Study the Word

Pastor Thom Keller: Take a true and false test with us next on Study the Word. It all boils down to four true-false questions and this ties into all that we've talked about this evening. God cannot contradict himself, yes or no? The Bible is not a historical reliable manuscript, true or false? Jesus was a liar or a madman, true or false?

Then the last, because if you check all of those off as false, then the last one is, I choose to reject, ignore his offer of eternal life. That's true. I choose to reject. Really, if you take the positive side of those questions, then how can you end up at that place and make that decision?

Host (Male): Common questions and objections regarding the Christian faith and Bible-based answers today on Study the Word. Good to be with you. We're in the middle of a discipleship series and here lately, we've been learning how to share our faith with the lost.

Ever had someone ask you, what about the people in Africa who have never heard the gospel? Will God send them to hell too if they don't believe? It's one of the many questions we'll ponder over now with Pastor Thom Keller.

Pastor Thom Keller: I'm going to tell you a little story. When we first started this church, in the first five years, I got a phone call from a woman who lived in Plaza Apartments. She was almost completely blind. She was probably 80 years old at that point and she had a 50-year-old special needs daughter living with her that couldn't speak and couldn't feed herself. That's where she was mentally.

This woman called me and said, "I heard you in the radio. Would you mind stopping out at my house? I have a question to ask you." She told me she was blind and couldn't come to church, so I went to visit her. When I got there, I saw her daughter and she was not able to communicate. She said, "I haven't been in church for 10 or 20 years." Whatever it was, it was a long time.

She said the reason was she went to this church, she probably named it, and she said after I went for a while, some women from the church came to visit me and they looked at my daughter and they said, "Your daughter's going to go to hell." She said, "Well, why?" She said, "Because your daughter's not able to pray a prayer to receive Christ and without that, she's going to go to hell." She said, "Is that true?"

I said, "That's a lie. That's a lie. God does not hold your daughter accountable to understand something that he knows she can't understand. His grace applies to her. No, that is not the truth." My point is, think if God made people that because they weren't smart enough to figure out they'd be destined to hell. It's horrible.

I tell people this too, if you ever get sideways on your own salvation and you start thinking, you know, I'm not really sure I understand this all that well, all that he did. I'm not really sure that I prayed it right when I prayed it. You get sideways on those issues. All I want you to do is think about this. A five-year-old little boy, little girl can pray to receive Jesus with a five-year-old understanding and get to heaven. Is that true? So why do you need some greater understanding at 20 than a five-year-old has? You don't. You just believe, right?

When I just taught in John where Jesus said, "Just believe." He said just believe. After I was preparing that message, I thought, no, that's not true. After I delivered that message, I thought, you know what, there are some people that are going to criticize me because I should say, yes, just believe, but once you believe, you need to do good works. It's proof that you are saved. Someone that is saved wants to do good works.

I thought someone's going to criticize me for that. And then I thought, isn't it interesting that Jesus didn't add that after he said it? He just left it wide open. No qualifier. Of course, of course, of course. But I think Jesus didn't even want people getting all mixed up with works after he says believe. It's pretty simple.

Would God create a way to heaven through works and then create individuals without the ability to achieve eternal life? There's one that's not on here and I think this is really helpful too. If somebody says, "I believe that Jesus is a way to God. I believe you can get to heaven through Jesus. But I also believe there are other ways to get to heaven, not just through Jesus." This would be my argument, and boy, this is a strong one.

If that's true, if you can come through Jesus, but you can also get there through Islam, you can also get there through the Vedas, you can also get there through other religions, then why in the world would God let his son die on the cross when all he'd have to say is go one of those other ways? This is a bridge to heaven. I don't want to have to pay with the blood of my son because there are four other bridges you can take. How?

The evidence that it is the only way. Listen, if you had a child, would you let your child die? Story's told, I'm not sure this is a true story, story's told of a man that was a switcher. This is back before they had mechanical switches for train tracks and he had a little house out there. During his work hours, he was to be in this house. There was a big switch, a big lever, and he'd get on the top of that thing with leverage and yank it and it would switch the tracks from one to the other. He had a schedule and at certain times of the day, he'd have to switch that track.

One day, he had his little boy with him and was playing with his son out there near the track. Time got away from him and he heard the train coming and he realized that he was behind the schedule. He ran back to the switch to throw the switch and as he went to pull the switch, he looked down at the switch box and saw that his son had jumped in the box. He knew that if he pulled that switch, it was going to kill his son. Now if he didn't pull the switch, everyone in that car was going to die. So he had to make the choice between killing his son or all those people dying.

And he pulled that switch. How hard would that be? So I mean, if there was any other way that that track could have been switched, that man would have taken it. Same thing with God. I remember another little story someone told me one time. They said when someone mocks Jesus's death on the cross, when they trivialize it or make light of it or make it small, he said imagine if you were the parents of a son who gave his life for a classmate in some heroic fashion. Maybe like one of these guys in the military that they throw themselves on the bomb and save their other guys. Someone like that.

They said imagine being the parents of that son that gave up his life and being in a restaurant in a booth and hearing in the booth next door the people that were saved by your son mocking and ridiculing what he did. Think how that would hurt. I never forgot that imagery. When I hear people do that, minimize or trivialize, mock. He gave his life for them.

Next page, what about the people in Africa? We just taught on this in the book of John. Again it goes, I'll just do this quickly, but in Romans, it says that from the beginning of time, man has seen all that God has created and for that reason, they have no excuse whatsoever for not believing in God. That's Romans 1. So we are responsible to find our way to God. That's on us.

But then in John, John 6:45, as it is written in the scriptures, they will all be taught by God. Listen, everyone who hears and learns from the Father comes to me. So we are responsible to find our way to God and then God finds will get us to Jesus. He has a lot of ways to do this. So, you know, if you're witnessing to someone and they say, "Well, what about the person in Africa? What about that guy? You mean he's going to die and go to hell? No, I'm not going to buy into a religion where someone in some other country that's never heard is going to go to hell. That's just sick. That's crazy."

I say to them, well, how do you know that right now? Here you are in the Atlantic Ocean, you're drowning. God is throwing you a life preserver. You've got weights on your feet and you're going down with your arms like this saying, "No, I'm not hanging onto that life preserver. What about that guy in Africa? Who's saving him? Who's throwing him a life preserver?"

I say, how do you not know that at this very moment, God is throwing him a life preserver in some miraculous fashion? You're going to drown for the sake of someone that you think is drowning and God is saving them? Think about that. The irony, the craziness of that.

If you ever want some fun reading, this is an old book, but Don Richardson, *Eternity in Their Hearts*. It's stories of other cultures where within the story of their culture, the religions of their native culture, was the gospel. All they needed to do was be told that Jesus was the centerpiece of the story that they already followed. I remember one in particular, it was really cool. I think it was along the Amazon. There was a tribe of people and every so often they would take a chicken and the witch doctor would put the curses of the people on that chicken and they'd put it on a canoe and send it down the river.

You see how the story of Jesus dovetails into that. Because they start saying, listen, you put the sins of the people on that chicken every year. The final sacrifice has come and died, it's Jesus. And it dovetails into that. The point they make in the book is that in a lot of cultures, Western missionaries made the mistake of going in and just trying to impose a Western mindset Jesus on the people without first hearing their stories. Within the story, the gospel spoke to those people. It's a fascinating book, *Eternity in Their Hearts*.

Then the last thing it all boils down to four true-false questions and this ties into all that we've talked about this evening. God cannot contradict himself, yes or no? The Bible is not a historical reliable manuscript, true or false? Jesus was a liar or a madman, true or false? Then the last, because if you check all of those off as false, then the last one is, I choose to reject, ignore his offer of eternal life. That's true. I choose to reject. Really, if you take the positive side of those questions, then how can you end up at that place and make that decision?

Any thoughts on this? Any questions on this? I said during the three days that Jesus was in the tomb, most, many believe that during those three days, and Bible backs this up, that Jesus went to Sheol, the place of the righteous dead. Because there were two compartments, a place of the righteous dead and the compartment of the wicked. He preached to the dead who died before Christ, who were righteous, and those that received that message and accepted that message were then transported to heaven.

That's why Sheol, the bottom compartment, still exists. That's still the place that holds the damned. But the upper portion of Sheol was completely wiped out of people and they went to heaven. You know, the Bible says the depths of hell are open to the knowledge of God. I believe that in hell, when people say I want to go to hell because there's no beer in hell and then they laugh, when I read that the depths of hell are open to the knowledge of God, I can't imagine anything worse than being in hell and knowing I'm going to be in hell forever and remembering back to all the opportunities I had to receive Christ.

Now knowing that he was the only way to heaven, because that knowledge will be in those people. Is it possible that those people in the upper compartment were given insight to know that a final sacrifice was coming? When you teach the Old Testament, as you read commentaries, we know so much about heaven and what happens after we die from the New Testament. In the Old Testament, it was very fuzzy. David had moments of clarity, "My body will not decay in the grave." When his son died, "I will one day go to him, he will not come back to me." But for the most part, even the prophets, when I taught in Ezekiel, all the commentaries said that when Ezekiel's talking about life after, it was just fuzzy.

"Where all are salted with fire and the worm never dies," Jesus said speaking of hell. "Where all are salted with fire and the worm never dies." Jesus said it. Look, I've said this before. You get in if you get into a Christians don't argue, you get into an encouraging debate with someone on any issue, you go to the Bible. I tell people this with homosexuality. Don't ever take someone on on the issue of homosexuality without making the Bible your focal point. Because if you don't do that, it's going to be your opinion versus theirs and it's going to end ugly. Let them get mad at the Bible, which is what you did.

I met with a when we started Cornerstone, there was a woman in the church that was living with another man unmarried, which happens a lot. But I said to her, you know, the Bible says that you shouldn't be living that way. She said, "No, it doesn't." I said, "Actually it does." She said, "No, it doesn't." I said, "Do you want me to show you?" She said, "No." That says it all, doesn't it? Jesus said, "I did not come to bring peace but a sword," and this is what the sword is. This divides. You let this divide.

There was a whole big thing in the newspaper about a church in Lebanon County, a Methodist church where there was a pastor who married his homosexual son and all that blew up out of that. I read all of those articles because that was really the beginning of the whole big thing going on in the Methodist church. That happened right here in little Lebanon, Pennsylvania. That has been the impetus for the whole country. Even internationally, it's the debate in the Methodist church.

There were half-page articles in the front of Lebanon Daily News repeatedly on that issue. They had everybody talking about it. They never, ever addressed the Bible. No one ever brought up the Bible. Never. Why? Because they don't want to. They want to discuss it. They want to have opinions on it. "I want my opinion and I don't like your opinion." You'll end up nowhere. You go to the Bible.

I'm going to tell a story because it just fits. Sue and I were in bed one night, we weren't asleep yet, and the phone rang. We have a phone next to the bed and Sue picked it up and she said, "It's Smoky." Now, Smoky is a man that worked for the dealership. He was a buyer. He bought trucks for us and he was employed full-time by the dealership. He had a very bad stuttering problem. Very, very bad stuttering problem.

It might have been 10 o'clock and he said, "Tom, Rocky died. Rocky died tonight." That was his brother. I said, "Oh, Smoky, I'm sorry." He said, "Pray for him, pray for him, pray for him." You get the point, you can't pray for someone that's dead. I mean, they are where they are. Catholics might say something different, but that's not reality.

I'm thinking quick and I said, "Well, Smoky, do you know if he was a Christian?" He said, "Yeah, years ago he prayed about Jesus." I said, "Oh, good." He said, "Where is he?" Then I said, "He's in heaven," and explained what heaven is like. He said, "Good, good, good. We were really worried. My family's really worried. Do you think you could come to our house and tell all of our family where Rocky is?" I said, "Yeah, I can do that."

A couple nights later, I went to a little rancher down in Reading. It was right before Christmas. I was in a little room, five or six chairs, and there were five brothers, four left. So Smoky and his three brothers are sitting in these four chairs and I'm here in a chair about this close. My back's up against a branch in the Christmas tree, so I can't go back any further. I'm talking to them about where Rocky is now and they're sitting there like linebackers. They're down in their hunches like this, really listening.

I thought if I get this wrong, they're going to attack me and I'm dead. I'm going to be impaled by a Christmas tree. What a way to die. I got to the end and I explained about praying to receive Jesus and that's why he's in heaven. The only reason he's in heaven. I said, "Would you like to do that?" And they said, "Yeah, we do. We want to do that. We want to be with Rocky."

I said, "I'm going to pray a prayer and you just repeat it with me." I said, "Dear God," and they went, "Dear God!" I think they figured they had to cover the distance from earth to heaven with volume to hear the message, but it almost sent me through the limb again because it was so loud. The whole prayer was loud like that. How do you settle them down once they start? I just let it go. And then I found out that a sister was there too and she had prayed the prayer.

I said to them, listen, I have a Bible and I'm going to put a little thing together for the funeral. They asked if I'd do the funeral and I said, yes, I'll do the funeral.

Host (Male): This has been Study the Word with Pastor Thom Keller. Thanks for joining us. If you'd like to hear more, or if you have questions, visit us online at studytheword.com. Join us again next time. Until then, God bless.