If you’re a parent, you don’t want to hear your child ask, “Mommy, is Santa real?”

If you’re a patient, you don’t want to hear your doctor ask, “How would you like me to administer this medication?”

And if you’re a Christian, you may hope to go your whole life without hearing, “If God is love, then why would he send people to Hell just because they never heard about Jesus?”

For many Christians, the question about unreached people groups is a tough one because it’s a classic “rock and hard place” question: no matter how you answer, you’re going to feel like you got it wrong.

Before we tackle PK’s helpful answer to this inquiry, let’s take a moment to learn something that might help you when you encounter this kind of question. Christian apologist Ravi Zacharias is known for saying, “Behind every question, there’s a questioner.” What he means is that every question a person asks is influenced by the life experiences and beliefs of the person asking.

It’s a helpful thing to remember, because quite often the question is just a vehicle for testing how YOU feel about the questioner. If you respond with anger, arrogance, or condescension then you are communicating something significant to the person asking the question. Namely, that the Gospel you claim to follow isn’t much of a Gospel.

If you respond with patience, honesty, and love, you communicate to the person asking the question that you take their curiosity seriously, and care about answering them in a way that is beneficial to their understanding. You model the life of Jesus and give credence to your own claims of faith.

So how do you answer the question about people who’ve never heard of Jesus and their eternal destination?

During the Q&A, PK began to wrestle with complexity of compassion. This question is usually asked from a place of compassion by the asker. Their heart cares for unreached people groups. But, in answering this question we come face to face with how much compassion God has. We are reminded that God’s compassion for this world is far greater than we are capable of.

The truth is, if God was unconcerned about reaching everyone with the Gospel, then Jesus never would’ve sent us out as his disciples. He would’ve been content with keeping the Good News “in house” and letting the rest of the world figure things out on their own. And yet John 3:16 says that God so loved the entire world that He sent Jesus to die for ALL people.

And then He gave those of us who choose to follow Him the responsibility to reach people who don’t know Him.

The second part of PK’s answer was to remind us that God is giving time for the whole earth to hear the Gospel. The Apostle Peter wrote, “God isn’t late with his promise as some measure lateness. He is restraining himself on account of you, holding back the End because he doesn’t want anyone lost. He’s giving everyone space and time to change” (2 Peter 3:8-9, The Message).

What’s clear about the compassion and the nature of God is that he can be trusted with his own plan for salvation and how Jesus’ work would be applied to that person if that person sought God as best they knew how. There is no salvation apart from Jesus, and how God would work in this situation is unclear - but God’s character is trustworthy, therefore his response in these situations is too.

There’s no compassion greater than God’s, and the path for salvation is not only set, it’s being given time to work itself out to every nation. If the church would ever grab hold of that, there’s no telling how many unreached groups would actually be left.