All those who have heard and not believed or who live where, if they had bothered, they could have heard are declared to be outside of God’s grace and destined to go to hell if they die in this state.

Some evangelical Christians try to get around the awful injustices involved by saying, ‘Oh, but God knows who would have accepted Jesus if they had heard, so these ones will be saved.’ Such a statement means of course that the classic evangelical interpretation of the ‘Great Commission’ in Matthew 28.18-20, "Go into all the world and preach the good news….," immediately becomes nonsensical. Why? Evangelicals interpret the great commission as being all about witnessing and missionary work in order to save the lost from going to hell. If all those who would have accepted Christ will be saved anyway, why bother to go to all the cost, trouble and danger of going to try and save people who will get to heaven anyway? And why jeopardise their salvation by going anywhere near them?

In brief, the big mistake that evangelicals have made is this. Most have interpreted the Cross as an event stuck in time, and not as a timeless eternal event. Therefore Christ’s atoning work on the cross is seen as creating a fundamentally new way to God which cancels out the ways people were accepted by God in the period before the Cross. Most evangelicals would further claim that the only way God can forgive sin is through Christ’s work on the cross. The fact the there was full forgiveness of sin in the Old Testament before Christ even came, and that Christ himself forgave people’s sin before he died on the cross, is never explained.

All evangelicals happily acknowledge that God did forgive sin in the period bounded by the Old Testament and, at times, without the involvement of any sacrificial system. They love to read Psalms 51 and 103 describing God’s amazing forgiveness. Then, in the next breath, they will declare that God can only look on sinners through the ‘righteousness of Christ’ or on the basis of the shed blood of Jesus. If that were indeed so, how could he have ever forgiven sin in the Old Testament, when Jesus hadn’t yet come? It is their alarming lack of logic and shallowness of thought on this absolutely key subject which drives evangelicals into their exclusivistic interpretations of salvation.

They fail to realise that the Cross was first of all God’s grand drama acted out on the stage of history to show humankind the way he has always regarded us and always will. Christ was and is “The Lamb that was slain from the foundation of the world”, and the events of the crucifixion were God’s dramatisation of this cosmic eternal truth. The Cross portrayed in time and space the eternal nature of forgiveness. It showed that acceptance for mankind had been fully available and unchanged since the dawn of time, and would remain unchanged to the end of time. The Cross was not only God’s endeavour to show us how he has always felt about us. It was, perhaps primarily, about the need for us to change our ideas about what we believe is God’s attitude to us, and about what constitutes the real basis of living in loving relationship with him.

The Cross was never about an event that suddenly and vastly narrowed down the way humans could approach God. It was about a better way, a richer more powerful way of living in God than was previously available, but a way, none-the-less, firmly based on and an extension of, the time honoured Old Testament way. That is the ‘good news’ of Jesus Christ.

This wonderful good news of Jesus was never meant to suddenly cancel out the pre-cross valid God-ordained ways of right relationship. It was never, ‘From now on there is only one way, and all previous ways are, from this moment, cancelled. If you follow these ways you will be sent to hell’. What, in the name of all that’s fair and sensible, is good news about that proposition?

Note: A fuller explanation of this understanding of the Cross appears near the end of this article. Please ensure to read it as it ties everything together.