Is Man Really Lost? (1970)

Message delivered at Urbana 70
by Leighton Ford

"... if a man does not have a soul, then compassion is pointless and absurd. Why care, if man is a chance chemical accident? Man is valuable because he is significant. He is significant because he is morally and spiritually responsible. And because he is responsible, he is really lost. That is why our practical concern for man's earthly welfare must grow out of an overarching concern for man's eternal destiny. "

A few months ago Apollo 13 was launched toward the moon. At 10:08 p.m. (EST) on April 13, 1970, an explosion took place. Ana suddenly the routine was broken by a terse announcement from Jim Lovell: "Houston, we've got a problem." It quickly became apparent that the astronauts were in serious difficulty. "Lost in space" was no longer a fictional concept for a TV plot. National resources were mobilized for the rescue attempt and from all over the world messages offering help poured in. When the astronauts finally got back, John Swigert was asked if he prayed. "I sure did," he replied, "and I believe the prayers of a lot of people around the world had a lot to do with bringing us back." If the whole world can be moved to concern for three men lost in space, how much more ought we upon whom Jesus Christ has laid his hand be motivated to rescue millions from spiritual disaster!

Once upon a time a great conviction gripped the Christian movement. It may have been put naively or even crudely sometimes, but the conviction was this: If man has a soul, and if that soul can be saved or lost eternally, then the greatest thing in the world is to bring men to salvation in Christ. But today that conviction suffers from tired blood. Many of us as Christians today are embarrassed to talk about the soul" or "eternity" or being "lost." And even those of us who subscribe to the ideas expressed in those words don't seem very fired up about them.

When our daughter, Debbie Jean, was six, she disappeared one day. We searched everywhere for her-the other houses nearby, the shopping center, the schoolyard. I remember walking up and down a little dirt road calling, "Debbie Jean," and fearing the silence. Two hours later she showed up and told us she had gone with a friend to a candy store and then on to the friend's house. After the thunder, lightning and tears had passed, I reflected: During those two hours that my little girl was missing, there were books that I had to read, letters I had to answer, telephone calls I had to make, planning I had to do-but I could think of only one thing: My little girl was lost. I had only one prayer and I prayed it a thousand times, "God, help me to find her." But how often, I asked myself, had I felt the same terrible urgency about men who are lost from God?

What led Jesus to weep over Jerusalem? Or Paul to cry, "Woe is me if I preach not the gospel"? Or John Knox to pray, "Give me Scotland or I die"? Or Henry Martyn to land in India saying, "Here let me burn out for God"? Or George Whitefield to cross the Atlantic thirteen times in a small boat to preach in the American colonies? Or the aristocratic Lady Donnithorne of our own generation to go into the forbidden precincts of Hong Kong's "walled city" to bring the healing of the gospel to the pimps and prostitutes? Or Jim Elliot and his friends to stain a river in Ecuador with their blood to reach an obscure Indian tribe? They were gripped with a tremendous conviction that without Christ men really were lost in a deep and eternal way.

But for many today to be "lost" seems to mean that you merely fly to heaven tourist-class, not first-class. The belief that man is lost is far from the only motive for evangelism. A thousand and one positive reasons exist for winning men to Christ. Yet there is this one great negative: that men should not perish. Take that away, and you will cut the nerve cord of concern. Trace the history of the movements which have brought great numbers to Christ, and at the heart you will find men who have prayed, planned, worked and witnessed with a great burden for the lost.

What dulls the knife edge of our concern? For one thing, the general mindset of our day isn't geared to the idea of dividing men into categories of "lost" and "saved." But Jesus talked about these categories. He said that men were building on one of two foundations, going into one of two doors, traveling one of two roads, serving one of two masters, heading toward one of two destinies. But we are not comfortable with that "either-or" kind of talk; tolerance is our great contemporary idol. The modern mind has shifted into neutral, disliking the pain of distinguishing right from wrong, or truth from falsehood. In philosophy, morals and everyday life we are told: do your own thing. The revolt against authority has left us with no binding standard. We call this being "liberated," yet fail to recognize the danger of a broad-mindedness that has no moorings.

Tolerance divorced from truth very easily leads to totalitarianism. Because we have become so permissive in our own lives, we have also become permissive about God. The belief that men are lost does not jibe with the idea of God as our "buddy" in heaven. So a new wave of universalism is abroad-the idea that everyone is doomed to be saved. Universalism began in the Garden when the serpent told Adam and Eve, "You shall not surely die," and it has often reappeared.

The older universalism told us either that men were too good to be damned or that God was too good to damn men. The "new universalism" is more subtle. It tells us that men are damned and need to be saved, but Christ has already saved them! To oversimplify, historic evangelism has said to men, "Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and you will be saved." The so-called "new evangelism" says to men, "You're already saved. Believe it!" This is a sure way to short-circuit evangelistic urgency. If all men are "doomed to be saved," then there are many better ways to serve your neighbor than to try to save his soul.

Searing social problems also stab our consciences and demand first call on our energies. The Secretary-General of the United Nations, Mr. U Thant, warns that the members of the United Nations have only ten years to launch a global partnership to curb the arms race, improve the environment and defuse the population explosion.

Human society today is like the chartered plane that carried the Wichita State football team to its death. Just as that plane couldn't climb over the Continental Divide, our problems seem insurmountable. Our leaders, like the pilot of that plane, are desperately trying to change direction.

What are we to do? Should we try to help the pilot change course or talk to him about his soul? When we see a man sitting with starving babies in his arms, a nuclear bomb over his head and pollution poisoning the air around him, we are tempted to say, "First, let's change the earth, then we can talk to him about heaven."

So the church is polarizing into two camps: the "soul savers" and the "social reformers." But the core issue is this: Can we change the world without saving souls? And can men really be saved without becoming involved in the effort to change the world?

Then too, a new sense of honesty and realism has humbled our self-righteousness. No longer can we think of a "missionary" as a superior soul from Canada the Good or America the Beautiful going to set the poor heathen right. The events of the past few years have forced us to face our own shortcomings. We have seen the burned-out ghettos, the rural slums, the bodies at Kent State, the stupidity and greed that have killed Lake Erie. No longer can we live with the illusion that God is our "Great White Father" and that Jesus wears red, white and blue.

And if we have examined our own Christian experience candidly, we have had to admit that believing in Jesus has not made all our hang-ups disappear. Even though he may have profoundly changed our lives, we still fail and fall. So when someone says, "Jesus is your trip, LSD is mine," I may be tempted to ask, "Who am I to tell this guy where it's at?"

Add to this the fact that not too many people we meet today seem over anxious about getting "saved," at least in the traditional sense. James Boswell records a conversation between Dr. Samuel Johnson and Sir Joshua Reynolds about Johnson's fear of death. "What are you afraid of?” asked Reynolds. "Damnation, sir," replied Johnson, "damnation." Now, unless I miss my guess, not too many people on your floor have said that to you this past semester.

What do you give the man who has everything? How do you relate Jesus Christ to the playboy who couldn't care less? to the friendly Hindu student down the hall? to the agnostic with the social conscience? to the engineering student who believes that, given enough time, man can solve all problems? How concerned can you be about people who don't feel "lost"?

Has the age when man really needed God faded into the age when man has everything and can do everything himself? Or have we been taken in by the image-makers? Which is the true-to-life picture: the man of distinction and the God who is dead? or the man who is alienated and the God who is really there?

Let us see how Jesus related in a similar situation to Zacchaeus, the old-time IRS tax official. Zacchaeus didn't seem to need God. He was a comfortable materialist, a "successful sinner" who had disregarded traditional moral codes and religious customs and had made it. To most of his contemporaries Zacchaeus did not seem very "lost.”

Then along came Jesus, bringing his religious crusade to Jerusalem and on the way passing through Jericho where Zacchaeus lived. And a strange thing happened. Driven by longings no one suspected were there, the man "who had everything" runs out of his office, rushes to the main street, tries to elbow his way through the crowd and finally, forgetting his dignity, climbs a tree with the little urchins off the street-to see who this Jesus is.

Luke records that when Jesus came by, he looked up at Zacchaeus and called him by name. "Zacchaeus," he said, "Quick! Come down! For I am going to be a guest in your home today!" Zacchaeus scrambles down and takes Jesus to his house in great excitement and joy. There he says to Jesus, "Sir, from now on I will give half my wealth to the poor, and if I find I have overcharged anyone on his taxes, I will give him back four times as much!" And Jesus told him, "Salvation has come to this home today. This man was one of the lost sons of Abraham and I, the Son of man, have come to search for and to save the lost."

The key to this encounter is in the way Jesus saw Zacchaeus. He didn't view Zacchaeus superficially. Because Jesus knew God and knew he was on a mission from God, he had a deep view of Zacchaeus. And because he was in contact with both God and Zacchaeus, he could sense the gap between God and this man. I believe our sense of man's lostness will be in direct proportion to the quality of our relationship with God and with others. Evangelistic concern is born when, like Jesus, we walk with God among men. Break either of these contacts and we grow cold. We cannot conjure up a concern for others by withdrawing and praying, "God, give me a concern." As we get close to both men and God, God fans up the concern in our hearts.

It is important to note also that Jesus didn't go out of his way to find Zacchaeus. Jesus was focusing on God's will when he became aware of the need of this man along the way. To me, this suggests that Christian witnessing is more a way of life than a program. And it suggests that the way to get a concern for others is not by trying to carry the whole world's burdens, but by sighting in on one person. Remember when you were a child how your parents would try to shame you into cleaning your plate by telling you about the starving people on the other side of the world? Somehow that never reached me. I could not see how finishing my spinach would help that boy in China.

Maybe this is part of our problem in developing a passion for the lost. We try to bear the burden of millions without Christ, and our emotions will not take it. We are not big enough. Only God can carry the burden of the world. He asks us simply to start with what is on our plate. Of course, we need to build a world concern, but we start with the one Zacchaeus we meet, perhaps even here at Urbana.

How did Jesus sense Zacchaeus' need? Had someone told him about Zacchaeus? Had he met him before? Or was it just his divine intuition? I don't know. But I do believe we, as Jesus' followers, can discern people's needs if we are willing to listen. All around us in our huge, lonely cities, on our vast campuses, in our affluent, empty homes people are crying, "Won't someone please listen to me!" Are we close enough to hear the "soul English" in their cries?

When I hear people, say, "Modern man isn't concerned about salvation," I feel like saying, "Don't talk nonsense! Even though people may not talk about damnation, if we care enough to really listen we'll find that most of what they're saying is about being lost and saved!"

Listen to the songs people are singing. In "Woodstock" Joni Mitchell writes, "We are starlight, we are golden, and we've got to get ourselves back to the garden." There, in almost biblical words, is the significance and the lostness of man.

Read what the social critics are saying. In The Making of a Counter Culture Theodore Roszak has given a devastating analysis of our dead-end technocratic society. He closes his introduction with this paragraph:

I find myself unable to see anything at the end of the road we are following with such self-assured momentum but Samuel Beckett's two sad tramps forever waiting under that wilted tree for their lives to begin. Except that I think the tree isn't even going to be real, but a plastic counterfeit. In fact, even the tramps may turn out to be automatons ... though of course there will be great, programmed grins on their faces.

Roszak is saying, "Of course, man is lost. Are you too blind to see it? Can't you see that history as we know it has no purpose? that nature has no reality? that man has no significance?"

It is just not true to say that men have no needs and fears. Even those who deny God cannot escape from guilt. Even though they don't take it to a clergyman, they do take it to a psychiatrist. Our mental hospitals are half-full of patients suffering not from organic troubles but from deep emotional ones and especially guilt complexes. Before this school year is over, one thousand college students in America will commit suicide - many because they cannot escape the haunting sense of failure. They have never learned one of the great things about Jesus Christ - that he makes us free to fail.

People who don't see themselves as lost from God will freely admit they are lost in the sense that they have found no meaning, no direction for their lives. The longing for significance expresses itself most clearly in the fear of death. Note the obsession with death in movies like Easy Rider or Love Story. Neil Simon, who wrote The Odd Couple and Barefoot in the Park, was asked on the Dick Cavett Show whether making a lot of money concerned him. The studio went dead silent when Simon answered, "No.... what does concern me is the fear of dying."

How many live with a terrible sense of loneliness, when even in a crowd no one seems real? How many others are gripped by despair about the world situation? One student, when asked why he was on drugs, said, "Because I know the wrong finger on the right trigger will end the world, and I live for today because tomorrow may never come."

Get behind the mask, as Jesus did with Zacchaeus, and you will find the misery. And one of the best ways to get behind that mask is to listen with real interest. As someone has said, when as a Christian you listen with love it's like putting your hand into the other's life and feeling gently along the rim of his soul until you come to a crack, a frustration, a fear or longing that he may or may not be conscious of.

The question is: How deep is that crack? And what will it take to fix it? People today realize a crack exists. They're crying, "Of course we've lost our way." Writing in Harper's, John Fischer envisioned a new university, across which he would emblazon the motto: "What must we do to be saved?" The old optimism is gone. Secular prophets have ripped the band-aids off humanity's hide and exposed the fatal wounds.

It is obvious that we have lost our way. We have lost our way internationally. The walls that divide men are higher than ever before. We have a 38th parallel, a 17th parallel, a Jordan River, a Suez Canal, a wall between East and West Berlin. We have lost our way racially. A decade ago it seemed that the end of racial segregation might be just around the corner. Now the question is: Can we avert racial war and suicide? We have lost our way morally. There have always been people who have broken the rules, but now they are saying, "There are no rules, there are no absolutes." We have lost our way ecologically. The new Jeremiahs of our day are the ecologists who are pronouncing woe and doom on a technological society gone mad with greed.

Of course we have lost our way. Man is alienated from himself, from his fellow man and from his world. Yet our cures for the crack, for the alienation, fail because our diagnosis is too shallow. Many people might have looked at Zacchaeus and agreed that he needed a psychological salvation from his hangups and a sociological salvation from his hostilities. But when Jesus looked at Zacchaeus, he saw a man who was lost because he was alienated from God.

Let me illustrate this deeper spiritual alienation. A friend of mine was going fishing with another fellow early one morning. They stopped to drink coffee in the other fellow's house. While they were sitting at the kitchen table, his buddy's little girl came into the room crying. During the night there had been a thunderstorm and because she had become frightened her parents had taken her into their bed. They had gotten up early and left her in their room. Now she was sobbing and said, "Mommy, I looked in your bed and you were gone, and I looked in Daddy's bed and he was gone, and I looked in my bed and I was gone!" When she lost her relationship with her parents, she lost herself.

Similarly, but in a far more profound way, when we lose touch with God, we lose ourselves and our other relationships go wrong. The salvation we need is one that deals with our basic lostness from God and also begins to heal all these other alienations. And this is precisely what Christ offers!

If we really were gripped with the stupendous adequacy of our gospel, we would identify with Paul who wrote to the Romans, "I'm not ashamed of the gospel of Christ. It's the power of God to put men right with God and with themselves and with their fellow men and with their world. It is for all of men and for all of life."

"I'm not afraid to come to Rome," says Paul, "and to speak of Christ. This gospel will stand up in the marketplace of ideas and the pressures of real life. It's not puny and irrelevant. It's stupendous! It works!"

Universalism, in the sense that all men will be finally saved, is unbiblical. But there is another universalism which the Bible does teach. The Bible teaches that (1) all men have been given life by God, (2) all men have rejected that life, (3) all men are offered, as a gift, new life in Christ. Do we believe this universalism enough to put our lives on the line? All men, all men, all men.

I'll never forget once when I preached about Zacchaeus in a church in the United States. After I had finished my sermon, I found out that that morning a young black soldier on his way to Vietnam had been refused admission to the service because they said he was coming as a demonstrator. Afterwards I wrote a letter and publicly declared, "I will never preach in any place representing Jesus Christ where anyone is barred like that." And when a friend of mine was going on a special mission to Vietnam, I had him make a point of looking up this young man and taking to him my personal apologies and regrets and witnessing to him about the Christ who died for all men, not just white men. The message of the Bible is a universal message, that God has given life to all men. The God of the Bible is not a cold, impersonal formula or power. Rather, he is personally interested in man, he wants us really to live-to know and enjoy him forever. As Jesus put it, "I have come that you might have life more abundantly."

God made man to have the highest destiny among created beings. You and I were made like God. The Creator said, "Let us make man in our image." This means that man has a soul - the capacity to have a unique relationship with God. "Life" as God planned it is much more than biological existence. It has a spiritual and moral dimension to it. "This is life . . . eternal life ... to know the only true God," said Jesus (Jn. 17:3). And when we are in harmony with God, we really have abundant life.

God planned to build a wonderful world with man. He made man to live in peace and dignity and love with a real purpose. Instead, what do we see? Restlessness, war, prejudice, hatred, despair. What has happened?
The biblical diagnosis is that man has rejected life. The root cause of our human predicament is spiritual rebellion. The Bible's verdict is that "we have turned to our own way." "All have sinned." We have chosen to say No to God's design and to run our own lives.

Under God’s Wrath

When we say sin, most people think right away of sexual immorality or some terrible crime. But basically sin is pride, egotism, self-centeredness. Sin means that we deny the true God and we try to play God for ourselves. The "sins" men commit - for example, stealing, lying, and hating - are the result of pushing God to the edge of our lives or ignoring him altogether. The result of sin is spiritual death: "The wages of sin is death." Man may be mentally, physically and socially alive, alert, vigorous and successful, but still he can be spiritually dead. Like a flower cut off from its root, his contact with his Maker has been broken and that is why man is bored, lonely, guilty, restless, afraid. And the end result is eternal banishment from the presence and fellowship of a just and holy God.

But, someone may object, doesn't the Bible teach that "God is love"? Would a loving God punish and banish man from his presence? But the Bible also tells us that "God is a consuming fire" (Heb. 12:29), and that "God is light and in him is no darkness at all" (I Jn. 1:5). Just as light and darkness cannot abide together, so a holy God cannot tolerate sin.

That is why when Paul says, "The gospel is the power of God unto salvation," he immediately goes on to say in Romans 1: 18 that "the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and wickedness of men who by their wickedness suppress the truth." Otherwise, men might shrug it off and say, "Who needs salvation?" or else, "O.K., you've got Jesus for your hang-ups; I've got pills for mine." "Hold it," says Paul, "I'll tell you why you need salvation: It's because you're guilty, under the wrath of a holy God and you need Christ to set you right."

From the biblical perspective, all of man's alienations come because man is under the wrath of God. Master the first three chapters of Genesis and you will grasp the biblical view of man. Man is significant (made in "the image of God"). But man rebels against God. So what happens? Man is separated from God, expelled from the Garden - spiritual alienation. As a result, something dies inside man - psychological alienation begins. Cain kills Abel - sociological alienation begins. The ground is cursed because of man's fall - ecological alienation begins.

The reality of God's wrath is as much a part of the biblical message as is God's grace. "He who believes in the Son has eternal life; he who does not obey the Son shall not see life, but the wrath of God rests upon him," says John 3:36. Yet the concept of God's wrath is hard to take in. Why? Perhaps because our own anger is so often selfish and mean. I get frustrated, I blow my stack. I'm tired, I punish my children before I get all the facts and I have to tell them I'm sorry.

But God's wrath is not like mine, just as God's love is different from mine. Where my love is often fickle, God's love is faithful. And where my anger is often petty, God's wrath is pure. Where I "fly off the handle," God is "slow to anger" (Ex. 34:6). God's wrath is his settled opposition to sin. It is not vindictive; it is vindictive. It is the active, resolute action of God to vindicate his justice, uphold the moral law of the universe and punish sin.

We need to be clear that while God's blessing is eternal life, his wrath is eternal death. Where sin comes, death follows (Rom. 5:12). Death means that we lose something essential to the kind of life we were made for. In the Bible life means more than physical life - it is a relationship with God. And thus death means more than physical dissolution - it is a loss of that fellowship with God here and now, and hereafter in hell.

Does the thought of hell seem to you to belong to the Dark Ages? Let me read a comment from Leslie Weatherhead, a liberal theologian:

Sin is a terrible thing in the universe. Let us never forget that though the idea of hell has been caricatured as a fantastic vulgarity by the generation of our great-grandfathers, we are doing our generation a greater disservice if we make light of sin and pretend that it does not matter and that you are all going to the same place and that God will pat everyone on the head and say, "There, there, it doesn't matter. I'm sure you didn't mean it. Come now and enjoy yourselves." We need to remember that the most terrible things ever said were spoken by the most wonderful person who ever lived.

Never forget that the talk about outer darkness, the closed door, the weeping and gnashing of teeth and the lake of fire came from the lips of the most compassionate person who ever lived. Jesus, who died to save us from hell, had the most to say about it!

Many things we do not know about hell. But Jesus and the New Testament writers use every image in their power to tell us that hell is real, terrible, something to be feared and avoided at all costs. In his parable of the last judgment Jesus taught that some would go to eternal punishment, some to eternal life (Mt. 25:46). In other words, hell will be as real and as lasting as heaven.

The horror of hell is not physical pain. After all, the Bible tells us hell was prepared for "the devil and his angels," and they are not physical beings. Rather the "fire" and "outer darkness" and "thirst" depict spiritual separation from God, moral remorse, and the consciousness that one deserves what he is getting. Hell is the end result of selfishness - an eternal sentence to exist with self as our god. Hell is disintegration - the eternal loss of being a real person.

Hell is eternal desire - eternally unfulfilled. In hell the mathematician who lived for his science endlessly totals a column of figures, but can't add two and two. There the concert pianist who worshiped himself through his art can't play a simple scale. The man who lived for sex lives in eternal lust with no body to exploit. The woman who made fashion her god has a thousand wigs but no mirror!

But there is another side. G. K. Chesterton once remarked, "Hell is the greatest compliment God has ever paid to the dignity of human freedom."

Hell - a compliment?

Yes, because God is saying to us, "You are significant. I take you seriously. Choose to reject me - choose hell - if you will. I will let you go."

Hell is God's final monument to human freedom. After all, no one ever thought of a dog going to hell.
Incidentally, if we really grasp the biblical view of man - sinful but significant - then we won't get caught in the artificial hang-up between social action and evangelistic concern. Because man is lost but of great value, the two belong together. To bring a man the Bible for his soul but ignore his need of bread is mockery. If we really believe man has a soul worth saving, then we will be committed to offer that man eternal life and also to see that he receives economic and social justice in this life.

On the other hand, if a man does not have a soul, then compassion is pointless and absurd. Why care, if man is a chance chemical accident? Man is valuable because he is significant. He is significant because he is morally and spiritually responsible. And because he is responsible, he is really lost. That is why our practical concern for man's earthly welfare must grow out of an overarching concern for man's eternal destiny.

Does the biblical teaching about God's judgment and man's lostness repulse you? Does it seem to degrade God into a monster and man into a puppet? As Francis Schaeffer points out in Death in the City, the only way we can get rid of the lostness of man is to do away with either the holiness of God or the significance of man. Says Schaeffer:

... If you give up the holiness of God, there are no absolutes and morality becomes a zero; if you give up the significance of man, man becomes a zero. If you want a significant man, with absolutes, morality and meaning, then you must have what the Bible insists upon - that God will judge men justly.

In the final analysis history is the record of man under judgment, man trying to get back to God and failing. We try to fill that God-shaped vacuum in our lives - by business, by pleasure, by possessions, by philosophy, even by religion and a good life - but we can't cross the gap that sin has made.

You and I cannot get back to God but he can come to us. In spite of our rebellion, God kept on loving us. And this great, holy, loving God in his mercy invaded history in the person of Jesus Christ to provide a solution. He paid a personal visit to our planet to repair that broken contact. "God was in Christ reconciling the world unto himself" (2 Cor. 5:19).

Two thousand years ago God gave us a personal demonstration of his love in the life of Jesus Christ who was God in human form. Jesus came to bring us back to God at the cost of his own life. He said, "I came to give my life a ransom for many." He committed no sin, but in his own person he carried our sins to the cross: "He, the just, suffered for the unjust to bring us to God."

Thus, Jesus Christ is the bridge by which we can come back into personal contact with God. He said, "I am the way ... no one comes to the Father, but by me" (Jn. 14:6). Note that Jesus did not say, "You can't believe in God but by me." Rather, he said, "You can't come to the Father [that is, come into a living personal relationship with God] but by me."

It may sound like sheer arrogance for Christians to say, "There is only 'one way,' and we've found that way." It would be arrogance if salvation were a matter of attainment. But it is not. Salvation is a matter of obtainment. "The gift of God is eternal life through Christ." We are all in the same fix - Jew, Christian, Hindu, agnostic - we have all failed by our own moral standards. Even when we have done our best, our bridges do not reach to God. That is why God had to reach to us.

But what of those who have not heard of Jesus? Is it fair and just for God to judge them? The first answer to the problem of those who haven't heard the gospel is to realize that if you are concerned about the fairness of the situation, God is more concerned. "Shall not the judge of all the earth do right?" asks the Scripture (Gen. 18:25). God is just and we can believe he will do right.

The second answer is to recognize that God will judge men on the basis of their knowledge, not their ignorance. Paul makes this clear in Romans 1 and 2. He points out that the wrath of God is revealed against men who "by their wickedness suppress the truth" (Rom. 1: 18). He is referring here not to Jews, but to Gentiles, to men who do not have the Bible. And, says Paul, the truth they suppress falls into two parts. One part is the truth of God's power written into the order of nature (Rom. 1: 19-20). The other is the truth of God's moral law written into their hearts (Rom. 2:14-15). So, says Paul, men are "without excuse." Even men without the Bible have consciences that make moral judgments and on the day when God calls men to account, the record of conscience will bear witness and 14accuse or perhaps excuse" men.

To use Francis Schaeffer's illustration in Death in the City, it is as if each person had a tape recorder built into his conscience that registers every moral judgment made during that person's lifetime. At the last day God will play back the tape and every man will hear his own voice saying, "That's right. That's wrong. You shouldn't have done that. You should have done this." And then God will say, "Have you lived by your own moral standards?" And there will be an unearthly silence as every mouth will be stopped. Every man will have to plead guilty because he will have been judged not by what he hadn't known, but by what he had known and hadn't kept.

The third answer to this problem is that God has promised that those who seek him sincerely will find him (see Jeremiah 29:13 and Matthew 7:7). In Acts we read of Cornelius, a Roman army officer who, though not a Christian, was a God-fearing man. He earnestly sought God, according to the light he had. And God responded by sending to him Peter, who told Cornelius how his sins could be forgiven through Jesus Christ. When Cornelius heard, he believed. It was not Cornelius' good works that saved him. Like all other men he had sinned. But when he sincerely sought God by the light he had, God sent him further light. We must be careful how we interpret this story. It does not teach that any religion can save a man if he is sincere. It does suggest that God will in some way respond to anyone of any background who diligently seeks him, sending him the word of Jesus Christ.

And that is the fourth part of the answer. God sent Peter to Cornelius. If you are concerned about those who have not heard of Jesus, perhaps God is saying: You go tell them! "How can they hear without a preacher ... ?”

Love for lost men led God to send his Son. Love for lost men led Jesus to seek and save them at the cost of his life. What does love lead me to do? If I have bread, another man is hungry, and I don't share, do I love him? If I know Christ, another man is lost, and I don't share, do I know love?

We do not evangelize from a superiority complex. We do not go in an attitude of condemning others. We must not say, "You're all wet and I've got all the answers." As D. T. Niles said, "We're beggars telling other beggars where to find bread." We go saying, "Brother, we're in the same boat. I identify with you. We've both failed. But Jesus Christ has enabled me to take my mask off and to face myself and admit my failures and prejudices. He's given me the way out, the exit. And this Jesus Christ can do the same for you. I'm not what I should be. I'm not what I'm going to be. But because of him I'm not what I used to be!" That's witnessing! And we are witnesses, not judges. It is my responsibility to witness; it's God's responsibility to judge. Only God is good enough and knowledgeable enough to be the judge.

We are witnesses, not condemners. Jesus did not condemn Zacchaeus. He did not walk up to him and say, "Hey, you dirty sinner. You're going to hell." Jesus knew that Zacchaeus was lost, but he merely said, "I want to stay at your house." And faced with the love and acceptance of Jesus Christ, Zacchaeus could face himself and could find salvation.

We have been considering the question: Is man really lost? Maybe the question should have been, Am I ... are you ... really saved? For if man is lost, and if Jesus Christ is God's stupendous answer to that lostness and if I don't care about sharing him, then something must be wrong with my relationship to God.

If I do not have that concern, either I do not know God or I have grown cold and have forgotten what Jesus Christ has done for me. Maybe I want so much to be popular that I will not pay the price of genuine love: to tell it like it is and face others with the finality of Christ. Maybe the problem is not my belief, but my obedience. Jesus could not save Zacchaeus and save himself too. Saving the lost is a costly business - spiritually, materially, and emotionally.

Maybe the price seems too great. I suspect that the reason Zacchaeus trusted Jesus was because he sensed, "Here is a man who really cares about me." In fact, this man was ready to die for him. And I suspect that men will believe what we say about Jesus when they see that we really care, that we are willing, in some sense, to die for him and them.

Maybe the world does not believe because it does not believe the believers believe. Last September, a black brother, a member of the Billy Graham Team, came to my room. The night before he had met until 1:30 with black students at a Pennsylvania university. "They are committed to revolution," he told me. "They are ready to die for it. They threw my words back in my teeth and said to me, 'Your Jesus is powerless, your Jesus is irrelevant in our situation.' I wanted to reach them, but I couldn't. I failed." And as he told me, he broke down in my arms and cried like a baby, a strong man racked with sobs.

Two days later I got word from the person who arranged that meeting. He said, "That was the most significant meeting we have ever had on this campus." He did get through. The next Sunday when he spoke in a church in that college town, thirty students, black and white, committed their lives to Christ.

And then I learned what had gotten through - what had really reached them. At the end of that late night session my brother had looked at the students and said, "O.K., you say you're ready to die. Well, I want you to know I'm ready to die, too. And you can kill me right here if it will make you feel any better. But I want you to know this. If you die, you die for nothing. If I die, I die for something."

Is man really lost?

Don't answer too glibly. For if we say yes, then Jesus may say, "Come with me, disciple - to Jericho, to Jerusalem, to Calvary, back to your home, back to your campus and to the ends of the world."

Is Man Really Lost? (1970)

God's Word

Urbana Stories

35 days until

December 27-31, 2009