There’s a bit of debate going on among some friends regarding the salvation of people who have never heard the Gospel of Christ.

One brilliantly intelligent young woman wrote:

When you sin, you are dead and separated from God, and since we are born into sin, that’s how we start this life off. God’s grace has made it so we can atone for this if something else dies in our place – hence OT sacrifices which foreshadowed Christ as the perfect, once for all, final sacrifice. I don’t understand what’s so difficult about that. 

By the logic of the other side, I would ask you, how far do you take liberties with God’s grace and mercy? If someone is born into a Muslim home and brainwashed to believe that is truth and to reject anything they hear about Christ, isn’t that unfair of God for placing the child there rather than in a Christian home? I think the Bible is pretty clear that God has placed us all where we are to be – rich, poor, talented, Christian influence or no – by others’ logic, isn’t that “unfair” advantages for some and not others to find God?

I can tell you exactly how far I take those liberties and mercy. 

Jeremiah 31, a great messianic prophecy, sees God promising to write his law upon our hearts, that all people might know God even without teaching. At the barest possible level, how can that mean anything less than God giving each of us the capability to know *how to live rightly*?

I’ve written elsewhere (to which nobody replied ) that faith is a word we use to mean belief, but in the writing of the New Testament, the word they used meant fidelity, oathkeeping. It’s a word about how you act, how you live. Faith without works is dead because faith without works isn’t faith — you aren’t being *faithful*. Being faithful to your husband doesn’t mean you believe in him — it means you don’t cheat on him. Being faithful to the Lord, in the same way, means that you trust him to keep his promises and that you will keep yours. 

To that end, faith, keeping faith, is all about how you live. This isn’t to say people earn their way into heaven, not at all, because it’s simply living the covenant God made with all humanity. It’s bloody hard to do that outside the context of a prayerful Christian life, but I am *not* going to say it’s not possible. 

So I don’t give everyone in the world who hasn’t heard the Gospel a pass into heaven; I expect them to live the law written on their hearts, first and foremost. I expect fidelity to the law God has given everyone.

Get it? I expect faith of them.