Who'll Be in Heaven & Who Won't?

Excerpt from Chapter 1
You’ll Be Surprised by Who Will Be in Heaven
Heathen in Heaven!
About four thousand years ago there was a man of great wealth and high social position, a man who endeavored to worship and serve God to the best of his knowledge even when the stock market crashed to zero and he lost his health, wealth, and children.[i]
His friends turned against him, and his critical wife advised him to curse God and die. His actual knowledge about God appears very limited. As far as we know he had no contact with any organized religion on the earth. Based on when in history he probably lived, he never heard of Jehovah of the Old Testament, and he lived long before Christ or Mohamed walked the face of the earth. For all intents and purposes, he was a heathen attempting to the best of his knowledge and ability to worship God—whoever he was. Yet I doubt whether any Jew, Christian, or Muslim would question Job’s being in heaven. The question is how, on what basis, was he saved? His wife and his religious friends had a lot of good religious advice for him, but Job stuck to his guns and in due time God vindicated him. I have absolutely no doubt that I will see him in heaven, as the Scriptures say, “for the LORD had accepted Job.”[ii]
Other Jobs?
Let’s put it another way: do you think there is any possibility that throughout all the earth, down through the ages, there could be another very righteous man who loved, obeyed, and feared God despite a very imperfect knowledge of the Almighty—we might refer to him as Job II? I think we are forced to say there certainly could be. How about a Job III? Is it even possible in some remote jungle today there is a Job IV? Again, I believe, the answer has to be yes.[iii]
Furthermore, there will be many other unexpected people in heaven, such as the lying prostitute Rahab[iv] and the wicked Ninevites who turned from their sin to worship the living Creator. Theirs was an evil civilization; the Israelites hated them, and the Hebrew prophet Jonah resisted God’s desire that he urge them to repent. After much arm-twisting by God, Jonah finally went to Nineveh, and to his dismay, they listened to God’s message and repented in sackcloth and ashes. I’ll see them in heaven.[v]
Of course there will be many whom most of us would expect to be in heaven, such as Adam and Eve’s son Abel, who offered an appropriate offering and was killed by his jealous brother.[vi] Most would agree that the stalwarts in the early days of Judaism—such as Noah,[vii] Abraham, and Moses—will be in heaven.
I’m sure we’ll see the first Christians ever—the Persian magi, from either the current Iraq or Iran, who were priests, wise men, and of all things, astrologers, following by faith a strange and miraculous leading.[viii] Of course the thief who was crucified with Christ and was told by Jesus that “today you will be with Me in Paradise” will certainly be saved.[ix] The Roman centurion to whom Christ said, “I have not found such great faith not even in Israel,” will be there.[x] Then there will be the black treasurer from Ethiopia who was seeking to worship the true God and so went to Jerusalem and on the way home was enlightened.[xi]
The Hebrew disciple Peter struggled with repulsion at God’s beckoning him to go to the Gentile Cornelius and teach him about God’s truths. He ultimately concluded: “I perceive that God shows no partiality, but in every nation whoever fears [God] and works righteousness is accepted by Him.”[xii] I could greatly expand on this list; but I believe you get the point. This roster spans many different nationalities over thousands of years and many miles, all enjoying the benefits of heaven.
Thus, I surmise that individuals will be in heaven who have never been part of any organized religion, individuals who respond to God’s grace and will enter the pearly gates. Such a conclusion is crucial; otherwise many people in the world who have never had the opportunity to hear about the true God could never enter heaven. That would not be fair—and I believe God is both fair and just. Rhetorically the Scriptures say, “shall not the God of all the earth do right?”[xiii] I assert he has and always will do what is right. This addresses the most frequently asked question about Christianity on college campuses today.[xiv]
C. S. Lewis poignantly articulates the dilemma that most of us struggle with:
Here is another thing that used to puzzle me. Is it not frightfully unfair that this new [Christian] life should be confined to people who have heard of Christ and been able to believe in Him? But the truth is God has not told us what His arrangements about the other people are. We do know that no man can be saved except through Christ; we do not know that only those who know Him can be saved through Him.[xv]
The highly respected theologian J. I. Packer elaborates further saying:
We may say (i) if any good pagan reached the point of throwing himself on his Maker’s mercy for pardon, it was grace that brought him there; (ii) God will surely save anyone he brings thus far (cf. Acts 10:34f.; Rom. 10:12f.); (iii) anyone thus saved would learn in the next world that he was saved through Christ. But what we cannot safely say is that God ever does save anyone this way.[xvi]
The British theologian Alister E. McGrath takes it a step further:
God’s revelation is not limited to the explicit human preaching of the good news, but extends beyond it. We must be prepared to be surprised at those whom we will meet in the kingdom of God. In his preaching of the good news of the kingdom, Jesus lists some who will be among its beneficiaries—the Ninevites, the queen of Sheba, and those who lived in the cities of Tyre, Sidon, Sodom, and Gomorrah. . . . By strict Jewish standards none of these had any claim to be in the kingdom of God. Yet God’s mercy extended far beyond the human limits devised by this rather narrow-minded section of Judaism. Perhaps there is a danger that today’s Christians will repeat this mistake, even with the best of intentions, by placing artificial human limits on the sovereignty, freedom, and love of God.[xvii]