The Hard Questions

Three questions come up whenever this territory is mapped, and honesty requires engaging them rather than pretending they are not there.

First: what about people who never heard? The person born in a culture and a century without access to the gospel in any recognizable form — what does the map say about them? The honest answer is that Scripture gives us the clear path without giving us a complete accounting of every case outside it. Romans 2:14–16 describes people who do not have the law acting on what the law requires, the work of the law written on their hearts, their conscience bearing witness. Romans 1:20 says the invisible attributes of God have been clearly perceived through what has been made, so that people are without excuse. What these texts establish is that no one is without witness. What they do not establish is exactly what God does with the witness received or rejected in the absence of explicit gospel proclamation. The judge of all the earth will do right, as Abraham put it in Genesis 18:25. That judgment is not ours to render. What is ours to render is the proclamation of the clear path and the urgency of the invitation.

Second: what about people who seem to have the real thing but whose lives give mixed evidence? The question assumes that the presence of the real thing produces a consistent, legible external pattern. It does not always. The genuinely knowing soul is the soul in poverty of spirit — which is exactly the soul that does not claim certainty about its own sufficiency. The assurance of salvation in the New Testament is grounded not in the consistency of the believer's performance but in the faithfulness of the one who is known.

"God is greater than our hearts and knows all things." — 1 John 3:20 (NET)

The person whose life gives mixed evidence and who is genuinely oriented toward the living God in poverty of spirit is in a different condition than the person whose life appears consistent and who is oriented toward the performance of consistency rather than toward the living God. The external picture does not tell you which is which. God does not make that error.

Third: what about deathbed moments and sudden deaths and all the circumstances in which the timing of the question seems compressed or closed? The thief on the cross in Luke 23 is the New Testament's most explicit answer to this question, and the answer is characteristically economical. "I tell you the solemn truth, today you will be with me in paradise." Not after a period of preparation. Not contingent on what he would have done with more time. Today. The empty hands were sufficient. They were always sufficient. They will always be sufficient.