Quote Originally Posted by disciple View Post
Hello Phoenix, I certainly see the point you are making but the criteria and means of salvation is chosen by God not you or I.
I agree: God chose the means and criteria to be this: If you wanna be saved, there are conditions. If salvation were unconditional, then all would be saved. We don't believe that all will be saved, so there must be conditions that some people don't meet because they don't want to be saved that badly.

God's standard is perfection, right?
Right, and all who want to be perfected in Christ, can be perfected in Christ. But it's not an instantaneous thing. Saying "Hallelujah, I believe in Christ as my Savior" won't make you instantly perfect. It's a lifelong process, and everyone who wants to become perfect has to start at the beginning and then stay on the path until they reach the end. At the end of the path is perfection, which results in eternal life.

To say you obey God at least a little is like saying you only sin a little,(For whoever keeps the whole law and yet stumbles at just one point is guilty of breaking all of it), or to say a little truth is not a lie.
It's better to obey some of God's commandments than to disobey all of them. A Christian once told me: You may not be able to become sinless today, but you can sin less today than you did yesterday.

OK then, now we know for sure that faith comes by hearing, what do works come by?
Obviously those who haven't yet heard of Christ, can't be punished for failing to have faith in Him. So faith in Christ becomes possible once people have heard His gospel. And then doing the good works of the gospel become possible once the person has heard the words of Christ. That's just basic logic that anyone should be able to understand.

But it would be a fallacy to say that the billions of people who died without knowing about Christ, died in complete and total rebellion against God. You don't need to know about Christ and His gospel in order to obey the commandment against murdering, stealing, lying, committing adultery, etc.