Understanding the Fate of Those Who Haven't Heard the Gospel

The Fate of the Lost – how God fails to reach the lost

Introduction

When I was a practicing Christian (such an odd term but you get the idea), I was always anxious about the blanket promise of salvation for believers, but a complicit silence about the millions, even billions, who would never hear the gospel. This might be because of where they were born, when they were born, what religion they were raised in, and their access to the Christian message that would “save” them, or in more simple terms, forgive their sins and allow them to enter Heaven when they die. It always seemed unfair that while I was lucky enough to hear the gospel, millions were denied the chance to respond to the message and give their lives to Jesus. The price of not hearing the gospel is eternal damnation, which means spending eternity in Hell for not believing in Jesus, or being faithful in following the Law of Moses if you were born before Jesus came. As a new believer, knowing this was difficult to reconcile with my understanding of God’s mercy. The apostle Paul does hint at salvation apart from the law, in Romans Chapter 2:14 - 16;

“Indeed, when Gentiles, who do not have the law, do by nature what the law requires, they are a law to themselves, even though they do not have the law. So they show that the work of the law is written on their hearts, their consciences also bearing witness, and their thoughts either accusing or defending them on the day when God will judge men’s secrets through Christ Jesus, as proclaimed by my gospel”

This seems to be uncertain at best and Acts 4:12 is quite unequivocal about salvation being by faith in Jesus exclusively;

“Salvation is found in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given to mankind by which we must be saved.”

For some reason, the issue of what happens to the lost, the people who are supposedly made in God’s image, the ones about whom John 3:16-18 refers to: “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.”, really became a major concern. No amount of personal evangelism on my part, or missionaries going forth was ever going to bridge the gap. There simply were too many of them. Paul goes so far as to say in Romans 2:12; “All who sin apart from the law will also perish apart from the law, and all who sin under the law will be judged by the law”. Did it never occur to these writers that millions had lived and died without access to Christ or God’s law, when they wrote these words and people would continue to die while they told the disciples to evangelise the world?

The mind-numbing absurdity of this cognitive dissonance should be obvious to everyone, but those whose consider themselves “saved” don’t give a thought to the fact that at least three billion people in the world today have never been reached by the gospel. That alone negates the statement that God so loved the world. To these must be added the billions who have lived and died from the beginning of time without hearing about Jesus or God. Needless to say, I kept asking this question, without ever finding a satisfactory answer. What was God’s plan for the world? This God is supposedly omnipotent so he should be able to make sure everyone who has ever lived had a chance of salvation. Without Jesus, no one can be saved, and billions will live and die without ever hearing the gospel, and this always struck me as very unfair, and even cruel. It was many years before I resolved this dilemma.

The Age of the Human Race

I was also aware, because palaeontology and archaeology were subjects that I loved, that the human race was ancient, and human civilisation went back thousands of years, not the nonsensical and simplistic young Earth creationist belief that the Earth and the human race can be dated to as recently as 4,000 BCE. I have always been an archaeology buff, from as young as Grade 4 when I was about 10. Our library at school had books on Egypt I read avidly and I learned from a young age that we humans have been here a very long time. Palaeontology later taught me about the origins of Homo Sapiens and our earlier ancestors like Homo Neanderthalensis. I brought this knowledge into my new Christian faith and immediately found that science and radical beliefs like evolution almost made you a very suspect believer. I was a Pentecostal, and they are absurdly anti-science and anti-education for Christians. This was 1980, and I was 27 years old. Even mentioning you were concerned about the environment would bring a rebuke from the pastor. That “stuff” was for those lefties, not believers.

Further to this I knew the Australian Aboriginals had arrived in Australia at least 50,000 years ago. The native peoples in South America, North America, the steppes of Russi and the discovery of hominin species in and around Gibraltar, not to mention Lucy, the Australopithecus in Africa all pointed to an ancient origin for humanity, not a mythical Garden and a perfect human pair. Commonsense and a knowledge of genetics makes that scenario impossible, or we would all be gibbering idiots as the effects of thousands of years of inbreeding took their toll.

As a believer I was always uncomfortable with the idea that “salvation” through the gospel seems to be more a matter of being in the right place at the right period of history and into the right cultural setting to hear the “true” gospel and be saved. The few pastors I spoke with were uncomfortable with the question and my lecturers when I did my theology degree were even more so. Their job was to ensure I had orthodox beliefs according to their conservative evangelical agenda, not to question the absurdity of scripture and its assertions about the age of the Earth and humans. To a man, every lecturer believed Adam and Eve were real, the Flood and Noah’s ark were historically true and the Bible was reliable historically and theologically.

What is meant by eternal life in John 3:16?

How should we understand “eternal life” when we read this in and what were the ideas of life after death in the Hebrew Bible? Firstly, we must understand the structure of the universe in Genesis. The Bible teaches a flat Earth, held up on pillars, with the “waters” separated to the edges of the land and representing chaos. This is the picture the writer draws for us in Genesis Chapter 1:6 – 10, 14 - 17. The land separated the waters, both above and beside the land. Then God put the sun and the moon and the stars in the “firmament” of the heavens, i.e. physically the skies. This is a classic flat Earth scenario. Mankind lives on the firmament that is the dry land, until death when they go to the underworld, literally under the earth, to a place known as Sheol. There is, in the Hebrew Bible, no concept of heaven and hell, places of reward and punishment. These ideas are Greek and came into Jewish thinking after Hellenization of Israel following Alexander the Great’s conquest of much of the known world.

Greco Roman ideas pervaded Israelite culture and religion from around 330 BCE and the Greeks were responsible for the idea that there would be places of punishment and reward. Sheol wasn’t a place of either, but rather some type of God’s waiting room. When we read the apostle Paul who started writing in 49 CE and the Gospel of John which dates for 95 – 105 CE, we need to remember they aren’t thinking about the dead in the same manner as Jewish religion taught. They were heavily influenced by Greco Roman concepts, and “saved” is now shorthand for going to Heaven, and lost is shorthand for going to Hell. This makes the stakes for evangelising the “lost” much higher, in fact, eternally high. Fail to believe, and enter a world of eternal torment for failing to worship and honour a god you never heard about in life. Perhaps the immorality of that decision by God strikes you as hard as it struck me when I really engaged with its implications. There is no court of appeal with Almighty God, according to scripture and we have no right to challenge according to Romans Chapter 9 because God can simply do anything he wants to, because he is God and we are just clay for his moulding.

God’s plan for reaching the world

In Genesis Chapter 12, God called Abram out of Mesopotamia to the area we know as Palestine. Palestine was then, as now, a tiny area geographically but of significance to the many nations around it who routinely went to war against the Israelites or used Palestine to transit to somewhere else. If you read 1 Maccabees you will see this clearly. To give it some perspective, the island of Tasmania in Australia is 68,000 square kilometres, Israel and Palestine barely 6,000 square kilometres. Wales in the United Kingdom, a tiny place, is more than three times as big. Abram, later renamed Abraham by God, was to be the father of many nations. Abram would have been a polytheist from the Fertile Crescent, and was a wealthy herder. The chapters before this are creation and flood myths that are reworked myths from other Ancient Near East (ANE) countries and aren’t relevant here. Genesis Chapter 1-11 were written after the Babylonian Captivity which ended in 517 BCE to provide a monotheistic cosmogeny which contrasted with the polytheistic cosmogonies of the Mesopotamian cultures. This is the time when the Pentateuch was written in Hebrew. Moses, who was certainly a mythical figure, did not give the Law to Israel or write the Law of Moses. In the time when Moses was supposed to have lived, approximately 1300 BCE, the language of Hebrew did not yet exist. Hebrew comes into existence in around 900 BCE. The Pentateuch was a collaborative effort by numerous authors, later compiled by an editor or editors. This is called the Documentary Hypothesis.

Agriculture began in approximately 11,000 BCE in the Fertile Crescent, when hunter-gatherers learned that agriculture allowed for a surplus of food for the winter and lean times. Abraham, almost certainly a mythical figure, came to Palestine about 2,000 BCE, or 9,000 years after mankind started planting crops in Mesopotamia. In other words, God waited thousands of years to begin a programme whereby mankind might be saved from sin. Abraham was to be the father of the Israelites, from whom a Messiah would arise and save the people and the nations. The law of Moses, was 9,500 years in the future for these farmers, but they were condemned to perish because they failed to obey the Law, which was not yet written, if we believe the apostle Paul.

Prior to agriculture, mankind was collections of hunter-gatherer tribes who foraged for food and lived through ice ages, climate changes and catastrophes like giant volcanoes like Toba in Indonesia. This supervolcano seems to seems to have wiped out most humans north of Indonesia. Meanwhile, about 50,000 years ago, possibly earlier, the people who would become the Australian Aboriginals arrived in mainland Australia in the far north. We have conclusive evidence from fossil records called Mungo Man and Mungo Lady. These bones have been conclusively dated at 42,000 years old. They were found in New South Wales, at Lake Mungo, which is 3,300 kilometres from where they would have entered Australia in the far north. These skeletal remains prove that Australia was inhabited millennia before Abraham existed, or was made up.

Similar stories can be told of other human beings who were spread across the planet. As a species, Homo Sapiens is at least 250,000 years old. This obviously makes the creation myth of Genesis Chapters 1 and 2 not objectively true. This especially applies the “Fall of Man” and the Adam and Eve story and the myth of sin and death entering the world. There was no Garden of Eden where an exemplar couple of humans were made and from whom we are all descended. We are an ancient species of hominins, and not the first to grace this planet, just the last survivors of natural selection. This fact changes everything. It completely undermines scripture’s assertion that there was one event that doomed humanity to separation from God, requiring an atoning human sacrifice in the form of Jesus, the Messiah. If we are an ancient species, this is not just mythical, but it’s an utterly irrelevant fiction on which an entire superstructure of salvation theology has been built. Mankind isn’t separated from God, if he even exists, there was no “sin” committed by Eve and humans have been living under a cloud of non-existent guilt for sin against God. This is an inverted pyramid of error, falsehood and mistaken belief, all because the authors of the ancient scripture treated a mythical aetiological story as literal fact.

The “Fall of Man” story in Genesis Chapter 3 can’t be read as a metaphor or an allegory. The apostle Paul uses this story, understood as an actual historical event, to construct a theology of sin and death. Paul makes Jesus the fulfilment of the promised Messiah (Christ in Greek) in the Hebrew Bible through whom all of mankind’s sins are atoned. The result is a theology that makes everybody on the planet dependant on Jesus to avoid going to Hell. With Adam and Eve, I believe Pauline theology fails.

The point I am making is that God waited for hundreds of thousands of years to reveal himself to the human race and to teach humanity what he demanded from them in terms of obedience and endless worship. Millions of humans perished waiting for God to reveal himself, making a mockery of the scriptures that speak of God’s mercy and grace. Moses, who never existed, supposedly received the tablets from God in Exodus 31:18, written by the finger of God, for the governance of his people, around 1200 – 1300 BCE or Late Bronze Age. A major problem is that the Hebrew language as a written language didn’t exist until 900 BCE, and Joseph and his children who decamped to Egypt during the famine, wouldn’t have spoken Hebrew when they went around to Egypt in 1700 BCE. This makes the existence of the Ten Commandments written by the finger of God on tablets of stone a fiction. They are another myth.

We have no idea what language the Israelites in Egypt spoke, if indeed there were ever Israelites in Egypt, but it was hundreds of years before the Hebrew language was developed as a written language. The Ten Commandments are just another group of laws probably borrowed from the Babylonians and changed to suit the Israelites. One important example of laws is the Code of Hammurabi, a detailed law code that tells citizens how they should live in the reign of the king Hammurabi. It’s likely the authors of the Pentateuch used a similar model to produce a much-truncated law code for the people of Israel. Other parts of the Law, which contains 613 commands in the Hebrew Bible, parallel Hammurabi, such as the eye for an eye injunction, sometimes called a law of proportionate response.

The Ten Commandments in the Pentateuch date from the post-exilic period after 517 BCE. God did nothing to teach humanity his laws for 250,000 years, but Paul writes in Romans Chapter 12:1 “All who sin apart from the law will also perish apart from the law.” That means that every human born without access to Mosaic Law is condemned to eternal destruction. Everyone who lived before Abraham is condemned to perish for the mistake of being born at the wrong time and in the wrong place. God is either negligent, cruel and uncaring, or there is no God. An omnipotent God would inspire historically correct stories about the origins of mankind, not myths that are so easy to refute. The Flood narrative starts with a civilisation, ends in its absolute destruction by the waters, and Noah’s first recorded action after leaving the ark and building an altar to YHWH is to start gardening, in this case, he planted a vineyard. Agriculture is all that the author understands. He has no understanding of any society that isn’t built on agriculture.

It is worth noting that this myth is one of the easiest to defeat. The obvious question is, in no particular order:

1. How did Noah and his three sons cut and mill enough timber to build a boat that would be larger than any wooden vessel ever built in history? The Bronze Age and the Iron Age were centuries in the future, so there were no metal tools to build a ship of this size.

2. The hull and decks would take 300,000 board feet of timber at a minimum, using 12” planking. Without internal ribs, the planks couldn’t be joined to each other and all the pitch in the world would hold the boat together. Development of this technology was millennia in the future.

3. Why did Noah take vine cuttings into the ark? Because he is a farmer and he represents farmers.

4. Where did he find a place to plant his vines? Following a devastating flood, the ground is inundated with water, mud, debris, dead animals, dead fish, dead humans, uprooted trees and, often land scoured clear of topsoil.

5. What did the grazing animals eat when they left the ark? There would be no grass or pasture, everything would be buried under mud.

6. How long did Noah spend at that spot? Grapes, from planting to harvest and wine is a matter of years, not weeks or months.

In short, it is easy to see this as another myth, borrowed this time from the Babylonians and therefore derivative. See the Epic of Gilgamesh for one source of this myth.

The worldview of the ANE peoples

We live in an age when we know so much about the world we inhabit. Intrepid explorers have mapped out the farthest reaches of our planet. Myriad ethnic groups have been mostly studied and documented. We know of at least 7,000 languages, not including all the local dialects and languages still unknown in places like New Guinea, South America, Australia and other extremely remote locations. We know that literally thousands of other languages have been lost in time, as well as writing systems, like Minoan Linear A. Our knowledge of our world can’t compare with the parochialism of the ANE, from Abraham to Jesus. Their parochialism was not their fault. They lived at a time when they had a very limited idea of the world. The marketplace in Jerusalem might have exotic goods from other places, like black salt from Africa, slaves from the East or spices, but the average person had no idea of these countries or their religions and beliefs. Certainly, they would have no idea of the population numbers in those far off lands.

It is estimated that approximately three hundred million people existed in the world at the time of Jesus. Did God have a plan to reach the people of Africa, of Siberia, of Australia and the Innuit in Alaska, because they are part that three hundred million. The risen Jesus supposedly said to his disciples in Matthew Chapter 28:18-20;

Then Jesus came to them and said, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you.

No one, including Jesus, could have had the slightest inkling of how immense and unachievable task that was. They probably didn’t even know of the existence of China in the 1st Century CE. As they evangelised, populations both in Palestine and abroad, increased and people died at a rate that no amount of evangelism could ever keep pace with. It would be like bailing out the Titanic with a teaspoon. The task was always impossible, and which proves that God had no plan to ever reach the world. As I said, my problem as a Christian was the fate of the lost. Reading this you will be tempted to tell me I should have supported Christian missions more or some other glib comment. But you would be missing the point, which is that all the good will in the world and the sacrifice of self and family for this task would make no difference. The lost were never reachable, because of the tyranny of distance, hostile cultures, well established religions like Buddhism, insufficient personnel and, too often, governmental opposition. The disciples Jesus commissioned had no idea they needed to evangelise three hundred million people, as soon as possible, before anyone was lost. Now the number is 3 billion, making the task even more impossible and even more unreasonable.

Only God, by divine fiat, could have made this task feasible, but as usual, he’s nowhere to be found. He left the job up to the surviving eleven disciples. The words of Jesus, written by the author of the gospel of Matthew, approximately forty-five years after the crucifixion, are certainly words never spoken by Jesus. They were written by someone creating a religious/historical work of literary fiction, in this case for a predominately Jewish audience. The lost couldn’t be reached by all the missionaries in the world, not then and not now.

Conclusion

The entire Hebrew Bible is written to an agrarian society, from Adam being given a garden to tend and Noah immediately restoring agriculture after God’s massive overkill for imaginary sin. Hunter-gatherers seemingly didn’t exist in the ANE, so they miss out on salvation. The world seems to actually come into existence in the mind of the Genesis author in the not-too-distant past. This reflects the author’s inability to appreciate the timescales we accept as normal. The audience for these scriptures was the tribes of Israel. They were an agrarian society. They battled their neighbours for control of the cities and the grazing lands. The cities were necessary for protecting the wealth that came from the harvest and that fed the society.

Religions that have sophisticated belief systems and that are written down need civilisation and stability to survive. The development of language made this possible, beginning with Sumer[1]. They develop concepts of gods and hierarchies of spiritual beings and wrote myths and legends that can be passed from generation to generation and developed. The God of Israel, YHWH, undergoes enormous development from Genesis, to the end of the Hebrew Bible. Hunter-gatherer groups like the Kalahari Bushmen and the Australian Aboriginal develop complex mythologies based on the elements of nature.

The writers of the Hebrew Bible and the later Christian Bible had no concept of a world larger than the ANE. The Hebrew Bible and the Christian Bible reflect their understanding of their world, which to our eyes, looks extremely parochial. They ascribed everything to gods or spiritual entities, and couldn’t appreciate a worldview such as we hold, where there were natural laws that governed the world and its function. There is not now, or ever were, “lost” people who would perish eternally because they never heard the gospels. This was the resolution of a concern I had forty-four years ago. Simple critical thinking inevitably led to this conclusion, as does the fact that God or gods don’t exist. We live, we die, we are not at war with God and we need confess our sins to anyone but those against whom we sin. God is unnecessary for living a meaningful life and losing God is to lose the false guilt that Christianity (and Islam) heaps on the human race. No one is lost.