We all like it simple and sweet. We’re busy, so we want quick solutions to problems. We’re pulled in many directions, so we want guidelines that go in the direction we prefer. We’re emotional, so we fall for whatever makes us transiently feel good. And we’re often lazy, so we believe answers that make great bumper stickers or memes, without actually explaining anything difficult.
While each instance of these conveniences seems innocent or inconsequential, it is undeniable that they have collectively created an entire culture of misinformation and polarization. We dislike individuals we only know one or two things about…and even those things aren’t often verified. We make sweeping judgments about huge groups of people based on easily-manipulated feelings, not evidence-based facts. And we even base our entire perception of God, religion, and any everlasting existence on what’s easily reachable, not especially rational.
This has been catastrophic. Centuries of proven compassion and life-giving aid to billions are ignored because of one guy on a street corner with a sign that we don’t like. An incomprehensible amount of creation, provision, and patience by a God for millennia are dismissed when we read a few sentences in his book that we don’t want to learn the wider context of. And discovering an entire religion full of refreshing and rational answers to life’s most difficult questions is often sacrificed for a convenient quip or the latest meme…overgeneralizations that let us keep scrolling but don’t make any sense after a few seconds of thought.
Doubts are never addressed. Issues are never resolved. And when life reminds us of this, we often blame it on God and his religion instead of our ignorance and dismissal. Especially with matters of eternal import, we need to crumble convenience, not let it crumble us.
So I’m going to attempt that here with Christianity. After all, making sense of God’s biblical hereafter is what my free Healing Hereafter book series is all about! But don’t worry about going too deep; I’m giving you the lite version! Below is the Quick Read summary of the opening chapters of Booklet 3, exploring what happens to the multitude of people who could not – and cannot – access or understand God’s message of salvation during their lives here on earth.
Keep in mind that these “Quick Reads” aren’t meant to extensively prove anything, just intrigue more interest concerning nearly all the questions and conclusions found in the first four chapters of Booklet 3. Please explore the Full Version of this booklet (free and two clicks away!) for a more thorough discussion and extensive biblical and scholarly evidence supporting what’s below.
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Booklet 3: The Ultimate Publicity Stunt
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Chapter 1
Our line of questioning turns to the fate of everyone who doesn’t have access to God’s solution of Jesus in a way they are able to comprehend during physical life. What happens to those who died before Jesus lived on earth, who were deceased at a young age or in the womb, who have always been mentally incapable of comprehending the gospel, or who otherwise have no way of learning about Jesus’ message?
As we search for answers, we are first reminded that God is impartial and never condemns any humans to Hell without giving them a fair chance to demonstrate their faith and hear the gospel. To do so would force God to violate his just nature by using a double standard for who ends up in Hell. It also makes no sense for God to go through all he did in providing the solution of Jesus if it were never applicable to the majority of humans who have lived to this point.
Instead, we find it biblically and logically consistent that God wants to, can, and does fairly reach everyone with the gospel before judgment day, the day every human enters their eternal destination. God may accomplish this through earthly human evangelism, through earthly divine evangelism like dreams or angels, or through postmortem divine evangelism, such as the Bible’s teaching that Jesus preaches to some who are dead. This is just, makes the solution of Jesus applicable to all, and judges everyone according to the exact same standard.
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Chapter 2
The fate of those who die very young or in utero is our first illustration of God’s all-encompassing evangelism. We realize that God not only violates his justice, makes Jesus obsolete, and holds a double standard if he sends people to Hell who haven’t heard Jesus’ message, he also does all three things if he sends people to Heaven who haven’t heard or accepted Jesus’ message. This contradicts the popular and emotionally-embraced notion that children will automatically go to Heaven when they die, so we explore everywhere in the Bible people turn to find arguments for it.
We learn that these arguments ignore the literary context, make unwarranted assumptions, are invalidated by the biblical context, are logically inconsistent, prove themselves wrong, specifically require hearing the gospel and expressing voluntary faith in Jesus, embrace universalism, make it possible to for children to go from Heaven to Hell, or rationally justify killing anyone who hasn’t yet been exposed to the solution of Jesus.
We conclude that whatever measure of comfort the automatic salvation of children appears to offer is nullified when we consider its dire consequences. But we also alleviate the emotional difficulty of letting it go by recognizing that there are no tots in Hell, only ageless spirits who are as capable of making their own salvation decision as we are, and that therefore, all our children—alive or dead—are treated fairly by God.
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Chapter 3
The issue of pediatric salvation leads us to ask why anyone without meaningful access to the gospel needs salvation in the first place, since a significant number of these individuals have no opportunity during physical life to use their free will to recognizably sin. The answer is simple for those who lived before Jesus and for those geographically isolated from the gospel: they are old enough, physically mature enough, and capable enough to freely choose to know and experience evil on earth.
To be sure that we know this is the case, the Bible explains the concept of general revelation. This is the education about God and moral truth that arises from the universe created around us and the conscience created within us that leave both groups above—as well as ourselves—without justification to sin innocently. And although general revelation could conceivably be directly appreciable to spirits within the bodies of children or the mentally handicapped, it cannot be physically appreciable to them.
Instead, we discover that they—along with the rest of us—are still imperfect and in need of salvation because of every human’s sinful nature. Because our bodies are exposed to the experience of evil from conception and because our spirits can only process information through the flagrantly flawed filter of a morally imperfect environment, every human is physically and spiritually imperfect and needs that imperfection removed. We demonstrate that our sinful nature is not inherited but immediately acquired, is not a part of our being but the mechanism by which it operates, and does not force us to sin but strongly predisposes us to sin. However, since the spirits of children and the mentally incapable get an adequate postmortem period of time to understand and respond to the gospel, it is all but inevitable that they will freely sin during this time too, as we do here.
Therefore, both humanity’s sinful nature and free will play significant roles in our universal need for salvation. Only Jesus, who is God and whose spirit is divine and therefore untainted by an imperfect world, does not need to be spiritually perfected to enter perfection.
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Chapter 4
We’ve seen that giving folks an automatic pass to either Hell or Heaven is problematic for many reasons, but some claim that a postmortem chance to demonstrate faith and learn about the gospel is still unnecessary, as God could reach everyone with his solution of Jesus before they die. While this could plausibly occur for some unreached individuals through divine earthly evangelism like dreams or angels, it’s all but certain that millions of folks who didn’t have physical access to the gospel could very honestly claim on their deathbed that God had not explained it to them through supernatural means.
Some address these people—as well as children and the mentally handicapped—by expanding the scope of general revelation. Instead of only making us aware enough of God and morality to be guilty when we sin, they claim that what all humans can learn from creation and our conscience explains the gospel enough to make us guilty of rejecting Jesus’ message as well. We evaluate this argument and dismiss it biblically and logically, explaining that only a comprehensible presentation of the gospel (special revelation) can provide enough information for a person to be able to freely and truly reject God’s universal invitation to Heaven through his solution of Jesus.
A final way God could reach everyone with his solution of Jesus before their physical death is to evangelize to their spirits directly, even if they inhabit baby bodies or brain-damaged bodies. Because there’s no biblical evidence of such a spiritual transfer of specific information and because both physical presentations of the gospel and every human’s physical existence would become completely unnecessary, we decide against universal premortem evangelism and accept the Bible’s teaching that God gets the message out to the unreached on both sides of physical death.
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But how does that work? How does God make it fair? And why don’t we hear about this more often? Stay tuned! If you’re asking it, I’ve asked it. And I like finding answers.
