Expert: Marilyn - 4/21/2008

Question
Hello Marilyn,

I just read an "answer" you wrote two years ago and it really helped me better understand one of the two issues I have been struggling with (reincarnation).

You answered the gentleman's question so beautifully I thought I'd ask you my other earth shaking (in my mind anyway) question?

As Christians we are told the only way to the Father is through Jesus Christ.  In other words you must accept Jesus Christ as your savior in order to go to heaven after death.

Marilyn, the problem I have with this is that seventy-five percent of the world's population is not Christian.  Am I to believe that a loving, benevolent God would create billions of Buddhists, Hindus, Moslems along with the primitive tribes of Africa and Australia knowing that the possibility of their coming to know Jesus is very remote?

I am doing my best to follow our Lord and be obedient to His teachings, but this seems like a very egocentric, elitist attitude and I cannot believe it comes from God?

Thank you in advance for any help you can give.

Blessings,
Rob Cole

Answer
Hello Rob;

Peter tells us that God doesn't want anyone to perish, but it's His heart desire that all should come to repentance, II Peter 3:9.  

In the Old Testament we occasionally meet people who are outside the "picture frame," people like Jethro and Melchizedek who seem to come out of nowhere, but belong to God.  Not only do they belong to God, but they're every bit as committed and sometimes more godly than the supposed hero of the story.  

If you read quotes from the American Indian you find a very savvy picture of God in many ways identical to what believers receive from the Bible.  It's my belief that God comes to every individual at the point in each person's life when he's the most willing to listen and presents Himself.  

Paul tells us in Romans 1:19 & 20, "...what may be known about God is plain...because God has made it plain...For since the creation of the world God's invisible qualities--His eternal power and divine nature--have been clearly understood from what has been made so that men are without excuse."

Or as the Psalmist says, "The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of His Hands.  Day after day they pour forth speech; night after night they display knowledge.  There is no speech or language where their voice is not heard.  Their voice goes out into all the earth, their words to the ends of the world," Psalm 19:1-4.  

A few years ago Stephen Hawking announced that he'd concluded that the universe could not exist without God to create it.  His atheist colleagues all over the world verbally pummeled him and he took back his remarks.  The point is, this great mind scraped the surface of the universe and saw God looking back at him, just as Paul and the Psalmist said he would.

If a person won't respond to God's speech from the stars and from nature, what then?  If this person goes off on a tangent and invents a new religion, what then?  If the person adheres to a religion he knows in his heart is false because he's afraid of what his neighbor or his relatives will do to him, what then?  Paul says there is no excuse for failing to get the message.  God hasn't created these other religious beliefs, only the people who observe them.  Don't forget who is the over-king of the earth, none other than the deceiver, the father of lies.  But God doesn't give up.  

Not long ago I read testimony posted by a Muslim teen.  God pursued this teen.  He said He literally felt God's Presence, He felt that God was putting certain people and things in his path, that God made opportunities for him.  He found Jesus on the internet.  I've heard of Muslims dreaming of Jesus.  Other similar things.  In my own life, when I'd turned away from God, I went looking for truth in new age, but I didn't find it.  Instead I ended up in hell on earth.  When I reached the point where I was finally willing to listen, the Lord sent a person with a book for me and it changed my life.

But there's two things we humans often fail to comprehend about God.  First, He gave the earth to us.  He made us gods of the earth, see Psalm 82 and John 10, to rule and reign here.  He was supposed to be our Over-King, but Adam's rebellion ended that.  Instead, satan is over-king.  God only has dominion on the earth wherever a believer is living and breathing--otherwise He's basically shut out (except for indirect means such as the stars and their speech).  This puts responsibility on us to be His witnesses, to share the Gospel--to love human beings well enough to tell them about Him.  God doesn't break the rules.  He gave the earth to Adam and by extension to us.  He doesn't interfere unless someone prays and asks Him to.  You are the authority in your house and in your neighborhood.  It's your God-given god right and duty to effect change for the better every moment of every day wherever you are and to pray without ceasing, as Paul advises.  

Why are so many in the earth unsaved?  Because God's people don't do their jobs.  I'm pointing at myself too.  I deal with fear of rejection, feeling tongue-tied, anxious, butterflies in the stomach, wondering if that prickly feeling I ought to say a certain thing is God or just indigestion--I deal with it too.  Fortunately, it's not up to just you or me to reach a given person, God has others working on the same clients.  This is why Jesus tells us to pray for the harvest, that the workers will be plentiful.  

God gets things done in the earth by prayer.  If none of us will pray, His Hands are tied.  So many of us are focused on the wrong things.  Soul winning is very low on our lists.  Many of us "believers" aren't even making bumbling attempts to do our god duty for our fellow humans.  

While pointing at God and accusing Him of failing to live up to His reputation as a LOVING GOD, what about you and me?  We're supposed to be His Body, act on His behalf in the earth, show His love to others.  What are we doing?  Sometimes, I'm too terrified to move.  

God's Love does not include forcing people who rejected Him in this life into living with Him for eternity.  You might say, well, I'm not talking about that, but think.  If it's true that God reaches out all of the time, whether though His creation or by putting people in the way or causing a person to scrape the surface of the universe, or encouraging or even insisting you or I pray, then is it His fault if the persons He's trying to reach say "no, don't want to deal with that," "don't want to think about that right now," etc. etc.?  You and I in all our wisdom, do we know whether all these people we imagine have no hope have seen God in the stars or heard His speech in the music of the earth and turned Him down?    

When God "bashes someone on the head," follows him around like He did in the case of that Muslim teen or throws a man off his horse, as He did in Paul's case, you can be certain that somewhere someone was praying and believing with all his might.

Unitarians say that Jesus' sacrifice on the cross bought redemption for all humanity whether the person receives it or not.  But if this is true, what value is this redemption?  Is there no justice for the Hitlers and Stalins of the earth?  Why should anyone try to live for God if everyone is saved anyway?  Why can't we all just sin to our heart's delight?  If Jesus Blood is that cheap, why didn't God just hand everyone a "get out of jail" card to start with and spare His Son such excruciating suffering?  

If it's true that everyone is saved regardless of what they believe, then truth no longer exists.  If we say truth is whatever I say it is for me and whatever you say it is for you, that's the same as if it never existed.  Truth must be fixed, it must be solid, otherwise it is not truth.  The god who saves everyone whether they receive Him or not is a tiny god of no significance.  He's a god worried about what everyone thinks.  Can you picture Jesus worried about what anyone thinks?  

How did Jesus act while He was in the earth?  Hebrews 1:3 says, "The Son is the radiance of God's glory and the exact representation of His Being..."  You want to know the heart of God, look at Jesus.  You want to know what God values, look at Jesus.  Jesus is the picture of God for us.  What did He do?  He spent practically every moment reaching out to human beings, healing them, teaching and living the example of the Servant Leader.  Jesus tells us that we can do everything He did.  Why don't we do it?  

We don't do it because we don't put in the prayer time.  We don't put in the study time.  We don't love people that much.  We just want to sit down and point at God and ask Him why He's not doing anything about all this death, suffering and hell on earth.

The second thing we forget is that God has already done all that He can do for humanity.  He has the heavens pouring out speech; He gave us the Bible, managed to keep it pretty accurate through countless translations and managed to distribute it widely; He sent His Son to show Himself to us and to pay for our sins; He sent the Holy Spirit to live within us to empower us to become little Christs, which is what the word "Christian" means.  

We're supposed to be "little Christs."  He's multiplied His Son by millions and millions and we're supposed to be going out and doing the things Jesus did.  If we'd do our jobs fewer people would be going to hell.  

Any sin, no matter how small, is too much sin to enter Heaven.  Without the Blood of Jesus, nobody can stand in the Presence.  There is only One Way, Only One Truth and Only One Life and that is Jesus.  All other pathways are dead ends.  If we want to see more saved, then we need to do our jobs right where we are right now.  There are plenty of unsaved persons all around us.  Plenty of opportunities for us to be "little Christs."

If we pray in our understanding and out of our understanding, if we submit to the Father as Jesus submitted to the Father, if we study as Jesus studied, if we obey the Holy Spirit and only do what He tells us to do, we'll see God do mighty things in the earth.  There are certainly enough of us to reach the entire earth, don't you think?

Sincerely,

Marilyn

I heard a story about a young man who worked as a translator for a Christian preacher in Viet Nam.  The preacher returned to his country, but the young man had to survive under the communist atheistic regime.  He was taken captive and placed in a prison camp.  Day after day the soldiers beat him trying to get him to renounce Christ.  Finally, sick in heart and weary in body, he told the Lord, "Unless you do something, tomorrow I'm going to give up."  That next day he was assigned one of the most awful duties a prisoner can be commanded to do--clean out the latrines.  This young man set about doing his job, but noticed high quality paper in with the feces.  He pulled the paper out and discovered a page from the New Testament.  It was a verse reminding him that God was with him even in the prison.  It turned out that the prison commander had been given a Bible.  As an atheist he saw no other purpose for it except as toilet paper, he tore it apart page by page.  But from that day on the young man volunteered every day to clean the outhouses.  

The Lord speaks, but He does not force us to believe.  He spoke to the prison commander and the man refused to listen.  But the young believer knew truth when he saw it, even though it was covered in poo.