Expert: Ernie Laurence, Jr. - 11/15/2010

Question
Question involves salvation for those who never had the opportunity to hear the word.

So I saw part of an old BBC sci-fi comedy where the planet Earth gets demolished to make way for a galactic freeway.  Before destroying all life on Earth in a single genocidal blow, the foreman of the alien construction crew points out to the earthlings that the plans for this freeway have been on display for years at a nearby planet in another solar system, and it's our own fault if we didn't read them and evacuate in time.  He either doesn't realize or doesn't care that we haven't yet developed interstellar travel and can't get to the message that would have saved us.  In what way is this different from any pre-Columbian men and women in the Americas with a yearning for truth and a clear sense of right and wrong by which they tried to live, who will now be in eternal torment because they didn't have the technology to get to the message of Jesus for the first 1,500 years after it was given to man?

Answer
So, first of all, I thought Douglas Adams "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" series was pretty funny.

I do understand your question, and it is certainly one of the central questions to Adams' books.

But historically, did not the "Native Americans" arrive over the land bridge of the bearing strait around 1000AD?  And before that, did not Paul on several occasions state that the gospel had been preached to the whole universe (Rom. 10:18) and to every creature (Col. 1:6,23)?  But Paul also stated that the very universe itself proclaims God so that there are none without excuse (Rom. 1:18-21).

In Truth and Love,

Ernie