(Deuteronomy 32:18-21, Isaiah 65:1-3; Romans 10:12-21)
“There is no difference between Jew and Gentile—the same Lord is Lord of all and richly blesses all who call on him, for ‘Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.’” That’s the bottom line for Paul when it comes to defining and understanding the church; that’s the thesis statement for everything he’s going to say later about how Jewish and Gentile Christians should relate to each other. “All” means all, and “everyone” means everyone, and that’s all there is to it; no one gets a special deal, no one gets a free ride, and no one is excluded from consideration.
This being so, then, how do we understand the failure of the Jews to call on the name of the Lord? Paul considers this question methodically, laying out the steps that lead, from a human perspective, to salvation. Verses 14-15 are often taken out of context and used to preach on the importance of evangelism and missions, and that’s entirely appropriate, because Paul is working here on the level of general principles which apply much more broadly than just his argument; but we also need to understand them in this context. This is the chain of human activity through which people come to salvation; where has it broken for Israel? The implied question here is, is it really Israel’s fault?
In verse 16 Paul answers that question—he actually interrupts himself, jumping ahead of his argument to say, “Yes.” Israel has heard the message of Christ, as Paul affirms in verse 18 with a little hyperbole, drawing on Psalm 19; they heard, because they were sent plenty of preachers, beginning with Jesus himself. They didn’t miss the good news: they refused it. The NIV blurs that a little; the Greek word they translate “accept” actually means “obey.” I don’t know why they didn’t use the standard translation, because Paul uses this word deliberately. He’s been linking obedience with faith since the very beginning of the book, so this is nothing new, but it is central to his argument here.
On the one hand, Paul’s understanding of faith is never purely intellectual; it’s never just a matter of agreeing that something is true. Faith is a commitment which produces action. I have faith that this chair will support me, and so I commit my weight to it—I don’t keep my muscles tensed just in case it falls apart. I have faith that this projector will work, and so I keep sending Dan the materials to produce the slides. I have faith that my daughter can run the slides, and as long as I’m smart enough to let her do it, everything goes well. When we have faith, it determines how we act.
On the other hand, Paul knows—and we know—that there are different kinds of unbelief. Unbelief can be a form of apathy: I just don’t care enough to bother thinking about it. It can be a response to a lack of evidence, as for instance my lack of faith in the Tooth Fairy. It can be accompanied by the willingness or even desire to believe, as when we go looking for evidence to prove a theory. But it can also be predetermined, the product of the refusal to believe. We see this, for instance, in the philosopher Thomas Nagel, who declared, “I want atheism to be true and am made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well-informed people I know are religious believers. It isn’t just that I don’t believe in God and, naturally, hope that I’m right in my belief. It’s that I hope there is no God! I don’t want there to be a God; I don’t want the universe to be like that.”
In declaring that not all Israelites have obeyed the gospel, Paul is saying that they don’t believe because they don’t want to. Their unbelief doesn’t arise out of skepticism, or confusion, or lack of knowledge; nor indeed are they apathetic—they are zealous for God, as long as he conforms to what they want to believe. The message of Christ does not fit what they want to believe, and it calls them to an obedience they do not want to give; they refuse to obey, and thus they refuse to believe.
And yet, God doesn’t stop loving them, and he doesn’t stop reaching out to them. His love and his grace are relentless, even in the midst of his judgment. The way Paul uses Isaiah 65 here is interesting, because in the prophet, verse 1 also refers to Israel; they are the first ones of whom God says, “I revealed myself to those who did not ask for me; I was found by those who did not seek me.” This is the pattern of God’s dealings with his people from the very beginning: he reveals himself to us, not because we chase him down and find him out, but purely on his own initiative, as an act of his grace. Nor is that merely how our relationship with him begins—it’s all the way along. Our growth in holiness and spiritual maturity isn’t about our effort half so much as it’s about God continuing to reveal himself to us and to call us to himself even when we aren’t seeking him.
When Israel remained obstinate and refused the Messiah God sent them, he reached out beyond them and once again revealed himself to a people who did not seek him, and indeed in many cases didn’t know they should be looking for him. But in doing this, did he turn away from Israel? No, he continues to hold out his hands to them; and indeed, Paul says, when God called a people for himself from among the Gentiles, this was not only for the Gentiles, it was also for the Jews. Part of his purpose in calling the Gentiles was to provoke Israel to jealousy and thus, ultimately, to bring at least some of them back to himself; and as Paul shows, they were told this was going to happen all the way back to the time of Moses.
We see in this the relentless love and faithfulness of God. Paul asks in 9:23, “What if God has endured with much patience vessels of wrath prepared for destruction?”—but in truth he hasn’t merely endured Israel in their rejection, he has continued to love them and call them back to himself. We see as well that our actions and decisions matter, that they have consequence—and hear me carefully here. It isn’t just that they have consequences, like my dad always told me just before he spanked me; our actions could have consequences and still be, at a deeper level, inconsequential. Our actions and decisions have consequence—they have weight, meaning, significance. What we choose and what we do matters because we matter.
And note this: they don’t just matter in the way we think, or expect, and they don’t just matter for us. What God is doing in us as individuals and as a congregation is in part about us (though even there, not subject to our expectations), but it isn’t only about us; he’s also doing things through us in the lives of others that are beyond us to know or predict. He adopted Gentiles into his people because his salvation is for the Gentiles—but also for the sake of the Jews.
God works through our choices and our deeds, but never just in one way or on one level; he’s always doing many things through everything we do and everything that happens, and often with very long-term goals in mind. To pull a story from the Catholic blogger Jennifer Fulwiler, if your car breaks down on the way to an important meeting, maybe it’s not about you at all—maybe it’s about the tow-truck driver. Or from my own experience, I ended up in counseling (and on ulcer medication) in seventh grade. I don’t know all the reasons God allowed that, but one of them was so that I would marry Sara.
Remember, this is God’s story—we’re just characters in it; much-loved characters, yes, but it isn’t our story, and it isn’t limited to what we can see. We see in part, but he sees the whole; and the theme of the story, and the power that drives it, is his “Never Stopping, Never Giving Up, Unbreaking, Always and Forever Love.”