Matthew 7:13-14 “Enter by the narrow gate; for wide is the gate and broad is the way that leads to destruction, and there are many who go in by it. (14) Because narrow is the gate and difficult is the way which leads to life, and there are few who find it.”
Sadly most of mankind will end up in hell, for as our Lord Jesus taught us in the above passage of scripture, broad is the way to destruction and there are many that enter by it, and that narrow is the gate to life and that there are few that find it. In other words, our Lord was telling us plainly that there are far more people that go to hell than those who go to heaven. So approximately, how many people are in hell today? To give us some idea of just how many people are presently in hell, we can look at a scriptural example. When Elijah walked as a prophet he cried to the Lord, stating that he was the last one in Israel who still served Him. Our Lord’s response to Elijah was that God had reserved to Himself seven thousand who had not bowed their knee to Baal (1 Kings 19:14-18). The adult population in Israel at that time would have been approximately three million people. And so we see that of the three million adults in Israel in that time, only seven thousand are in heaven today, while the remaining two million nine hundred and ninety-three thousand are in hell. People mistakenly think that all Jews under the old covenant were saved, and that all gentiles were lost but that is not the case at all, for as we have just seen in the above example, very few Jews were saved. But also, not all gentiles were lost, for under the old covenant, Abraham’s bosom was open to all who believed. For example, both the people who dwelt in Nineveh and the queen of Sheba ended up going there (Luke 11:31-32). Job and his family and friends also ended up going there, and the list goes on and on. Many gentiles were saved under the old covenant, for there were many from every nation who feared God and worked righteousness, and all that God required was for one to be a believer in order to be saved. However, the point remains that if we were to apply the same statistics to the earth’s population as we have seen in the example of Israel given above, then we can roughly estimate how many people are in hell today. From the time of Adam until today, it is estimated that one hundred and thirty billion people have lived and died. Of those who have lived and died over that time, roughly twenty-five billion would have been children under the age of thirteen and they would therefore all be in heaven today. That leaves a residual of approximately one hundred and five billion people. And so if we were to apply the same statistics from our biblical example, that would equate to approximately three hundred million saints in heaven and in excess of one hundred and four billion people in hell. And so we can clearly see that the vast majority of the people of the earth have been cast into hell.
Michael E.B. Maher
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