Read: Romans 10:14-21 - STEP Bible, Bible Gateway
One of the hardest questions Christian preachers ever get asked is: how will God look upon those who haven’t heard about Jesus? The straightforward answer is that we don’t know exactly how; but we – you and I – have heard, and so we have a responsibility to respond in a certain way.
The question springs from a legitimate inference about God’s justice – that he cannot hold people responsible for failing to follow Christ if they’ve never heard about him. A Jewish reader of these verses of St Paul’s Letter to the Romans might raise a similar objection: how on earth can we Jews be held responsible for our failure to confess Christ, since God has not told us anything about him in the Old Testament?
Paul will have none of it. The Jews have heard about Christ, he says; they just didn’t listen. For one thing, all of creation proclaims the truth about God (and Paul quotes from Psalm 19), and that includes the coming of Christ. But much more than that: Paul actually thinks that the coming of Christ to fulfil the Law and to open wide the gates of God’s kingdom to all peoples was encoded within the Law itself. Paul reckons that, without realizing it, the Jews have been reading about Christ every time they opened their Torah. And consequently, he thinks that the Jews should have heard and paid attention and identified Jesus as their Lord and king. Indeed, Paul thinks that Christ’s coming wasn’t anticipated by the Israelites in large part because they failed to understand their own bible correctly. (For why else would Moses and Isaiah have been able to write such prophecies of correction against Israel as they did, had God not intended Israel to see something they hadn’t yet glimpsed, to follow a king they had not yet met?)
For our part – most of us Gentile Christians in today’s church – our hearts should overflow with gratitude. Because if Paul is right, and God had always had it as part of his plan to bring you and me into the fold of his flock and the family of his kingdom, then God really is extraordinarily gracious and kind. You and I, who have done exactly nothing to deserve such love, and who never even had a clue about God for thousands of years of history – you and I, he has desired and longed for from the very beginning of days.
These devotions were originally written for the parish of All Saints, Ascot and we are grateful for permission to republish them on Fulcrum.
Patrick is curate of All Saints’, Ascot in Berkshire. A musicologist by training, he is married to Lydia, a university lecturer, and dad to Madeleine. He writes (sporadically) at benedixisti.wordpress.com and tweets (even more sporadically) as @patrickgilday.