Think Wink.

I was in class today and we were studying the two main types of revelation, general and specific. The professor said that a person cannot be saved by general revelation, salvation only occurs when the special revelation of Christ through Scripture is made known to them, (Gal. 3:1-5; Romans 10:9-10, 13-17). But God is just in condemning a person based upon general revelation. One person gave the following scenario and then asked a question to go along with it:

What if there is a person stranded on an island who is an unbeliever and never does get to hear the gospel of the glory of Christ, will that person when he dies without hearing go to hell? If a person never gets to hear the saving message of God, does God send them to hell?
The prof. answered with John 14:6, Acts 4:12, which say that only through Christ himself and trusting in him can we be saved. So this person came back with the following scenario: What about those people who live in the jungles of South America and have a god but they don’t know about Jesus, will they go to heaven?
Again the prof said they won’t because they don’t have the gospel message.

What really bothers me is that some people don’t want to embrace certain difficult truths of Scripture. They don’t have a problem with Ezekiel 18:23 and Ezekiel 33:11. But when God says that he has given enough revelation in the conscience of man and in nature that man stands condemned, they can’t possibly conceive of God doing that. It doesn’t fit Ezekiel or 1 John 4:8, 16 and so they try to dismiss this. It is my prayer for that person and all Christians to really think through just what the Bible means when it claim that unless you have Jesus, you cannot go to heaven. If you don’t receive the Gospel, you go to hell. It is harsh but it is still what Scripture says. I pray that the church, especially in more scholarly circles now, can come back to the Bible and abandon certain assumptions that contradict the rest of the Bible and embrace all of God’s word.

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