Faithfulness Okom, Cross Roads Journal, Aug 20, 2026
I spent years locked in an exhausting fight with the reality of suffering. Reconciling human agony with the existence of an all-powerful God demanded everything from me, and it took God’s patient, intimate guidance before I could finally understand, and eventually glory in, the purpose of pain. Yet resolving that crisis only brought me face to face with a far more stubborn deadlock that resisted every clean resolution: the geographic lottery.
Demographic reality offers no room for sentimental evasion: an overwhelming majority of human beings die inside the exact religious tradition of their birth. A child raised in Riyadh lives and dies a Muslim. A life begun along the banks of the Ganges in Varanasi inherits Hinduism as an unquestioned default. To be born in London or Lagos is to receive effortless, ambient proximity to the Christian story, while a peasant in eleventh-century Japan lives and dies without ever hearing the name of Christ once.
The dilemma demands a straight answer: if salvation requires embracing the truth, yet geography dictates which version of that truth reaches your ears, is God running a cosmic lottery? Is divine justice reduced to an accident of birth coordinates?
It is an indictment that deserves far more than a Sunday school platitude. Follow the logic down to its foundations, however, and the entire critique collapses under its own weight.
What are we actually asking God to do?
Underneath the geographic objection lies an unspoken demand: if one true God exists, He should have uniformly enforced a single religious monoculture across every tribe, tongue, and epoch. Every culture should have received the exact same explicit theological instruction manual from the beginning of time.
When people realize this has not happened, they usually run to one of two extremes. The skeptic concludes that God is unjust, while the religious pluralist insists that every contradictory religion must simply be a different, equally valid path to the same summit.
Both conclusions miss the point entirely.
Pluralism only survives by patronizing the world’s traditions, pretending that mutually exclusive truth claims are just cultural dialects describing the same thing. They are not. If truth is real, it cannot contradict itself.
The alternative demand, that God should have stamped an inescapable theological blueprint onto every civilization from antiquity, leads to something far darker: epistemic coercion.
Think through what that world would actually look like.
An overwhelming, inescapable revelation that leaves zero room for cultural divergence or intellectual search is not grace. It is tyranny. A reality where divine glory is so immediate and crushing that doubt becomes physically impossible does not produce lovers of God; it manufactures captives.
God maintains an intentional epistemic distance. Ultimate reality remains clear enough to be discovered by the earnest, yet veiled enough to be resisted by the proud. That distance is not an administrative oversight. It is the foundational operating condition for genuine free will. You cannot cultivate authentic love in a universe where refusal has been rendered structurally impossible. Divine restraint is the very mechanism that preserves human agency.
Why do we excuse in religion what we condemn in morality?
The statistic that most people die within their inherited tradition carries undeniable weight. I have watched this precise point corner thoughtful apologists on platforms like The Diary of a CEO, leaving conversations in an uneasy silence because the demographic reality feels so heavy. I do not pretend to dismiss that weight with cheap confidence. The sheer gravity of human history demands respect, and the sociological fact remains indisputable: we are intensely shaped by the soil into which we are planted. But while the observation is sound sociology, it fails completely as an indictment of divine justice.
In every other theatre of human life, we utterly reject cultural osmosis: the passive absorption of beliefs simply by breathing the air of one’s environment. We never accept it as a valid moral defense. A young man coming of age in 1930s Berlin was saturated with the virulent ideology of the Third Reich. A child born into the antebellum American South inherited a social architecture built entirely on the commodification of human beings. A boy raised in a culture rooted in clan violence or the subjugation of women inherits those cruelties as the default setting of his world.
Yet when those lives are brought before the court of justice and history, we refuse the defense of geography. We never say their birthplace granted them immunity from the truth. We demand that every moral agent wrestle with their inheritance, expecting them to interrogate and reject the traditions of their elders the moment those traditions collide with basic human dignity. We know intuitively that the conscience possesses a voice louder than the village.
Here lies the quiet inconsistency of the skeptic. We demand that human beings exhibit moral courage against the dark traditions of their culture, yet we grant them total intellectual absolution when it comes to spiritual complacency. We treat the pursuit of ultimate truth as though it were the only arena where humans are helpless victims of their zip code. The soul stays where it was born largely because questioning inherited comfort requires a costly, terrifying rupture with the tribe. Sociological inertia reveals our deep, tragic preference for familiar belonging over the demanding pursuit of truth. It exposes human apathy; it never indicts God.
What was placed inside us before we ever saw a map?
If sociological comfort explains why we stay asleep, it does not explain how we were equipped when we woke up. Long before any missionary crossed an ocean or a scripture was translated into the local tongue, God had already installed the baseline hardware of human accountability.
Classical theology calls this general revelation, but C.S. Lewis captured its mechanics with unforgettable clarity. In the opening pages of Mere Christianity, Lewis observes that whenever human beings quarrel, they rarely just express raw animal irritation. They appeal to an invisible standard of fairness, an unwritten rule of fair play they instinctively expect the other person to recognize. We do not need a lecture to feel indignation at betrayal, nor do we need a holy book to feel the immediate sting of our own cowardice.
Pause and interrogate your own chest. You know this law exists within you. The real question is never whether human beings can sear, numb, or suppress this internal voice through decades of cultural conditioning; the question is whether the voice was there to begin with. The fact that a man can blind himself does not prove light is an illusion.
This universal moral baseline is what God owes Himself, and it is what He owes humanity if free moral agency is to have any coherent meaning. In our own legal systems, culpability is inextricably tied to the capacity to distinguish right from wrong. The only defendants our courts genuinely excuse are those suffering from severe cognitive impairment who truly cannot comprehend the moral nature of their acts. Even where severe trauma, duress, or intoxication exist, jurisprudence does not grant blanket exculpation; it merely weighs mitigating factors in sentencing.
God, with infinite wisdom, understands the complex nuances of human limitation far better than any earthly judge. But He has ensured that no accountable person enters the world entirely blind to the good. Real injustice would be a God who demands moral accounting from creatures He left entirely devoid of a moral compass. He never built such a world.
Conscience, however, is not a complete historical archive. It cannot deliver the details of first-century Roman history, nor can it whisper the Hebrew name of Jesus of Nazareth into the ear of an ancient Aztec farmer. But it does something infinitely more critical: it brings every honest human soul to a terrifying precipice.
The moral law forces you to confront the reality that an absolute standard of transcendent goodness exists, that you are intimately aware of it, and that you have repeatedly and willingly violated it. It diagnoses our decay, our selfishness, and our total inability to mend our own rot. It turns the human gaze inward and reveals our complete, quiet helplessness.
Conscience does not supply the cure, but it creates the agonizing hunger for one. It prepares the diagnostic soil so that whenever the Christian announcement of redemption finally arrives, the honest soul does not hear a foreign, arbitrary philosophy. It hears the answer to the crisis it has been carrying all along.
How does a just God judge the soul that never heard?
This brings us to the core dilemma: if historical access is wildly unequal, how can divine judgment be anything other than arbitrary?
The answer begins with the realization that Scripture presents a system of strict moral proportionality. God never acts as a bureaucratic clerk administering a standardized test on withheld information. Divine jurisprudence is explicitly calibrated to revelation.
In the Book of Romans, Paul lays down this baseline with surgical precision: “For when Gentiles, who do not have the law, by nature do what the law requires, they are a law to themselves, even though they do not have the law. They show that the work of the law is written on their hearts, while their conscience also bears witness, and their conflicting thoughts accuse or even excuse them.” (Romans 2:14-15).
In the Gospel of Luke, Christ removes any remaining ambiguity about how accountability scales: “And that servant who knew his master’s will but did not get ready or act according to his will, will receive a severe beating. But the one who did not know, and did what deserved a beating, will receive a light beating. Everyone to whom much was given, of him much will be required.” (Luke 12:47-48).
This is the foundation of what I call Moral Faith. God evaluates every soul based on their fidelity to the light they were granted, never on their failure to recite words they were never given the chance to hear.
We must be careful here not to invent an easy, sentimental escape hatch. In human legal systems, ignorance of the law is almost never an absolute excuse. We do not let a man walk free from murder simply because he claims he never read the penal code. We expect him to know better.
In the same way, the concept of a completely ignorant, neutral human being is largely a myth. God did not merely install a silent legal code in our chests; as the author of Ecclesiastes observed, “He has put eternity into man’s heart.” (Ecclesiastes 3:11). Every civilization is haunted by an acute, restless awareness of the infinite and a quiet discomfort with its own moral decay. The sheer ubiquity of world religions proves that humanity has always felt the pressure of that internal ache and scrambled to manage it.
The honest question is: what happens to the soul that feels this holy discomfort, realizes its own corruption, and genuinely seeks the transcendent Good without ever hearing the historical name of Jesus? Does God damn that soul simply because of a missing calendar date or a distant zip code?
To believe that is to drastically shrink the sovereignty and reach of the Cross.
Christ’s sacrifice is not a localized, fragile event trapped inside a three-year window in first-century Palestine. It is a cosmic reality that governs all of human history, backward and forward. God justified Abraham centuries before the incarnation because Abraham trusted the light he had. Jesus looked at the dying thief beside Him, a man with zero theological credentials and zero liturgical works who threw himself on divine mercy before Christ had even died, and promised him paradise that very day.
The atonement is vast enough to redeem any soul throughout history that arrives at the end of itself and casts its brokenness upon the mercy of God.
This is why Christ’s opening proclamation in the Sermon on the Mount is so devastating to human religious debate: “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” (Matthew 5:3).
Notice that Christ does not demand academic brilliance, cultural lineage, or exhaustive theological data as the price of admission. He names spiritual poverty. The entry condition has always been the complete collapse of self-righteousness.
When a soul anywhere on earth looks at the moral law written on its conscience, acknowledges its total inability to save itself, and reaches out for mercy, that soul is exhibiting the poverty of spirit that the Cross was designed to answer.
Divine justice is not an arbitrary lottery. It is administered with absolute, terrifying precision. God judges every soul according to the light they possessed, while offering a redemption broad enough to cover anyone humble enough to admit they cannot climb their way to heaven.
What happens when the soul meets the real Christ and turns away?
This brings us to a crucial tension: what happens when a soul that senses its internal brokenness finally encounters the historical Christ, yet walks away? What if a person rejects Jesus not because they love evil, but because they wanted a different kind of deliverer: a more formidable conqueror, a more flattering philosophy, or a glorious king who confirms their tribal pride rather than a crucified carpenter who exposes their utter helplessness?
That soul is judged on its own merits, and the verdict is entirely just.
When the light increases, the diagnostic test deepens. The tragedy of first-century Jerusalem was not that the people lacked religious zeal; it was that their zeal was invested in a messiah of their own design. They wanted a political warrior to crush Roman occupation and vindicate their national identity. Instead, God gave them a bleeding servant on a Roman cross who demanded that they repent of their self-righteousness.
The scandal of the Cross is that it denies the human ego any room to boast. If a person encounters Jesus and walks away because He is not pompous, powerful, or prestigious enough, that rejection unmasks the real condition of their heart. It proves that their apparent pursuit of the divine was never about true spiritual poverty. It was an appetite for self-affirmation disguised as piety. When faced with the ultimate revelation of divine love and humility, the soul chose its own pride. The judgment that follows is not an arbitrary penalty; it is the natural consequence of refusing the light when it stood directly before you.
Why does the human heart cling so fiercely to the ladder?
This explains why human beings remain so fiercely loyal to the religions of their upbringing, even when those systems fail to bring internal peace.
Every religious architecture constructed by human ingenuity operates on the logic of a ladder. The specific steps change across geographies (ascetic discipline, legalistic precision, meditative detachment, or exhaustive ritual performance), but the underlying mechanics never vary. The human ego remains the climber. The divine is treated as a distant summit that you can reach if you work hard enough, suffer long enough, or master the correct techniques.
We love the ladder because it preserves our self-respect. It allows us to feel like active participants in our own vindication. The ladder lets us imagine that we are negotiating with God on our own terms, balancing our debits with our credits.
Christianity enters the world with an axe at the root of that entire system. It does not offer a slightly better ladder, nor does it hand us improved climbing techniques. It shatters the ladder completely. It proclaims that the distance between human corruption and divine holiness is infinite, that human effort cannot bridge the chasm, and that God Himself had to descend into our dirt and death to rescue us at total cost to Himself.
People do not cling to inherited religions merely because of geographic habit. They cling to them because the human ego will endure almost any burden, perform almost any ritual, and climb almost any mountain rather than accept the humiliation of absolute bankruptcy and surrender entirely to a Saviour.
Can geography have jurisdiction over an empty tomb?
The geographic argument makes one final, fatal mistake: it treats Christianity as a regional philosophy rather than an empirical historical event.
The Christian faith does not ask the world to subscribe to a set of abstract, timeless moral axioms generated by a cultural tradition. It makes a direct, testable claim about an event in human history. It asserts that a specific man was publicly executed outside the walls of Jerusalem under the Roman governor Pontius Pilate, and that three days later, His tomb was empty.
That claim was not whispered in secret centuries later in a distant land. It was proclaimed openly in the very city where the execution took place, in front of Roman soldiers and Jewish authorities who had every political and religious incentive to produce a corpse and destroy the movement before it began. They could not produce the body.
A historical event does not belong to a culture, and it cannot be inherited through cultural osmosis like a dialect or a folk custom. A historical event either happened in space and time, or it did not. An empty tomb has no geographic jurisdiction. It is a reality that stands over all of human history, demanding an honest investigation from every mind capable of thought.
Demographic reality shapes the vocabulary and the environment in which we first learn to speak. It does not dictate whether God is fair, nor does it excuse the human soul from seeking the truth. God has spoken to every civilization through the moral law written on the human conscience. He calibrates His judgment to every soul with absolute justice, measuring each life by the light it actually received. In Christ, He descended into history to redeem anyone humble enough to admit they cannot save themselves.
The geographic lottery was never a real barrier between humanity and God. The only true barrier has always been the refusal of the human heart to honor the light it was given.
https://crossroadsjournal.substack.com/p/moral-faith?r=d2eia&utm_medium=ios