What Happens to People Who Never Hear the Gospel

What Happens to People Who Never Hear the Gospel?

Passage: Romans 1:18-21, Romans 3:19-26, Romans 10:14-15

I will be honest with all of you. I have been kind of dreading this lesson. Because this is easily the hardest lesson for me to teach. Not because it’s particularly complex or because it’s lesson is vague or hard to understand.

No, I have been dreading this lesson because it physically and emotionally tolls on me. When I was about your age and I first heard this same truth from scripture, it radically changed me and my path in life. I don’t talk about it often, but I am going to seminary to learn how to be a missionary one day, and it is because of this question and the answer that scripture gives. It has kept me up and night with thoughts and implications of this.

And my hope and my prayer is that this lesson tonight radically changes you guys too. That maybe some of you will change the course of your lives because of what we’ll learn tonight. And it all starts with this question. Reveal the title slide for the lesson. What happens to people who never hear the Gospel?

To help us understand and answer this question we’re going to be in a few places but all within the book of Romans. And Romans is a letter written to an early church almost entirely about reaching the unreached world with the Gospel of Jesus. And the author, Paul, is challenging the early church to be the hands and feet of Christ and go and reach the world! And through this letter, Paul kind of answers our question, but we’ll have to understand a few things before we can outright answer it.

1) All people know God in some capacity, and all people reject God

Read Romans 1:18-21

So, first and foremost we have to understand that all people, whether they know God personally or not, have some understanding of God. Paul argues that Creation itself points to the existence of God. He says, “since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities–his eternal power and divine nature–have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse.”

Paul tells us that the fact that God is there has been made plain to all people. He argues that you can look around, see the creation in front of you, and logically know that there had to be some creator behind it!

Every man in the African jungle, every woman in Asia, every Eskimo on the forgotten Tundra of the North has a knowledge of God written in their hearts. Everyone is drawn to want to know who God is.

But this also comes with the problem that Paul tells us about. Because although we were all made with some knowledge of God, and a desire to know Him, we have all rejected Him in our hearts. He says, “For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened.”

We all have an inherently sinful nature. All of us have a desire for God, but we also have a desire pulling us away from Him that causes us to worship the creation rather than the creator. And this is a fundamental truth of Scripture that we try to overlook when we ask this question about people who never hear the Gospel.

Think about an Indian tribe that existed long ago and wanted to worship God, but they didn’t know Him, so they worshiped the sun and called it God. People will often say that they tried their best and so surely God is pleased with that, right?

When asked about this, pastor Matt Chandler said this,

What Paul is saying very clearly in Romans 1 is you don’t worship the sun and call it “God,” and that becomes pleasing to the God who is worthy of all worship. That’s idolatry. This is not an indictment of that Indian tribe. It’s not an indictment of any tribe in Africa or people in Asia. It’s an indictment of every single one of us. We are all prone to worship creation rather than the Creator, who alone is worthy of all praise. We worship ourselves, worship things, worship idols, whatever it is, we have rejected true knowledge of God.

Unless we are worshiping God and God alone, we are worshiping an idol, and it’s no different than the Canaanites who worshipped Baal in the Old Testament or anyone who worships in any other religion today.

And I’m not trying to imply that this should be an easy truth for us to swallow. It is a horse pill of a truth that we all need to wrestle with. What I’m trying to tell you is this is what scripture teaches as truth. And because this is truth, we also learn our second point.

2) All people are guilty in the law and unjustified before God

Read Romans 3:19-20

Paul tells us here that everyone is guilty under the law of God and every man, woman, and child are held to those same standards. He tells us, “…so that every mouth may be silenced and the whole world held accountable to God.” So, everyone is held accountable to God, everyone, no matter if they know the true God or not.

Earlier in the chapter Paul tells us that there is no one good in the eyes of the law. Everyone, when held against the standard of the law, fails miserably. And now he’s telling us that, “…no one will be declared righteous in God’s sight by the works of the law”. No one will be saved by the law because we are all found guilty under it.

You probably know the famous Romans 3:23, “for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God…” Everyone is guilty.

And this understanding, requires us to rework how we think of the lost. Because we can’t think of some innocent man waiting to hear the Gospel, or some innocent lost woman in the jungles of South America who is waiting to hear about Jesus.

The reality that scripture teaches is that it is a guilty man who is under the wrath of God waiting to hear the gospel of Jesus, or a guilty, woman in the jungles of South America who is condemned and waiting Judgement who is in desperate need of the saving Gospel!

We are all guilty of sin, whether you know it or not and that sin is what leaves us under judgement! Would it be just or fair for a good God to condemn people to hell who have never heard about Him before? Our emotions and our hearts want to tell us, no. That God could never do that. And we have churches that teach that.

But the scripture teaches that we are all guilty. Every man, woman, and child is guilty. The scripture teaches that people stand condemned for their sins. And it teaches that there is an infinite Chasm between our sinful selves and God.

And logic would tell us that if people could automatically get a free pass to heaven if they never heard about Jesus. Then the absolute worst thing we could ever possibly do is tell them about Jesus. Because before, they were on an automatic road to heaven but now we gave them a choice.

All people, whether they have heard the gospel or not, stand condemned and guilty before a holy and just God who must punish the guilty. But that leads us into our third point.

3) God has made, and enacted, a plan of salvation for all people and no one is justified apart from this plan

Read Romans 3:21-26

God did not wait for us to find our way back to Him because we could never do that! Instead, God came to us. We are all guilty of sin, but God has made a way to save us from it! Through His Son Jesus we can all be redeemed again!

Paul tells us, “For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and are justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus”. Everyone is guilty before God, but everyone can be saved through the blood of Jesus! It is through faith in Jesus that people are saved because it is Jesus who takes our place and our punishment. In the next verse there, Paul tells us, “[Jesus] whom God put forward as a propitiation by his blood, to be received by faith.” So, by the blood of Jesus, we are saved through faith. And all of this was to that God would be, and please listen to this because this is so important, “It was to show his righteousness at the present time, so that he might be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus.”

God worked this whole plan of redemption so that He would be just and the justifier! All men are guilty under God, but God wanted to forgive His people. But God also must be just (meaning he must punish wrong). So, God, in order to forgive and also be just, sent His Son Jesus! And when Jesus died, all of our sins were put on him and God punished Jesus for our sins. So, by putting our faith in Him, we receive forgiveness because the punishment has already been dealt!

But here’s the emotional part of this question. God designed this all so that there isn’t one bit of our works in there, it is a free gift from God. But the way we accept that gift is through faith in Jesus Christ. You cannot come to God apart from faith in Christ. That is the only way.

And so, here’s where we get the emotions. This is where you start thinking “but surely there’s a way that they can still be forgiven. There’s got to be some way that God can still forgive them if they’ve never heard the Gospel. There’s got to be another way!”

And I feel those emotions, I get it. But the second we say that there is another way. The second we say that someone can be reconciled to God without faith in Jesus. That is the second that we look at Jesus on the cross and say “Thanks, but there is another way around it.”

Jesus Himself literally prayed to God the Father begging Him that if there is any other way to forgive humanity apart from the crucifixion then please go with that. But God knew that this was the only way.

Scripture is very very very very very clear that the only way to God, the only way to get forgiveness for sins, is through faith in Jesus Christ. There is no other way. So even if someone has never heard the Gospel, they are unforgiven because their faith is not in Christ. People cannot come to God apart from faith in Christ.

But, and this brings us into our last point for tonight, God designed the church to go and spread the good news.

4) God designed the church to go and spread the good news

Read Romans 10:13-15

Paul promises that “everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.” That is a guarantee, a promise, you can count on it. No one will go to Jesus in faith and be turned away. All who genuinely call on Jesus for forgiveness will be saved!

But then he lays out the design for how people come to Christ in a series of questions. He says, “How then will they call on him in whom they have not believed? And how are they to believe in him of whom they have never heard? And how are they to hear without someone preaching? And how are they to preach unless they are sent? As it is written, ‘How beautiful are the feet of those who preach the good news!’”

And this isn’t just some rhetorical brain exercise that Paul is doing here. This is a practical picture for how God designed the church to function! All people need to be saved by calling on the name of Jesus, but they will never call on the name of someone who they don’t believe in, so they have to believe. But they will never believe in someone who they’ve never heard of, so someone has to preach to them. But no one will go and preach if they have never been sent or supported, so they need a church to send them!

Christ sends His followers into the world to preach His name to the farthest ends of the earth until everyone has heard the good news of Jesus and the forgiveness He brings. That is why the church is here, that is why we are here.

It is the responsibility, privilege, obligation, and opportunity of every follower of Christ. IT is a cause that is worth living for; it is a cause worth dying for; it is the cause for which we have been saved, and it is the cause for which we are still here on this planet. To go into the world and make Jesus known.

That is the plan of God. Jesus sends his followers, the followers preach and people hear, and those hearers believe in Jesus and call on His name, and those who call are saved. The only way this plan breaks down is if the followers of Jesus sit back and do nothing. The way the plan falls apart is if God’s people are unwilling to spread the Gospel. If we say we’re too attached to our comforts and ways of life to go and bring the god news to people who are dying without it!

You may be asking yourself this whole time, “how can God call Himself good while sending people to hell who have never heard of Him?” And you want the answer to that? God is still good because God has saved everyone who calls on Him. He has made salvation free through faith in Jesus. And He has enlisted all 2.382 billion of us who claim Jesus to go and make Him known.

The truth is there is no reason that people still don’t know who Jesus is when you have over 2 billion people whose job it is to make Him known. The only way the plan of God for redemption falls apart is if God’s people are unwilling or unloving enough to go and preach His name to people who don’t know Him.

People who have never heard the Gospel are still under God’s wrath. And we are given the job to make Him known to those people. So, my final question is this.

What are you going to do about it? Now that you know, how do you respond. Not every single one of us are going to be called to be missionaries in foreign countries, but I do feel that a lot more of us are called than are going. A few of us may be called to be mobilizers in a church body here in America. But every single one of us who call on Jesus are called to make Him known in some way. So, what can you do to make Him known?