This is going to be a contentious post, and you should be warned that a lot of sacred cows are in danger of their lives 😉

It’s about who will be saved; who will be in Heaven. Life after death. Just a fairly superficial look at a very deep subject, but paradoxically, one that’s probably much simpler than we humans expect – we do love to complicate simple things! Let me say up front that this is not a Universalist perspective – where everyone gets ‘saved’ no matter what – but, well, you can of course form your own opinions on what I am saying, ok? 🙂

Firstly, let me set out my premises. Jesus said in John 14:6, “I am the Way, I am the Truth, I am the Life. No-one comes to the Father except through Me”. Acts 4:12 says, ” Salvation is found in no one else, for there is no other name [Jesus] under heaven given to mankind by which we must be saved.”

So far, so good. We establish that Jesus is the Way to the Father; the Way to Heaven.

Now, let’s look at Romans 10:13 where it says, “Everyone who calls on the Name of the Lord will be saved”. There appears to me to be no other condition for salvation…. and remember we need to take into account the passages above which set out that Jesus, and only Jesus is the Way to salvation.

You may have noticed that the Bible does not contain a formula or prayer that makes someone suddenly ‘saved’ where they weren’t before. So often, for example in Mark 5:36, Jesus Himself said ‘Only believe’. He mentions being ‘born again’ (John 3:3ff) but it does not really explain in the Bible how this happens, except that in the same passage Jesus says we must be ‘born of the Spirit’. The Bible also talks in Galatians 6:15  about being a ‘new creation’.

But there’s a lot more unanswered questions as well, in addition to these. For instance, what happens to those who have not heard the Gospel? What happens if someone kind-of ‘believes’, but isn’t sure? What about those who would have loved Jesus, if only they’d been given a proper representation of Him, but the Church people were not showing Christ’s love? Can you make the choice after death, or must you make the choice while you’re still on Earth? Is it too late once you’re dead? The Bible is silent on most if not all of these questions; I would also hazard that many of the currently popular answers to these questions have been made up by well-meaning people in order to propagate a certain doctrine or another. And I suppose in writing this piece, I am doing the same!

So, what do I think? Well, I’d need to write a book….and in a similar way to how I sometimes feel that the doctrine of Hell is not necessarily founded in Scripture – I have read some very interesting interpretations of the Bible’s ‘teaching’ on Hell – I also have some issues with finding evidence or answers in the Bible for having a ‘time limit’ on receiving Christ. And for the other questions above too.

I am Aspergic so please bear with me; my lines of thought are sometimes hard to follow 🙂

So here goes. Let’s use an illustration first. Ok, as an ex-College tutor I have issues with the academic assessment of students. I don’t believe in exams or qualifications (despite having loads of them) because they do not reflect either the way in which knowledge is absorbed or used. It’s the same with a quiz show – a player may know the answer but unless it is given before the answer is revealed by the quizmaster, it does not count. If the answer is given by the quizmaster, and the player says ‘But I knew that answer’, he would not get the prize because he did not prove that he knew the answer before it was revealed. So the assessment, or the quiz, is more to do with regurgitating the answer on demand, and at the actual time, rather than actually knowing it internally despite not being able to recall on demand.

It’s difficult to explain how this relates to life after death but as an Aspie I am making a non-logical transition…..please bear with me.

So, a second or so after a person dies (but what is time in the Eternal Realm? Another reason for my doubts on this matter!) – anyway in that second or so, the person can see God right there (whether it’s Judgement Day or whether he sleeps and then wakes up in Heaven, whatever) but basically the person can now see things as they really are. So, like in the quiz, just because the answer is now plainly obvious, does not mean that the person cannot say ‘Oh yes! I understand now!’ and ‘qualify’ for Heaven based on Jesus’s already-done, all-encompassing sacrifice. He died for everyone!

Then there’s C.S. Lewis’s ‘Chronicles of Narnia’ which you may be familiar with. In ‘The Last Battle’, remember how there’s a Judgement: “But as they came right up to Aslan one or other of two things happened to each of them. They all looked straight in his face, I don’t think they had any choice about that. And when some looked, the expression of their faces changed terribly – it was fear and hatred: except that, on the faces of Talking Bears, the fear and hatred lasted only for a fraction of a second. You could see that they suddenly ceased to the Talking Beasts. They were just ordinary animals. And all the creatures who looked at Aslan in that way swerved to their right, his left, and disappeared into his huge black shadow, which (as you have heard) streamed away to the left of the doorway. The children never saw them again. I don’t know what became of them. But the others looked in the face of Aslan and loved him, though some of them were very frightened at the same time. And all these came in at the Door, in on Aslan’s right.”

I think that this is more or less what it will look like. There will be people who, all along, have loved Jesus without having met Him. Or, at least, they would have done, had they met Him. And when they do see Him, they will love Him. The answer to the quiz is right there and they will either already know the answer, or they will not. But the timing has nothing to do with it.

These people have been denied the chance to see Him as He really is – either because, as we have seen, they are perhaps newborns, those from far away or whatever – or simply those who have never had Jesus presented to them realistically and given the chance to respond.. I am Jesus to my colleagues at work, and yes I ‘witness’ to what God is doing in my life. But I am not challenging them – or at least I don’t think I am (and, of course, under the rules of the old ‘religion’ I used to have, I would have been condemned for that, for not being a pushy Witness!) but at the end of the day, Jesus is being presented. The challenge – the conviction, if you like – is up to Holy Spirit. That’s not my job. And neither is their response.

What happens to those who don’t love Him? We don’t know for sure. Personally I don’t believe that God would inflict eternal suffering; I think it is a device made up by the Mediaeval Church to keep people under their control. You couldn’t even commit suicide to evade the Church’s repression because they made that a ‘cardinal sin’ – to me that’s a dead giveaway! It’s a control thing. That’s what I believe at the moment, anyway.

And what about people from other faiths? Not only people who perhaps have never heard of Jesus the Son of God (as opposed to Isa the Prophet or whatever), but also those whose birth faith precludes ever having ‘correct’ knowledge of Him?

Well, again, for me Christ died for all. So this is my starting point. No-one comes to the Father except through Him. But this does not necessarily mean that it’s only Christians who can come to the Father. It means to me that even those of other faiths only get to come to God because of what Jesus did. Either before or after He came – which caters nicely for those who died before He arrived. Incidentally, the Old Testament saints were convinced that they were going to be with God. How? Interesting….Jesus must have had something to do with that!

Anyway, because of this, I think there are going to be many surprised Muslims in Heaven. They’ll be surprised partially because their religion has told them that they will never be good enough. And there will equally be a number of very, very surprised Jehovah’s Witnesses in Heaven, where all along they thought they’d only make Paradise Earth…. You see, I believe God looks on the heart. The story of Emeth in C. S. Lewis’s ‘The Last Battle’ is absolutely brilliant, “But the Glorious One bent down his golden head and touched my forehead with his tongue and said, Son, thou art welcome. But I said, Alas, Lord, I am no son of thine but the servant of Tash. He answered, Child, all the service thou hast done to Tash, I account as service done to me”. I am in tears just reading that once again…. I love Emeth and I am looking forward to meeting those like him in Heaven.

So, when it comes to the few seconds immediately after death, a person may find that they have loved Jesus for ages without having ever actually realised it.

And I believe that this is the basis for entry to Heaven. Your love for Jesus – the Real Jesus. The Jesus you always hoped He’d be like. It still fits with the Scriptural framework – Jesus is the Only Way – but it’s not necessarily what mainstream Christianity teaches, and certainly not what Fundamentalism teaches.

A wise friend of mine said, when asked the same question,

“I think there *might* be a possibility for people to come to faith in Christ after death. I would say this more than a possibility for children who died before they could understand the gospel, for mentally ill, and for those who have never heard the gospel. Similarly, there are countless people who have lived through horrible “religion” and so rejected the Gospel as a result. Are they to blame for rejecting God? I am not so sure.

“I do know this: God is loving and just. He will do what is right. From my perspective, what is “right” is to give people a real chance to believe in Him, a chance that this life does not always afford. But then, that is just my human perspective”.

And that opinion, too dovetails nicely with mine. You see, even in the Christian faith, or should I say especially in the Christian faith, there is room for discussion and differing opinions, even on the deepest and most eternal of matters.

Of course, none of this takes away from the absolute assurance that those who believe here and now have for their salvation. If you believe in Jesus for your salvation, in whichever way makes sense to you, you are saved, and that’s all there is to it. You can rejoice in that simple fact. You will be in Heaven. Your sins are forgiven. So why, then, should we become Christians in the here and now, with all the sacrifice that entails, if after death we’ll possibly make it to Heaven anyway? What benefit is there? That’s another whole issue, involving the reality of God in today’s life, assurance of salvation here and now, and the presence of the Kingdom of God. But more on that later. [in fact it’s here.]

A quotation from one of the key Christian books of our time:

“Therefore, we had better have a mechanism in our Christian culture that deals effectively with the sin when it comes out right in front of us.

For whatever reason, we’ve come to expect that church is a place where there isn’t going to be any sin. It is just not true. If we don’t know how to deal with sin, then we don’t know how to deal with people.

We inevitably create a culture of law in order to keep people from sinning. The message of this culture is, ‘Contain your sin within yourself. Don’t show it to me; I can’t handle it’