Romans 10:17 NKJV
So then faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the word of God.

This is a popular text in Charismatic circles, especially the Word of Faith variants. In these settings, this text is generally understood as a divinely revealed secret of receiving and/or maintaining faith. If anyone lacked faith, an antidote would be to listen to the “word of God” continuously. There are two practical ways the “word of God” has been construed. In the days before audio Bibles became prevalent, the word of God was generally understood as a preacher’s sermon or his recorded reading of Bible passages. Nowadays, however, people are just encouraged to listen to audio Bibles and sermons. I do not want to invalidate this Charismatic practice, even though I have seen it abused. After all, motivational speakers have convinced us all that there is value in attending to positive speaking. However, I am convinced that this text is not about what some Charismatics have turned it into – a pretext for telling the people to return to hear a preacher’s sermon continually.

We should begin by pointing out some known problems with this text. First, some manuscripts say “the word of Christ” instead of “the word of God.” This, however, is arguably a trivial matter, since many New Testament texts slot Jesus into God’s place. It may serve as further evidence of how early Christians saw Jesus as God. Second, Romans 9-11 are probably the most hotly contested parts of the letter, with various interpretations on offer. In this piece, I shall argue that it is best to see Romans 10:17 as a conclusion of the idea begun in Romans 10:14 and that Romans 10:14-17 is itself a unit within the argument Paul crafts in 10:14-11:6.

We should inquire what Paul meant by “faith comes by hearing.” What sort of faith did he have in mind, and did he mean to say that faith unfailingly accompanies hearing the gospel message? It is unlikely that he meant to say faith always follows after hearing the gospel for two reasons. First, Paul was present when Stephen gave the longest and most comprehensive gospel sermon. Paul heard the message about Jesus, yet did not obtain faith. On the contrary, he walked away angry and approved of the death of the preacher. In fact, it was a post-resurrection appearance of Jesus on the road to Damascus that led Paul to come to faith. Charismatics are generally reluctant to allow experience to play a corrective role in a believer’s theology, and this is not utterly unreasonable. However, it must be said that a robust and comprehensive sermon did not save Saul of Tarsus; an experience of the divine did. When he finally did, as a trained Pharisee with deep knowledge of Scripture, he did not delay in boldly proclaiming that Jesus is the Lord. This is why Paul says he did not receive the gospel from any human, as we explored elsewhere. Second, Paul also discusses the thorny issue of many Israelites in his day not believing the gospel (10:16). This strongly suggests that the “faith” Paul had in mind is saving faith; the faith that turns unbelievers to believers. Paul says his fellow Israelites heard the message:

Romans 10:18 NKJV
But I say, have they not heard? Yes indeed: “Their sound has gone out to all the earth, And their words to the ends of the world.”

In the very next verse to 10:17, Paul says that the descendants of Israel of his time did hear the gospel message, which had gone out to all the world by then. Yet, many of them did “not obey the gospel” (10:16). Hence, whatever Paul meant in 10:17 cannot be that faith always follows when someone hears the gospel message, even if it is robust and Spirit-breathed.

So, what is Romans 10:17 about then? As I mentioned earlier, Romans 10 is tightly connected to the issues Paul started addressing in chapter 9. In 9:30, Paul turns to the problem of Israel’s unbelief. This is a particularly knotty problem for the Apostle to the Gentiles. He has had much success witnessing to non-Jews while the majority of his people vehemently stood against his message. This was a heartache, resulting in Paul’s “heart’s desire and prayer to God for” his kinsmen to be saved (Romans 10:1). But why have they not believed? Well, it was not that they did not know about the Christian proclamation that “Christ is the end of the law for righteousness to everyone who believes” (Romans 10:4 ESV). On the contrary, they have elected not to “submit to God’s righteousness” (Romans 10:3), as Paul and the other apostles are preaching. They seemed to believe that Jesus and the Apostles were fundamentally wrong, a belief Paul felt the need to address.

Paul argues that Moses, on whom his Jewish kinsmen stood, foresaw the message about Jesus. The same Moses who validated the righteousness of the Torah (10:5) also writes about the righteousness that comes by faith in Jesus. Beginning in verse 6, Paul dips into Deuteronomy 30, one of a few farewell chapters in which Moses told the Israelites of his day what would happen after Moses was dead:

Romans 10:8-10 ESV
[8] But what does it say? “The word is near you, in your mouth and in your heart” (that is, the word of faith that we proclaim); [9] because, if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. [10] For with the heart one believes and is justified, and with the mouth one confesses and is saved.

The quotation in verse 8 is from Deuteronomy 30:14. Paul applies these words from Moses to Jesus. That is, Paul believed that Jesus fulfilled the words of Moses. Furthermore, Paul added that everyone, Jews or non-Jews, who believed on Jesus would be saved, “For there is no distinction between Jew and Greek; for the same Lord is Lord of all, bestowing his riches on all who call on him” (Romans 10:12). He does not here go into details about the universality of salvation, but he tells the Galatians that the Gospel of Jesus was first preached to Abraham that all the nations of the world – that is, nations who are not genealogical descendants of Abraham – would be saved through Abraham (Galatians 3:8). Furthermore, Paul tells the Roman church that Israel’s unbelief is temporary and that Gentile believers have a role to play in Israel’s destiny:

Romans 11:11 ESV
So I ask, did they stumble in order that they might fall? By no means! Rather, through their trespass salvation has come to the Gentiles, so as to make Israel jealous.

He says the fact that Gentiles are coming to Christ is itself supposed to be a means by which the Jews will come to Christ. Where is Paul getting such an idea? He gets it from the foremost Apostle of Judaism. In another part of Moses’ farewell address to Israel, Moses says concerning the future:

Deuteronomy 32:21 ESV
They have made me jealous with what is no god; they have provoked me to anger with their idols. So I will make them jealous with those who are no people; I will provoke them to anger with a foolish nation.

Moses says that because the Israelites of his days provoked God to jealousy by running after illegitimate gods, God would also provoke his people to jealousy by a foreign people. Hence, according to Paul, all of these elements of the gospel message he preached are spelled out in the Hebrew Bible. Jesus was the fulfillment of it all, and Paul was not making things up.

So, why were the Israelites of Paul’s time not saved again? They refused to confess with their mouths that Jesus is Lord and believe in their hearts that God raised him from the dead. This suggests that they denied the resurrection. They probably believed the theory that Jesus’s disciples stole his dead body and lied about his resurrection (cf. Matthew 28:11 – 14). If they genuinely believed that Jesus was not raised, it would be understandable that they also rejected him as the Messiah – ironically, Paul once was himself in that state of unbelief concerning the resurrection. But all they needed to do was ask the eyewitnesses alive at the time. They needed to be told the truth about what happened, rather than merely going by what their Rabbis, who, according to the Gospel accounts, knew better and had chosen to lie, said. This sort of thinking may be why Paul further writes:

Romans 10:13-17 ESV
[13] For “everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.” [14] How then will they call on him in whom they have not believed? And how are they to believe in him of whom they have never heard? And how are they to hear without someone preaching? [15] And how are they to preach unless they are sent? As it is written, “How beautiful are the feet of those who preach the good news!” [16] But they have not all obeyed the gospel. For Isaiah says, “Lord, who has believed what he has heard from us?” [17] So faith comes from hearing, and hearing through the word of Christ.

This pericope seems to serve at least two functions in Paul’s thought. While it continues the subject of Israel’s unbelief begun in chapter 9, it also seems to convey a standalone idea. As we already said, the Israelites heard the gospel and yet did not believe. Paul’s use of Isaiah 53:1 ought to make this point clear: who has believed what he heard from Paul? The answer: “Not all obeyed the gospel.” Again, Paul’s fellow Jews heard the word of God (or Christ), but saving faith did not result from it. Paul maintains that this state of unbelief on the part of his kinsmen is temporary (11:11-12). The Jews could do something about it, namely believe in the gospel message.

The standalone idea communicated in this passage seems to be the necessity of missional work. While it is true that faith does not necessarily accompany preaching, God has so designed it that preaching usually precedes saving faith. God sends out his equipped saints to go preach because that is the best chance the world has of hearing about Jesus and believing in him. This idea is borne out by the Great Commission as reported by Matthew and Luke:

Matthew 28:18-20 ESV
[18] And Jesus came and said to them, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. [19] Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them inthe name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, [20] teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age.”

These are the final words in the Gospel of Matthew. This is Matthew’s way of saying that everything he had written prior leads to this conclusion: making disciples of the nation by preaching.

Similarly, Luke, the man whose writings constitute the most by volume in the New Testament, writes:

Acts 1:7-8 ESV
[7] He said to them, “It is not for you to know times or seasons that the Father has fixed by his own authority. [8] But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth.”

Luke says Jesus here told his followers that they would soon be supernaturally empowered to witness about Jesus. Considering how witnessing plays out in the rest of Acts, we know for sure that preaching is a key element of what it meant. Actually, Acts 1:8 serves as the organizing thesis for the book of Acts. The church began in Jerusalem; when persecution broke out, the disciples were scattered everywhere in Judea, but some left Judea for Samaria. Philip was one of those who headed for Samaria. He preached Jesus, and won many Samaritans for Jesus. It was in the middle of doing this that the Spirit told him to go after the traveling Eunuch (Acts 8). This is noteworthy for a racially conscious world we now live in: a Black man from an ancient African kingdom was the first to believe in Jesus after the Jews and their siblings, the Samaritans. By Acts 13, Black people were teachers and/or prophets in the church of Jesus. It was in Acts 10 that a Roman and his household first believed in Jesus. So, we see that the witnessing on behalf of Jesus followed the path outlined in Acts 1:8: Jerusalem to Judea, then Samaria, and then to the non-Jews. The only thing missing is witnessing “to the end of the earth.” This, of course, was precisely what Paul was conscious of as he sought to take the gospel to the end of the then-known world, Spain (Romans 15:24), and Luke was with him to document it. So, again, Romans 10:14-17 may be Paul’s way of saying what Matthew and Luke said in their own contexts: preaching the gospel is a major component of God’s program of saving the world.