know because the Bible doesn’t explicitly talk about this like it does those who choose sin consciously… but I’ll give you what I think the Scriptures most clearly teach and where I personally land…
I think we can most likely infer from the Scriptures that God imparts the saving grace of Jesus to children who die young and the mentally-handicapped apart from their ability to have conscious faith. Here’s why:
We have ample evidence in the Scriptures that the Spirit can and does touch children in the womb - we have examples of this like David and John the Baptist and even Jesus himself. And that Jesus even teaches that the kingdom belongs to children (Mark 10:14). Which was actually a pretty radical thing to say in this society that valued children far less than we do now.
And I know this opens up a whole other can of worms that we won’t go into, but there is evidence that children from believing households are conceptually in a different “position” than those outside the fold. According to Ephesians 6:1, they have access to covenant promises and, in 1 Corinthians 7:14, that they are made holy by a believing parent.
And then there is 2 Samuel 12:23 - when David’s son dies he says “I will go to him”. This certainly could mean “I too will die.” But in the next verse we read, “Then, David comforted his wife” (2 Sam. 12:24). I think it more likely that v. 23 was a comfort to David and Bathsheba because David knew he would see his child again in the next life. The juxtaposition of comfort makes less sense if David is simply assured he will join his son in the ground someday.
Lastly, the clear pattern of Scripture - over and over and over again - is that people are judged on the basis of sins committed voluntarily and consciously in the body (see 2 Cor. 5:10; 1 Cor. 6:9–10; Rev. 20:11–12). In other words, the pattern is that judgment is always based on a conscious rejection of divine revelation (whether in creation, conscience, or Christ) and willful disobedience. There is no explicit account in the Bible of judgment based on any other grounds. And simply, infants and the mentally disabled are not capable of either, so neither are they condemned.
I think this is most reasonably what the Scriptures teach here. But, underneath all of this, we’re actually asking something else…
Behind this question, we’re really asking: “Is God just? Can I actually trust that God will do the right thing?”
And the answer to that is, “Yes.” Even if we can’t for certain know what happens to those who can’t hear the gospel, we can trust that God will do what is right.
The cross is all the proof we need to discern this. Again, Romans tells us in Romans 3:26 - that the work of Jesus on the cross was to show God’s righteousness (or you could say his goodness and his trustworthiness to do the right thing) by being the “just and justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus.”
Through Christ, God upholds his justice by giving sin what it deserves - condemnation - but also his goodness and compassion - by extending grace to those who should be condemned. The cross tells us that ultimately there is no one more just and simultaneously more compassionate than God. No one who more stands up for what is right, and no one who more understands and cares about the plight of every single human more than God. And it tells that He is more than a God who knows these things… but is a God who has acted on them.
So even if we don’t theoretically know for certain what may happen to those in question - we can trust Him. We can trust the wisdom of an unfathomably good and merciful God.
And you may think that sounds like a cop-out, but it’s not. It’s the posture of humility. After all, it is not our place to subject the Creator to our finite and fallen notions of fairness - in fact, it could be argued that grace itself is not fair. But, our task is to take Him at His word and trust His heart. As Isaiah 55:8-9 says, “His ways are higher and different than ours.” Or Psalm 119:68, “He needs no counselor, for he is good and does good” because we know the cross is the summit of his wisdom and the intersection of His justice and love.