Do people need to hear the gospel to be saved? (Rom. 10:14-17)

 

George Whitefield preaching.  Painting by Thomas Walley  Image from WikiMedia Commons

When we come to this passage, there are two things about it that expositors and commentators are in ready agreement about.  The first is that the structure and meaning of this text is fairly obvious.  You will remember that in verse 13 the apostle had said that whosoever calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.  Now in verses 14-17, he tells us how it is that one comes to call on the name of the Lord for salvation.  Notice the repetition of the word “how” in verses 14-15 especially.  How does one call on the name of the Lord if they don’t believe on him?  The answer is that they won’t.  You must believe that Christ is able to save if you are going to ask him to save you.  And then, how does one believe on a Christ they have never heard of?  The answer is again that you can’t. You have to know that Christ is able to save, and you won’t know anything about him if you haven’t heard about him.  And then, the next question is, how does one hear without a preacher?  The implied answer is that you don’t.  And finally, how does a preacher come who has not first been sent?  The answer is that God uses men called by him for the purpose of preaching to bring the gospel to bear on souls so that hearing, they will believe it, and believing it, will call on the name of the Lord and be saved.  That is the clear meaning of verses 14-15.  In other words, what we have here is a sequence of events, a sequence that begins in God sending preachers who preach the gospel to people who hear it and believe it, and believing it call on the name of the Lord and are saved.

However, in verse 16, the apostle reminds us that this sequence is not automatic.  Just because you hear the gospel doesn’t mean that you will respond to it positively.  We know why: it takes the work of the Spirit of God in the heart to open them up to the gospel. Many of Paul’s fellow kinsmen did in fact hear the gospel and yet they rejected it. That is the point of verse 16, which seems to be a sort of parenthesis.  He is quoting Isaiah 53:1 here.  This chapter is about the Messiah and Isaiah opens it by a question that assumes that many of his people won’t receive it.  Paul is basically saying that Isaiah’s prophesy is being fulfilled in his day.  He will come back to this in verses 18-21.  Paul then concludes the thought of all of verses 14-17 in verse 17 by summarizing: “So then faith cometh by hearing and hearing by the word of God” (which is the “word of Christ”).

That’s fairly straightforward.  Now the second thing that expositors of Romans agree on is that the connection of this passage to Paul’s overall purpose is not so clear!  In other words, how does this fit in his larger argument?  However, if we keep in mind the overall purpose of Paul in chapters 9-11, it does become clear.  Recall, that Paul is dealing with the place of the Jews in the purpose of God.  And in particular he is seeking to deal with the problem created by the rejection of the gospel by so many Jews in his day.  Despite the fact that they had so many privileges, the word of God and so on, they had refused to put their faith in Christ and be saved.  And the apostle, who was himself a Jew, is explaining why this was so.  It’s not something you would have expected from a human point of view, and so it needed an explanation, and the apostle is giving that to us.

As Paul answers the questions created by this problem, he tells us that the first and most fundamental explanation is that of God’s sovereign purpose, which we see in chapter 9.  The ultimate reason why anyone is saved is that God has chosen them.  The great point Paul is making is that physical descent from Abraham is not what saves a person, but God’s sovereign purpose is.  “They are not all Israel which are of Israel” (9:6). The reason why anyone is saved is that God unconditionally chose them before they were even born, indeed, before the foundation of the earth (11).  Conversely, those who are not chosen by God are hardened in their sins so that they remain in unbelief and condemnation.  In other words, people remain in unbelief because God has not chosen them to salvation.  That’s the first explanation.  It is the explanation from the perspective of God’s sovereign purpose.

And this leads to a second explanation, which is the explanation from the perspective of human responsibility.  This is the point of chapter 10.  The Jews, many of them, had rejected the gospel, and in rejecting the gospel they rejected Christ who is the only way anyone can be saved.  They did this because they were seeking to commend themselves to God on the basis of their law-keeping.  This is what Paul is saying in verses 1-5, as we have seen.  In verses 6-13, by way of contrast, he is showing how different the message of the gospel is from the message of the law, as it was taught by many of Paul’s fellow Israelites.  The gospel is the way of faith, not works. This is what they had rejected. They didn’t like this Jesus Christ; he wasn’t the kind of Christ that they wanted, and so they rejected him.  

In this connection allow me to put to you a statement from Michael Shermer, who is an atheist, who basically argued that we shouldn’t believe that Jesus rose from the dead, because if he had really risen from the dead, the first-century Jews would certainly have believed in him.  But most of them didn’t; and so he concludes that Jesus must not have risen from the dead.  Now that is not a very good argument, for the simple reason that people often don’t believe what they don’t want to believe.  And the NT record makes it very clear, especially the gospels, that Jesus wasn’t the Messiah many of the Jews wanted.  He wasn’t their style; and so they rejected him.  People in Dayton didn’t believe that the Wright brothers had flown even a year or two after they had done so, and even when Orville was flying his plane in their own backyard.  The reason is that many people just didn’t think man could fly, and so they didn’t believe it, even when there was plenty of evidence that it had happened.  I know that a lot of critics of Christianity think that religion is just the opiate of the masses, that it is just a matter of wish-fulfillment and so on, but they don’t seem to see that the rejection of God and Christ can be attached to a sort of wish fulfillment.  People also refuse to believe what they want to believe is false, and the danger of wish-fulfillment goes both ways.  The Jews rejected Christ, not because there wasn’t real proof that he had risen from the dead, but because they didn’t want him as Savior and Lord.

Now this is where verses 14-17 fit in, and indeed, right through to verse 21.  What Paul is doing in these verses is continuing to explain why so many Jews in his day were not saved and hence remained outside the church.  They weren’t saved because they weren’t calling on the Lord for salvation (13) and the reason for this was that they didn’t believe the gospel (14-17).  They had heard (16), but they didn’t believe the report.  Nor did they accept that the apostles were sent by God.  They rejected the whole sequence of events that Paul lays before us in verses 14-17.  And since they didn’t believe the report, the gospel, the word of Christ, they didn’t call on his name to be saved.  

That’s not to say that these unbelieving Jews didn’t pray.  But there is prayer and then there is prayer.  There is the prayer of the Pharisee in Luke 18:9-14 who trusted in himself and in his own righteous keeping of the law.  In contrast with the publican, the despised tax-collector, the Pharisee was not saved.  His prayer was, despite all the trappings of religion, the prayer of a wicked man who wasn’t heard.  The difference?  The publican called on the name of the Lord as someone who knew his need of God’s grace.  He knew he was a sinner, and so he wasn’t trusting in his own righteousness, like the Pharisee was.  That’s the difference.  The calling on the Lord that leads to salvation that Paul is talking about in Rom. 10:13 is the prayer of the publican, not the Pharisee.  The Pharisee didn’t know how to pray that way, because they refused to submit themselves to the righteousness of God.  They refused to believe in Christ.

To sum up, these verses function not only to show how a person comes to call on the Lord and be saved, but also to show that those who reject the gospel cannot be saved.  It was an explanation of the fact that so many Jews remained unsaved, for those who reject the gospel of Christ cannot call on the name of the Lord and be saved.  

Now with that before us, I want us to look at the obvious implication of this passage which is the following truth: The preaching of the gospel is the normal means that God uses to bring people to a place where they will call on the Lord and be saved.  And the reason I want us to see this is that I want us to be convinced that the gospel is the appointed means by God whereby the elect are brought to saving faith, and in seeing that, to see clearly our responsibility in sharing the gospel with the lost.  In other words, the answer to the question, “Do people need to hear the gospel to be saved,” is yes.

There are three things I want to do as we consider the teaching of this text.  I want to give some Biblical observations, offer a few helpful clarifications, and finally make an important application.

Some Biblical Observations

God uses gospel preaching to bring his elect home to faith in Christ.

This truth is not only taught here but it is illustrated for us all over the New Testament.  It was how the first apostles came to follow Jesus.  It was Andrew who heard John the Baptist proclaim as he saw Jesus, “Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world!” (Jn. 1:29, 36).  As a result of this testimony, he followed Jesus and became his disciple.  Not only so, but he got his brother Peter, and then Philip, and then Nathaniel, and they too followed Jesus.

Then it was Peter’s preaching on the Day of Pentecost that led to the conversion of 3000.  It was his preaching on the occasion of the healing of the lame man in Acts 3 that led to the conversion of thousands more.  We read that “many of them which heard the word believed” (4:4).  We are told that the evangelist Philip “went down to the city of Samaria, and preached Christ unto them. And the people with one accord gave heed unto those things which Philip spake, hearing and seeing the miracles which he did” (8:5-6).  Though they had previously been bewitched by a false prophet, we are told that “when they believed Philip preaching the things concerning the kingdom of God, and the name of Jesus Christ, they were baptized, both men and women” (12).  Then God told him to go to the desert and preach the gospel to the Ethiopian eunuch: 

Philip opened his mouth, and began at the same scripture, and preached unto him Jesus. And as they went on their way, they came unto a certain water: and the eunuch said, See, here is water; what doth hinder me to be baptized? And Philip said, If thou believest with all thine heart, thou mayest. And he answered and said, I believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God. And he commanded the chariot to stand still: and they went down both into the water, both Philip and the eunuch; and he baptized him. (Acts 8:35-38)

We see this with Paul’s ministry.  We are told that in Antioch Paul and Barnabas preached the word of God to almost the whole city, and “when the Gentiles heard this, they were glad, and glorified the word of the Lord: and as many as were ordained to eternal life believed” (13:48).  We read at the beginning of chapter 14, “And it came to pass in Iconium, that they went both together into the synagogue of the Jews, and so spake, that a great multitude both of the Jews and also of the Greeks believed.”  We could go on and on.  How did the Philippian jailor believe?  It was because Paul preached to him.  How did Lydia of Thyatira believe?  Because Paul preached the gospel to her.  Again, we are told of the Corinthians: “many of the Corinthians hearing believed, and were baptized” (18:8).

This is the pattern of the entire New Testament.  People hear the gospel and believe and are saved.  This is the promise of Rom. 10:9.  In fact, it is the peculiar work of the devil, that he tries to keep people from believing: “Those by the way side are they that hear; then cometh the devil, and taketh away the word out of their hearts, lest they should believe and be saved” (Lk. 8:12).  

It is the pattern of preaching, hearing, believing, and being saved that Paul is summarizing here in this passage.  

Again, I want to point out that this is totally consistent with God’s sovereignty in our salvation.  For God is the one who sends the preacher to preach the gospel, God is the one who opens our ears to hear the gospel, who gives us faith to put our trust in Christ, and God is the one who justifies the believer and forgives all their sins through Christ.  This is the way God brings his elect home to faith and salvation.

And it is right to say that this is necessary.  If we are justified by faith (and we are), and if you cannot be saved if you are not justified and forgiven before God (and you can’t), then faith is necessary for salvation.  But if faith comes by hearing and hearing by the word of God (and it does), then that makes the hearing of the gospel necessary.

Some people seem to think that this limits God or makes God’s purpose uncertain.  Not at all.  God not only ordains the end, he also ordains the means, and the if the end is certain, so is the means.  If someone needs to hear the gospel, do you not think that God is able to get the gospel to them?  I mean, remember that God told Jonah to go to Nineveh and preach to them and yet instead of obeying God he got on a boat in the opposite direction.  Did that keep God from getting Jonah to Nineveh?  No!  Jonah got to go to Nineveh on the whale express.  God will get the gospel to his elect.  Those who deny this aren’t magnifying God’s sovereignty; they are denying it.

God uses preachers of the gospel to bring his elect home to faith in Christ.

The second observation is that this text teaches the importance of preachers as God’s appointed servants so that the gospel is preached so that the elect are converted.  A preacher is a God-call man who is appointed for the sake of the Spirit-anointed proclamation of the gospel.  Not everyone is called to be a preacher in this sense, though we are all called to be witnesses and are all called to give an answer for the hope that lies within us.  

When you look at the book of Acts there seems to be this distinction.  Not every Christian was called to do what Stephen or Phillip or the apostles did.  Not all are called to preach as Paul commands Timothy: “Preach the word; be instant in season, out of season; reprove, rebuke, exhort with all long suffering and doctrine” (2 Tim. 4:2).  There is a special calling to this, something I think Paul is pointing to in his quotation of Isa. 52:7 in verse 15 of our text: “And how shall they preach, except they be sent? as it is written, How beautiful are the feet of them that preach the gospel of peace, and bring glad tidings of good things!”  The messenger that Isaiah is envisioning is a person who has been specially appointed for that task.  And in the same way, the ministers of the church, its elders and pastors, have been called by God and recognized by the church for the task of preaching the word in this way.

I’m emphasizing this because we are living in a day which is in danger of minimizing the importance of preaching and preachers.  One of the reasons we are in danger of this is because of the sinful way some preachers have been elevated in the evangelical world.  It has become sometimes a cult of personality.  That was never right, for as Paul says, the minister is nothing – they sow and water, but only God can give the increase.  God is everything; the preacher is nothing!  They are merely the slaves of Christ.  

But we are in danger of learning the wrong lessons from such a sad state of affairs.  I was talking to a man the other day who told me that he appreciated a particular church he had attended for some time because it had a highly liturgical service.  And one of the reasons he liked the liturgy so much is that it sidelined the preacher.  The preaching of the word was not at the front and center of the service.  And he thought that was a good thing because it cut down on the danger of creating a cult of personality around a preacher.

And of course, on one level that is a good thing.  The preacher as such should never be front and center.  It is the word of God that should be front and center.  But neither does that mean that the preacher doesn’t matter or even that the personality of the preacher doesn’t matter.  They matter because these are the means that God has appointed to bring his word to bear on his elect.  God uses imperfect men (Paul calls them earthen vessels in 2 Cor. 4), and that includes their imperfect personality, their imperfect talents, the whole show, to shine the light of the glory of Christ in the proclamation of the gospel.  Lloyd-Jones in his exposition of this passage, commends the following definition of preaching given by Phillips Brooks, who defines it as “truth mediated through personality.” Of course that is what preaching is!  Yes, we have to be careful here.  We don’t want to create a cult of personality around any man.  At the same time, we must recognize that even the personality of the God-called minister is part of the means through which God works in the preaching of the gospel. 

If this is true, and I think it is; then to sideline preaching out of a fear of creating a cult of personality is a mistake.  Not only do we not want to sideline preaching, if we are going to be Biblical it needs to remain front and center in the life of the church.  Paul didn’t leave Timothy telling him to mind the liturgy.  He didn’t leave him telling him to mind how they sang the hymns. He left him telling him to preach the word.  And it is not preaching through the internet, nor even the reading of books, but preaching mediated through the speech and personality of a man called by God for that purpose.

It’s also important for us to believe this in this day of AI and instant information.  AI is not a person, and it will never be a person.  You cannot replace the preacher with information.  The preacher of the gospel of course conveys information, he preaches news, but it is news mediated through a person.  And if this is the way God ordains that people come to faith, then we cannot replace preachers with smartphones and headphones.

Before we move on, let me give you an example of how God can use even a very flawed instrument to do his work. C. H. Spurgeon, probably the greatest preacher in the 19th century, grew up in a house surrounded by Christian people and Christian books.  His grandfather and father were both pastors and preachers.  They were not only preachers, but they were able preachers and sound in the faith.  But God did not use them to bring Spurgeon to a saving knowledge of Christ.  

How did it happen?  It happened that one Sunday morning as Spurgeon was under deep conviction of sin and “longing for a hope in Jesus,” he was prevented by a snowstorm from going to the house of worship that he had at first intended to attend.  So he went instead into a nearby Primitive Methodist meeting house.  There weren’t very many people there due to the weather, and the regular minister didn’t make it either.  So another man got up to preach, and it is interesting how Spurgeon described him.  He writes: “Now, it is well that preachers should be instructed; but this man was really stupid. He was obliged to stick to his text, for the simple reason that he had little else to say.”  His text was Isa. 45:22, “Look unto me, and be ye saved, all the ends of the earth.”  However, even though according to Spurgeon this man couldn’t even pronounce his words right, he preached the sermon that Spurgeon needed to hear.  God used it, and right there in that Primitive Methodist chapel, Spurgeon came to an assured faith in Christ.  

Although Spurgeon himself talks about evangelistic books that were written to help seekers like himself, he then says this: “The books were good, but the man was better. The revealed Word awakened me; but it was the preached Word that saved me; and I must ever attach peculiar value to the hearing of the truth, for by it I received the joy and peace in which my soul delights.”  The books were good, but the man was better.  Even a stupid man who couldn’t pronounce his words right (that gives me hope!).  Like Spurgeon and like Paul we should “ever attach peculiar value to the hearing of the truth” as it is preached by God-called ministers, for faith cometh by hearing and hearing by the word of God.  

God uses preachers!  He doesn’t have to, but he does.  God is not dependent on preachers; the preacher is totally dependent on God.  Why then does God do it this way?  I think God allows us to be co-laborers with him, as Paul puts it to the Corinthians, because he is kind.  It is in his kindness and graciousness that he lets us participate with him in the work of his kingdom.  

Some Helpful Clarifications

Now at this point, there are those who will trot out their objections.  Some don’t like this because it is offensive for them to be told that the only way a person can be saved is through faith in Christ, and that this faith comes through hearing the preaching of the gospel.  They want to believe that as long as you are a good person (as the world defines that), you will go to heaven.  And those who reject Biblical authority don’t think any particular religion is any better than any other.  And so this claim that we must hear the gospel and believe in Christ to be saved is offensive to them.  

One of the objections is that if this is so, what about people who have never heard the gospel or can’t hear the gospel?  Does this mean that they are not saved? Are we saying that people who, through no fault of their own, are in a place where they can never hear the gospel are thereby lost?  This objection is given as a slam-dunk, because to them this proves that such a view is on the face of it unjust and cruel.

What are we to say to that?  First of all, we aren’t saying that people go to hell because they haven’t believed in a gospel that they have never heard.  God will not hold men accountable to believe a message they have never heard.  But that doesn’t mean they aren’t condemned!  They are: they are condemned because they are fallen in sin from birth.  They are condemned because they don’t respond in faith to the revelation God gives them in creation but suppress it and turn to idols.  This is the universal reality.  There are no guiltless people.  There are no “innocent pagans.”  All have sinned and come short of the glory of God.  So you see, we are not claiming that people who never heard the gospel or who are unable to hear the gospel go to hell for that reason.  They go to hell because they are wicked in the sight of God.  Neither is God obligated to send the gospel to them or do anything for them.  Every sinner is a rebel against God and deserves only one thing: eternal judgment.  It is not therefore unjust or cruel for God to bring judgment upon sinners, whether they have heard the gospel or not.

What about infants who die in infancy?  They may be condemned in Adam (Rom. 5:14), but are we saying that because infants can’t understand the gospel and respond to it in faith, therefore all infants dying in infancy go to hell?  No, I am not saying that, not at all.

And so this leads me to my second answer.   You may recall that I said that the gospel is the normal means by which God brings us to faith.  What do I mean by this?  I mean that I believe that God is sovereign and can work when, where, and how he pleases.  He is able to save the dying infant by applying the merit of Christ’s blood to the little one apart from hearing and believing the gospel.  He is able to do the same for those who are handicapped in ways that leave them unable to respond to the gospel in any meaningful way. 

What Paul is describing here is the necessity of empowered preaching that leads to believing praying.  God responds to the prayer of faith with salvation.  What Paul is saying is that if a person is praying to God to save them through Christ, then that is because they have heard the gospel and believed it.  Faith comes by hearing and hearing by the word of God.  But what about those who cannot pray?  For example, the infant?  Paul does not address them here.  They are not under consideration here and we cannot take this text and apply it to them. In other words, Paul is not saying that the preaching of the gospel is the only way a person is saved.  He is saying that the preaching of the gospel is the ordinary means by which the elect come to faith and are saved. 

This has long been the position of those who embrace the doctrines of God’s sovereign grace. For example, consider what John Calvin says in his commentary on this passage. He writes, “But if any man shall hereby contend to prove that God could not otherwise than by the means of preaching, infuse or pour His knowledge into men, we deny that to be the meaning of the Apostle, who had respect only to the ordinary dispensation of God, and would not prescribe any law or limitation to his grace.”  Faith coming by hearing the preached word is the ordinary way that God works, he says.

In a similar way, the Puritan John Flavel in his book The Method of Grace, writes, “The preaching of the gospel by Christ’s ambassadors is the principal means appointed for reconciling and bringing home sinners to Christ.”  The principal means.  That is what we want to say as well.  Not the only means, but the principle means. Again, the Second Helvetic Confession of Faith, a sixteenth century Reformed confession of faith by Swiss believers puts it this way: “We . . . admit that God can, even without an outward ministry, illuminate men whom and when He pleases, it lies in His power.  But we are speaking of the means and manner which He ordinarily uses in teaching men, and of the commandment and example which is given us by God.”  I agree with that.  

The Second London Baptist Confession puts it this way: “The grace of faith, whereby the elect are enabled to believe to the saving of their souls, is the work of the Spirit of Christ in their hearts, and is ordinarily wrought by the ministry of the Word; by which also, and by the administration of baptism and the Lord's supper, prayer, and other means appointed of God, it is increased and strengthened.”  Again, you see the language “ordinarily wrought by the ministry of the Word,” by which they mean the preaching of the word of Christ in the gospel.

Now that qualification does not therefore give us the right to say that God never uses the gospel as a means to bring people to faith and salvation in Christ.  That reasoning is used by some people, but we must reject it.  We must because it certainly is not Biblical.  And it actually doesn’t even logically follow either.  To claim that because God saves the infant apart from the gospel, therefore no one gets saved through the gospel, would be like me saying that because Emma can’t get nourishment with her mouth, therefore no one gets nourishment with their mouth!  Clearly no one would say that.  Neither should we say that God never uses the gospel as a means in the salvation of his elect. It would be to ignore what Paul says here.  He clearly says that God uses the gospel as a means to bring people to faith in Christ by which they saved.  At the very least, Romans 10:14-17 indicates that this is the normal means that God uses to do this, and it should be the expectation of every Christian and every Church that this is the way the lost will be saved.  So the first clarification is that Paul is describing the ordinary means by which the lost are brought to faith.  

The second clarification I want to make here is what Paul says about preaching.  I pointed out that in verses 14-15. this has particular reference to men called by God to the special task of preaching.  That’s not everyone.  However, I want to be careful here.  I’m not arguing that because of this, only ordained ministers can be used to lead people to faith in Christ.  Not at all!  I am arguing that this is primarily what Paul has in mind here, but as it is the duty of every Christian to share the gospel, we should expect people to be brought to faith and saved in all sorts of ways.  God does in fact use books and tracts to convert sinners to faith and repentance.  Almost unbelievably, John Thomas, the man who accompanied William Carey to India, was converted while reading John Gill’s commentaries!  

In Acts 8, to which I have already alluded, you have people being spread all over the place due to persecution.  This doesn’t appear to refer only to ordained ministers, but to ordinary believers.  And we are told that they “that were scattered abroad went everywhere preaching the word” (Acts 8:4).  Now that word “preaching” is different from the one Paul uses here in Romans 10:14-15, which is the word kerusso, an authoritative proclamation.  The word that is used in Acts 8:4 is a general word which means to proclaim the good news, to spread the gospel.  This is something every Christian is to do.  But then in Acts 8:5 when it describes what Philip did, Luke does use the verb kerusso to describe what he did.  Now maybe this is too fine a distinction, and Paul does use the verb for the more general gospel proclamation in Romans 10:16, but nevertheless the point I am trying to make here is sound.  We are not to sit back and watch the pastors do all the evangelistic work!  It is for all of us to do.  And your feet can be beautiful too, no matter who you are, when God in his providence guides you into an unbeliever’s life in order to share the gospel with them.

And that brings me to my final point, which is:

An important application

The application is that this text is a text for evangelism.  This text is a text for missions.  This is a battle cry for sending people out to share the gospel in all the world.  It is a call for churches to send people out and to support those who go out.  It’s a call for believers to consider whether or not God has called them to this work.  I’m glad that our church supports the spread of the word of God in other parts of the world.  Let’s continue to be committed to that, as much as we can be.  But it’s also a call for sharing the gospel here in our city, with our neighbors, as God gives us opportunity.  It is true that some – even many – will hear and not believe.  However, the unbelief of some does not erase the fact that this text teaches us that God’s intended purpose is for his elect to hear the gospel so that they believe it, and believing it call on the Lord for salvation.  And therefore we should have every expectation to see this happen.  Let us not be ashamed of the gospel for it is the power of God to salvation to all who believe.