HawaiianShirts

I was thinking of this passage as well. I've met a few folks who believe that there's a kind of waiting room for people who were generally good and who had not outrightly rejected Christ but had not yet accepted Him (perhaps because they had not heard of Him). Not really a place between Heaven and Hell but an extra step between Death and God's Judgment. I don't know if that's true, but it kind of feels right to me, and I imagine that's one way a just and loving God could arrange to justly and lovingly help those who didn't have their opportunity to choose.

Okay, here's something about Christianity that still has me scratching my head, and I hope there's an answer out there that I've just missed so far. The Bible says that Jesus is the only way to God. Got it. Those who don't accept Jesus will not be saved. Got it. BUT! The Bible also says that God is Love. If so, then what loving God would banish souls to Hell for never having had a chance to accept Jesus? That's what's been explained to me sometimes. All those people in, say, rural China who have never even had a chance to hear the name of Jesus will obviously never accept Him, and because of that they're destined for eternal torment in Hell. Really? That's the punishment of a just and loving God for someone who never had a chance? I mean, if I get up in the morning and tell my kid that he has to clean his room or he can't have dessert after dinner, and if I then take him out for a whole day of running errands and playing in the park so that he doesn't have any time at all that day to do any cleaning, am I still going to say he can't have any dessert? No! I'm going to let him have his dessert and postpone the room-cleaning requirement for the next day. Why? Because it was because of me that he couldn't clean his room, not because of any inaction on his part. Why would God punish someone who couldn't obey the commandments even if they wanted to?

Well, Willamina, you summed that up rather well. And it looks like everyone here agrees with you. I'm still not 100% convinced, though. I mean, yes, God is all-knowing and all-seeing. I get that. God knows what I'm going to do with my life because he can see it all evn though I can't. I get that, too, and I'm totally on board with it. But even the Psalms that bopeep1909 quoted above don't stand to me as a clear statement of, "You didn't exist until I created you as a fetus in your mother's womb." Part of the reason I ask has to do with some personal experiences I've had. There have been people that I have met in my life who somehow seem familiar to me. One of my friends in high school, for example. He's a die-hard atheist; I'm a (slightly confused) believer. He uses Linux; I use Windows. Our interests and personalities are quite different. But I met him once, on a class field trip, and after maybe two minutes of conversation between museum exhibits, we were best friends. There was something inexplicably familiar about him, and to this day, I just can't shake the feeling that I knew him before I met him. To me, experiences like that and the verses in Jeremiah suggest that, just maybe, we did exist before mortality began. Maybe we were just God's thoughts, and maybe we just happened to bump into each other at some point. Does anybody think it's even possible, or am I way off track here?

So, I haven't read the Bible cover-to-cover yet, but I'm comfortably familiar with it. There are a few things that have me confused. Here's one. In Jeremiah 1:5 (KJV), I read this. "Before I formed thee in the belly I knew thee; and before thou camest forth out of the womb I sanctified thee, and I ordained thee a prophet unto the nations." It says that God knew Jeremiah, not just before he was born, but before he was even concieved. Could that mean that we all existed in some kind of pre-birth state? Were we... I don't know... some kind of self-aware entity, maybe like a spirit, before we were born here on Earth? That's what it sounds like to me, anyway, and, so far, I haven't found anything that proves it wrong, but every pastor I've talked to about this says that it's impossible for any human to have existed before now. Any thoughts?