I have a question relating what happened/will happen to all the people of the Old Testament. Since Jesus was not alive during the Old Testament, how could his people be saved by believing in him? Did all of those Jewish people not even get a chance to everlasting life? Are they condemned to hell?
First off, when dealing with the Old Testament, we must remember that God dealt with people of every nation on earth, all the way up until Genesis chapter 11. So anyone on earth who wanted to have a relationship with the Creator God had access to Him. All they had to do was cry out to Him in prayer, asking Him to show Himself to them, and He would come to them. He would then tell them to offer a blood sacrifice to Him to cover their sins. Nobody believed in Jesus because He was not around back then, but they did have to believe what God told them to believe, and that was to offer a blood sacrifice!
God allowed them to use animals as the sacrifice because He knew that one day His Son, the Lord Jesus Christ, would come and offer the real human blood sacrifice. So before Jesus showed up, God allowed people who believed in Him to show proof of their belief by sacrificing to Him alone! Again, they did not trust in Jesus, per se, but by offering the bloody animal, God accepted it just like they were trusting Jesus, who would come in the future! And as long as those people sacrificed to Him and obeyed His Word when He told them to do something, they went to paradise, which was in the middle of the earth (no one could die and go to Heaven before Jesus died on the Cross). So those people who trusted the Creator God and obeyed His Word by sacrificing an animal, went to paradise after death to rest, until the Lord Jesus went to gather them up after He died on the Cross.
Now that was the way that God did it before Genesis 11! After Genesis 11, when God chose out one man named Abraham (because the other nations of peoples did not want God anymore), God began dealing with Abraham and His people ONLY. If anyone else wanted God's blessing, they had to go to Abraham and be blessed by him or his family. But before Jesus came 2,000 years after Abraham, God still required a BLOOD sacrifice of an animal for Abraham and his family to be right with God. So Abraham and his family would constantly offer sacrifices to God for their sins and obey His Word to them when He told them something.
This continued for about 400 years until a son of Abraham named Moses showed up. Once Moses showed up, God wrote down His Word to Moses and Abraham's people, called the people of Israel. It was called the Law of Moses. In this law were all the commandments of God for that nation, and that included blood sacrifices of animals to pay for their sins. The Israelites (Jewish people) had to obey God by keeping the Law and to offer the blood sacrifices to be right with God. As long as they did that unto the day that they died, they would go to Paradise like all the other Old Testament believers before them. If someone from another nation wanted to be right with God and go to Paradise and not hell when they died, they had to become a Jew (a proselyte) and keep the Law and offer blood sacrifices to the Jewish God!
This way of dealing with the Jews continued for 1,500 years until Jesus showed up. Once Jesus showed up, God now required believers to trust, listen and follow Him! Those who did and offered the blood sacrifices would go to Paradise when they died, and not hell. Jesus let Israel know that all those bloody animal sacrifices were really pointing to, and representing Him! He was truly the Lamb of God who would be sacrificed for their sins.
The High Priest of Israel was supposed to sacrifice Jesus on the altar in the Temple by faith…
Psalm 118:27
God is the LORD, which hath shewed us light: bind the sacrifice with cords, even unto the horns of the altar.
Philippians 2:8
And being found in fashion as a man, he humbled himself, and became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross.
…but instead, he [the high priest] and other leaders of Israel rejected Jesus and murdered Him on the Cross [Acts 2:23] ...but God raised him from the dead! Now Jesus will punish all those people who rejected Him, but all those who trusted His sacrifice for them will go to paradise.
So all the Old Testament people who called out to God the Creator and obeyed His Word to them (by offering the required blood sacrifice) are in Heaven now with Him, even though they did not “trust Jesus.” (Again, Jesus had not come to earth in the flesh as yet so as to shed His blood for them to trust in.)
That brings us to to how God deals with us today. Now that Jesus has come, everybody both can and must trust Him and His shed blood! When Israel rejected God's Son, God sent Him to us Gentiles (other nations outside [alien from the commonwealth] of Israel). Jesus saved the Apostle Paul and sent him to us to let us know that if/when we trust Jesus' shed blood on the Cross for our sins, we too can be right with God and go to Heaven when we die.
Acts 9:15
But the Lord said unto him, Go thy way: for he is a chosen vessel unto me, to bear my name before the Gentiles, and kings, and the children of Israel:
1 Thessalonians 4:14-18
For if we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so them also which sleep in Jesus will God bring with him. For this we say unto you by the word of the Lord, that we which are alive and remain unto the coming of the Lord shall not prevent them which are asleep. For the Lord himself shall descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel, and with the trump of God: and the dead in Christ shall rise first: Then we which are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air: and so shall we ever be with the Lord. Wherefore comfort one another with these words.
Hopefully this
helps!
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