Could someone in the Old Testament be saved without believing in Christ?

Question

I have often heard it taught that those living in the time of the Old Testament were saved by the law, but that they also had to have faith that Christ would come. If someone living in the Old Testament era did not believe that Christ would come and denied the future coming of the Messiah, could they still be saved? Or was belief in the future coming of Christ necessary for salvation in that time period?

Answer 1

Faith in the Messiah, and repentance towards God is the only way of salvation, and always has been.

Adam and Eve were given the promise of a future Messiah as soon as they sinned:

And I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and hers; he will crush your head, and you will strike his heel, Genesis 3:15.

It was faith in Christ through believing this promise that brought salvation to all who believed it. A further act signifying that this future Messiah would be a substitutionary sacrifice for sin was demonstrated by the killing of an animal and the provision of a covering from the skin of the sacrifice. There included in this faith which saved an acknowledgment by the believer that his/her sins deserved death. Cain refused to believe this and sacrificed only vegetables; Abel agreed with it and sacrificed the best of his flock.

One of the earliest books in the Bible reveals the faith in Christ that was possible before Christ was born:

For I know that my Redeemer lives, and at the last he will stand upon the earth. And after my skin has been thus destroyed, yet in my flesh I shall see God, whom I shall see for myself, and my eyes shall behold, and not another. My heart faints within me! Job 19:25-27.

Job expresses his confidence in his resurrection, and that his saviour will not be the invisible God, but a kinsman redeemer, both God and man. All the OT prophets were saved because of their faith in the coming Messiah.

The moral law and the ten commandments were never given in order to save anyone, merely to demonstrate how impossible it is to please God by our own attempts, now that we are a fallen race.

Answer 2

The Israelites of the Old Covenant established between God and the Israelites at Mount Sinai with Moses as the witness required them to observe the Torah,to be clean and to observe the ten commandments. I have read the Bible several times from Genesis to Judges and it is difficult to see the Messianic prophecies. The Messianic prophecies started to emerge with prophets like Jeremiah, Isaiah and others. It is difficult to believe in a figure that has not been born yet for your salvation, I was shocked that some Christians here believe that Adam had to believe in Jesus whom he didn't know for his salvation, so be wary of false teachers and false doctrines. Trust the Bible only and not the interpretation of man.

I can give you an array of prophets who went to heaven and didn't believe in Jesus, we start with Enoch who walked with God, God reportedly took him alive, then there is Elijah,then there is Elisha and the list is endless till Jesus was born.

We believe in Jesus because his gospel and his ministry have been preached to us and we have heard and believed, but it was not possible to preach the gospel of Jesus Christ to people who lived before he was born including Israelites for Jesus needed to rise from the dead first to show us God's plan for this age.

Answer 3

@StephenDisraeli's apt rephrasing of your question is "In other words, what was the actual content of the faith of the "men of faith" listed in Hebrews 11"?

Many Christians maintain that those men of faith would have believed in Christ when they meet Jesus in heaven. It's reasonable to assume that God would judge every OT person according to how they would react to what God has revealed so far in their lifetime. As long as one didn't reject what God revealed so far, didn't rebel in their conscience, and obeyed the prompting to seek God (Prov 28:4-5), not knowing the details on how the salvation was going to come in God's incarnation in Jesus shouldn't be counted against them.

Of course the prophet Jeremiah's and the prophet Isaiah's content of faith was a lot more than what Abraham had, let alone Adam and Noah, because Jeremiah and Isaiah had the benefit of God's revelation at Sinai, the history of Israel's many rescues, the role model of David in his relationship with God, and other prophecies prior to their time. So people in both prophets' time should have been more sure of God's future salvation, even though God had not revealed fully the manner of His salvation through Christ. They only possessed hints such as Job 19:25-27, Abraham's trusting God to save Isaac because God promised him a great nation as descendants, Israelites' trusting God to settle them in Canaan, David's believing God for the future fulfillment of God's promise that his kingdom would endure forever, etc.

No one would have predicted that God would come in person face to face (even the disciples on the road to Emmaus needed Jesus to explain it to them), but the criteria should be how they would respond in faith to the content of faith given to them, rather than their ability to typologically interpret definitively the prophecies that the Messiah would appear as the eternal King descendant of David, as the "son of man" (Daniel 7:13-14), as a "suffering servant" (Isaiah 53), etc. in the person of God-crucified in Christ. Most of them didn't even have the benefit of the critical prophecy recorded in the book of Daniel!

Similarly, we in the New Testament era also have limited "content of faith" especially when the Second Coming of Christ seems to be delayed further and further, and how God can seem absent in the face of growing global awareness of grievous injustice and oppression to the weak in modern-day human trafficking and how war agressors seem act with impunity against civilians. The story of humanity-saving project of God is ongoing and we Christians are invited to take part, not only in spreading the gospel but also to bring God's justice and compassion to greater areas of the earth today.

The key criteria common to everyone past, present, and future is: when you meet Christ at the door as you pass from this life to the next (wonderfully portrayed in C.S. Lewis's final chapters of The Last Battle) would you rejoice to find in the face of Jesus what you have been longing for as you seek God your entire life, or would you recoil to find the clearest expression of what you have been hating and avoiding your entire life?

Finally, "saved by the law" is a Pauline concept foreign to OT people. They would have understood "faith in God" as doing their part in being faithful to God's covenant, partly by doing the "works of the law" which was not identical to simply doing good by the light of faith they possess in responding to the "content of faith" they had received.

CONCLUSION: No, they can only be saved by believing in Christ, but to OT people Christ would be revealed fully to them only when they died. A Biblical hint is Christ preaching to souls in Hades (1 Pet 3:18-20) and how Matthew portrayed that the "saints were raised" (Matt 27:52). Not being aware of Christ's mission to die on the cross to pay for their sins does not mean they don't "have faith that Christ would come". Their faith in God would have been counted as faith in Christ, following the principle in Romans 4:3 with regards to Abraham.

Answer 4

The problem here is that salvation in the New Testament means something different from what it means in the Old Testament. In Paul's writing, salvation means the process by which a sinful person is justified before God through belief in the atoning sacrifice of Jesus. It is the means by which a person attains eternal life, and thereby saved from death, which is the "wages of sin."

Salvation in the OT has several meanings. It can mean being saved from ones enemies (who have the upper hand due to the petitioner's sin), from sickness (due do sin), from despair (also due to sin), from an impure heart, or from guilt. Although atonement was sometimes made through a sacrificial offering, salvation often happens directly. God forgives the repentant sinner, thereby delivering from from their sin with no mediator. We find this often in the Psalms.

Psalm 18

The cords of Sheol encircled me; the snares of death lay in wait for me. 7 In my distress I called out: Lord! I cried out to my God. From his temple he heard my voice; my cry to him reached his ears... He reached down from on high and seized me; drew me out of the deep waters. 18 He rescued me from my mighty enemy, from foes too powerful for me.

Other examples include:

• Return, O Lord, deliver my soul! O save me for Thy mercies’ sake! (Psalm 6)

• 2 Bow down Thine ear to me, deliver me speedily; be Thou my strong rock, a house of defense to save me... 23 O love the Lord, all ye His saints! For the Lord preserveth the faithful... 24 Be of good courage, and He shall strengthen your heart, all ye that hope in the Lord.

Here and elsewhere, the psalmist is saved by God's loving-kindness. No mediator is involved. But in the NT, the mediation of Christ is essential. This can be explained by the fact that in Pauline soteriology, the sinful state is no momentary situation of despair but something basic in human nature. God often saved people from the consequences of their individual or collective sins in the OT. But he did not yet save them from sin in the general sense - what Christians call "original sin." (Psalm 31)