9. Question: If Christians are the only ones going to heaven, how were people saved before Jesus came to the earth?

Answer: The Bible states that people were always saved by grace: faith in the Messiah for eternal forgiveness. God revealed to every generation, beginning with Adam and Eve, by His Spirit and through His prophets, how to be saved by trusting in God to forgive forever by the atoning death of the Messiah (Romans 4). Jesus said that Abraham, Isaiah and Moses believed in Him for their forgiveness (John 5:45-46; John 8:56; John 12:41). Peter writes that the prophets who lived before Jesus came prophesied of the grace of God (they trusted in the atoning death of the Messiah) and the Spirit of God was in them (1 Peter 1:10-11). The Apostle Luke writes that the Apostle Peter preached at Pentecost about how the Prophet King David prophesied about the coming Messiah and believed in His forgiveness through His death, burial and resurrection (Acts 2:25-36).

All people of all time were led by the Spirit of God to seek the truth, and if they followed the Spirit, they found the truth that salvation comes only by surrendering to God as Master and trusting in His gift of eternal forgiveness through the atoning death of the Messiah, who would be God in the flesh, the only way to heaven.