[Chapter 10-2] True Faith Comes by Hearing (Romans 10:16-21)
(Romans 10:16-21)
“But
they have not all obeyed the gospel. For Isaiah says, ‘LORD, who has
believed our report?’ So then faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the
word of God. 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.’
But I say, did Israel not know? First Moses says:
‘I will provoke you to jealousy by those who are not a nation,
I will move you to anger by a foolish nation.’
But Isaiah is very bold and says:
‘I was found by those who did not seek Me;
I was made manifest to those who did not ask for Me.’
But to Israel he says:
‘All day long I have stretched out My hands
To a disobedient and contrary people.’”
Verse
17 says, “So then faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the word of
God.” Where does the faith that delivers a person from all his/her sins
come from? True faith comes by hearing the Word of God.
I
would like to continue bearing witness to the gospel of the
righteousness of God through His Word. Let us begin by taking a look at
Romans 3:10-20:
“As it is written: ‘There is none righteous, no, not one;
There is none who understands;
There is none who seeks after God.
They have all turned aside;
They have together become unprofitable;
There is none who does good, no, not one.’
‘Their throat is an open tomb;
With their tongues they have practiced deceit’;
‘The poison of asps is under their lips’;
‘Whose mouth is full of cursing and bitterness.’
‘Their feet are swift to shed blood;
Destruction and misery are in their ways;
And the way of peace they have not known.’
‘There is no fear of God before their eyes.’
Now
we know that whatever the law says, it says to those who are under the
law, that every mouth may be stopped, and all the world may become
guilty before God. Therefore by the deeds of the law no flesh will be
justified in His sight, for by the law is the knowledge of sin.”
How
should we understand and believe in these passages to receive
salvation? From the very beginning, there were neither the righteous nor
those who sought God, but all were sinners. Their throats were open
tombs; their tongues were like the venom of a poisonous snake, deceitful
and full of cursing and bitterness. Their feet were quick to draw
blood. They knew not the way of peace, or the fear of God before their
eyes, and only walked in the path to their own destructions and misery.
Everyone was a sinner before knowing and believing in the righteousness
of God, and the way they found out that they were sinners before God was
by the law.
How
could we, without the law, know our sins? How could we know God? Did we
ever fear God? Romans 3:18 says, “There is no fear of God before their
eyes.” Did our eyes of the flesh ever see Him? We may perhaps have been
slightly conscious of the existence of God, but we neither saw nor
feared Him. How, then, did we find out that we were sinners? We came to
know the existence of God by hearing His written Word. This is why
hearing comes from God’s Word.
We
know that God created the world because it is thus written in the
Scripture, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth”
(Genesis 1:1). It is by hearing this Word of God that we came to know
and believe in His existence, and to believe that He is the Creator of
the whole universe. If it weren’t for the Word of God, there would have
been no one who knew of Him, nor feared Him. Neither could we have known
of our sins without the Word of God—not a single person.
In
other words, we were fundamentally ignorant of God, worshipping futile
things, and unaware of our own sins. But God gave us the law, and this
is how we came to know of our sins before God. It was by hearing His
Word of the law as the Ten Commandments and the 613 detailed articles of
the law that we came to know our shortcomings and sins.
No
one can know even one’s own sins without the Word of the law. Almost
every convict behind bars would claim that he/she does not know what
his/her crime was, or why he/she had been locked away. Many of them
claim to be innocent; that they were sent to prison wrongfully and
unjustly. Without knowing the law of God, we cannot know of our own
sins, saying, “I have always acted in this way. Everyone does it. How
can this be sin?”
Only
by seeing and hearing the law of God have we come to realize our sins.
We have come to know that our worship of other gods, our calling of
God’s name in vain, our failure to observe the Sabbath, our killing, our
adultery, our theft, our lying, our envy-our failure to live by the
Word of God, in short-are all acts of sin because the law of God says
so. This is how we have realized and recognized that we were sinners
before God, by the Word of the law. Before this law, we did not even
know our own sins.
Having
realized that we are sinners, what, then, should we do before God? We
need to ask how our sins can be forgiven. It is by hearing the Word of
God that we come to know our sins, and realize our need for salvation.
Just as the hungry feels the need for food, those who recognize that
they have broken God’s law and know that they are grave sinners realize
their need for salvation. This is how we come to look for God and
recognize our need to believe in His righteousness through Jesus Christ,
whom He sent for us. As “faith comes by hearing,” we know our sins by
hearing the Word of God.
We now know that we are sinners. What should we do to be delivered from our sins then?
Salvation
comes by faith in His Word that stands in the center of our hearts,
just as we came to realize our sins by hearing and learning the Word of
God. As Romans 3:21-22 says, “But now the righteousness of God apart
from the law is revealed, being witnessed by the law and the Prophets,
even the righteousness of God, through faith in Jesus Christ, to all and
on all who believe.”
By
giving us His law, Got let us know that we are sinners before Him, as
we have failed to live by His Word. We consequently have two different
needs: we want to live by the law, but at the same time, we desperately
seek our salvation from sin. But because “…now the righteousness of God
apart from the law is revealed,” those who are to be delivered from
their sins must find redemption by their faiths in this righteousness of
God, not in the law. We know that this deliverance does not come by
obeying the law of God, but by believing in the salvation given by God,
in the very righteousness of God that has saved us through Jesus Christ.
What,
then, is this righteousness of God and His salvation? This is the
gospel of the water and the Spirit, spoken of in both the Old and the
New Testaments. The gospel of the water and the Spirit appears in the
Old Testament as salvation by faith in the sacrificial system, and in
the New Testament as faith in the baptism of Jesus and His Cross. Romans
3:21-22 says, “Being witnessed by the law and the Prophets, even the
righteousness of God, through faith in Jesus Christ, to all and on all
who believe.”
How
can we then receive the righteousness of God? We can receive the
righteousness of God by knowing, through the Word of God witnessed by
the law and the prophets, that Jesus is God and our Savior, and by being
saved from all our sins through our faiths in Him.
In
other words, we receive the righteousness of God by believing in His
Word, witnessed by the law and the prophets of the Old Testament. That
the law and the prophets witnessed God’s Word is shown also in the very
first chapters of Hebrews and Romans.
That
Jesus came to deliver us is the salvation promised to us by God. This
promise to save the sinners, who were under the law and bound for their
destruction, had been made thousands of years ago by God. He had
repeatedly reiterated this promise and revealed just how He intends to
keep it through many of His servants who came before us.
Let’s
see a passage for example. Leviticus 16:21 says, “Aaron shall lay both
his hands on the head of the live goat, confess over it all the
iniquities of the children of Israel, and all their transgressions,
concerning all their sins, putting them on the head of the goat, and
shall send it away into the wilderness by the hand of a suitable man.”
The passages from Romans 3:21-22, that the righteousness of God was
witnessed by the law and the prophets, means that the complete salvation
of Jesus was revealed through the Old Testament’s sacrifices of the
tabernacle and through such prophets as Isaiah, Ezekiel, Jeremiah and
Daniel.
In
other words, God had already revealed, through the Word of the Old
Testament, just how He would keep His promise of salvation—that He would
do so by sending Jesus Christ, having Him take up all the sins of the
world with His baptism, die on the Cross in our place, and thereby pay
the wages of all our sins with His own body, all for our deliverance
from sin through the righteousness of God. Our salvation is thus not by
the law, but by our faith in the righteousness of God, Jesus Christ
Himself, as witnessed by both the law and the prophets.
God
tells us that we are saved from our sins by believing in His
righteousness, which was fulfilled by Jesus Christ. Our faith comes by
hearing this Word of God, the Word of Jesus Christ. How can we know and
believe that Jesus is our Savior? We know and believe that Jesus is our
Savior by hearing the Word of God spoken to His servants, that He had
promised to save us according to His plan, and that Jesus came to save
us according to this promise and plan. As is written in Daniel 9:24,
“Seventy weeks are determined For your people and for your holy city, To
finish the transgression, To make an end of sins, To make
reconciliation for iniquity, To bring in everlasting righteousness, To
seal up vision and prophecy, And to anoint the Most Holy.”
God has set seventy weeks for our people
We
continue with the above passage from the Book of Daniel. What the
passage describes is the fall of Israel by Babylon, when God determined
that the Israelites, because of their idolatry, would be taken to
Babylon as prisoners and live there for seventy years as slaves. As
determined by God, Israel was attacked and overwhelmed by Babylon, and
unable to withstand the devastation, ended up surrendering to the
invaders, who took many of the Israelites as prisoners and turned them
into their slaves. Among the prisoners taken were also the wise, such as
Daniel, whom the Babylonian king made his advisor.
So
God punished the Israelites in this way for their sins, but because He
was merciful, He did not keep His wrath forever, but instead planned to
free them in 70 weeks.
When
Daniel, repenting before God on behalf of his people, prayed for His
mercy and deliverance, God sent an angel who spoke the above passage:
“Seventy weeks are determined For your people and for your holy city, To
finish the transgression, To make an end of sins, To make
reconciliation for iniquity, To bring in everlasting righteousness, To
seal up vision and prophecy, And to anoint the Most Holy.” This passage
is God’s promise to Daniel that He would forgive all the sins of His
people in 70 weeks when their transgressions were finished. It also
reveals to us God’s promised deliverance through Jesus Christ.
Because
the Israelites committed many sins, God had to punish them, and for the
price of 70 weeks of slavery, God forgave all their past sins. When the
transgression is redeemed and an end of sins is made, all the sins of
the Israelites would no longer be there. When the reconciliation for
iniquity is made, the everlasting righteousness is brought, and the
vision and prophecy are sealed up, all of God’s Words spoken to Daniel
would be fulfilled. Through the 70 weeks of slavery, all these would
come to bear, and on the 70th week, the Israelites would return to their
homeland.
This
is what God told Daniel through His angel. This promise was a promise
made to the Israelites, but it also has a spiritual significance—just as
God set 70 weeks for the people of Israel and their holy city, God has
prepared for all of us who believe in Him our Holy City of Heaven, our
Kingdom of God.
In
Romans, it is said, “But now the righteousness of God apart from the
law is revealed, being witnessed by the law and the Prophets, even the
righteousness of God, through faith in Jesus Christ, to all and on all
who believe.” When Jesus came to this earth, was baptized, and died on
the Cross, all our transgressions were eliminated, our sins ended, the
everlasting righteousness was revealed, and the vision and prophecy was
sealed up. The passage from Daniel ends with, “To anoint the Most Holy.”
What does this mean? The Most Holy refers to none other than Jesus
Christ, who would come to this earth to be anointed.
What
does it mean to be anointed? That Jesus would take upon the three
positions of the King, the High Priest of the Kingdom of God, and the
Prophet. As our King, High Priest and Prophet, Jesus would fulfill the
will of God to deliver us from all our sins. Just as prophesized by the
angel who spoke to Daniel, Jesus Christ took upon all our sins on
Himself and was judged in our stead by coming to this earth and being
baptized.
“Faith
comes by hearing.” How, then, can we hear and believe in this gospel of
the righteousness of God? How can we believe that Jesus Christ is our
Savior? We can hear and believe by the Word of God spoken in the Old and
New Testaments-by the words spoken by the prophets of God and His
servants. This is why Paul said that faith comes by hearing, and this
faith comes by hearing the Word of Christ.
The
prophets of the Old Testament, such as Daniel and Isaiah, had
prophesized about the coming of Jesus Christ. Isaiah, in particular,
prophesized, “Surely He has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows”
and “He was led as a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before its
shearers is silent, so He opened not His mouth” (Isaiah 53:4, 7).
Who
in Isaiah’s time would have believed that Jesus Christ would be born of
a virgin to come to this earth as the commonest of all commons, live
for 33 years, be baptized, crucified, and raised from death on the third
day? Yet Isaiah saw and prophesized, about 700 years before the coming
of Jesus, that all these things would come to pass. He bore witness to
the fact that Christ would bear our grief and all our sins.
This
is why Paul used the Word of the Old Testament frequently when writing
the Book of Romans, to explain how the servants of God bore witness to
how Jesus became our Savior-by coming to this earth, taking away all our
sins, and saving us with the righteousness of God.
For all have sinned
Romans
3:23-24 says, “For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God,
being justified freely by His grace through the redemption that is in
Christ Jesus.” Because we were born into sin and have all sinned against
God, we have come short before His glory and His Kingdom. But we were
justified freely by God’s grace through the redemption in Jesus Christ.
Our justification was for free, without a price. We did not have to pay
the wages for our sins because Jesus took upon all our sins and paid
these wages with His own life on the Cross, all to deliver those of us
who would hear and believe in Him.
What
do we mean by faith in the salvation from all sins? We simply mean
faith in the righteousness of God. Believing in the righteousness of God
has nothing to do with works, but everything to do with our hearts. We
become justified by hearing the Word of our Lord and believing in it
with our hearts. To save us from our sins, our Lord came to this earth,
became the Lamb of God, who carried all the sins of the world by being
baptized by John the Baptist, and died on the Cross. On the third day,
He arose from death, and now sits at the right hand of God the Father.
Jesus
took upon all the sins of the world onto Himself, paid the price for
the punishment of our sins with His own life, and arose from death; all
to save us from our own certain deaths. We are saved by believing in
this. Our salvation comes by faith, and our faiths come by hearing the
written Word of God, and our hearings come by the Word of Christ.
“Faith
comes by hearing.” We believe with our hearts. Our intellects are for
knowledge, while our bodies are for working, and it is in our hearts
that we believe. What, then, should we believe in our hearts, and how?
By hearing the Word of God, we can hear His gospel, and by hearing His
gospel, we can have faith, and by having faith, we can be saved. When we
believe, we believe by the Word of God—that is, we believe in the
written Word that proclaims that Christ took upon all our sins with His
baptism, carried them, died on the Cross and rose again from death.
To
have faith in God’s Word is to have faith in His righteousness. So,
faith without hearing God’s Word is futile and useless. Such claims—that
God was revealed through one’s dreams and whatnot—are all lies.
We
are saved by faith and faith alone. Let us read, one more time, Romans
3:24-26: “Being justified freely by His grace through the redemption
that is in Christ Jesus, whom God set forth as a propitiation by His
blood, through faith, to demonstrate His righteousness, because in His
forbearance God had passed over the sins that were previously committed,
to demonstrate at the present time His righteousness, that He might be
just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus.” Amen. Our
Lord was made the propitiation for our sins. Because of our sins, we
were made God’s enemies, but Jesus reestablished our relationship with
God by becoming the propitiation for our sins with His baptism, death
and resurrection.
In
the middle of Romans 3:25-26 is the passage, “Because in His
forbearance God had passed over the sins that were previously committed,
to demonstrate at the present time His righteousness.” This passage
tells us that God had waited in patience for a very long time, and that
He will wait until the Day of Judgment. Those who believe in Jesus
Christ, those who believe in the salvation through the water and the
blood, those who believe in the salvation of the Son, who became the
propitiation to God the Father–all their sins are passed over by God.
‘To have passed over the sins’ means that God has passed over the sins
of those who hear and believe in the Word of God and His gospel, the
very people who believe in the baptism of Jesus and His blood on the
Cross.
We
may falter from time to time in our lives, but this is because of the
weakness of our flesh and minds, and as long as we do not deny the
salvation of Jesus, God will not see all these sins as sins. God does
not, in other words, look at the sins of those who are saved by
believing in the water and the blood of Jesus Christ in their hearts,
but passes over them.
Why,
then, does God pass over our sins? How can He ignore such sins, when He
is the holy and just God? This is because Christ came to this world and
was baptized. It is because Jesus blotted out all the sins of the world
with His baptism and crucifixion that God passes over our previously
committed sins. Do the sins previously committed refer to only our
original sin? No, they don’t, because while they may appear as our
original sin, to our everlasting God the Father, everything is in the
past.
In
the viewpoint of eternity, time in this world always appears as the
past. This world has its beginning and end, but God is eternal, and so
when we compare His time with our worldly time, all the sins of the
world appear as committed in the past before Him. “God had passed over
the sins that were previously committed, to demonstrate at the present
time His righteousness.” This is why God does not see our sins. It is
not because He does not have eyes to see our sins, but He does not see
them because His Son Jesus Christ has paid the wages of our sins.
Because Christ’s baptism and crucifixion cleansed away our sins, we
actually appear before God as sinless people.
How
could God see our sins when Jesus Christ, whose fulfillment of God’s
righteousness redeemed all those who believe in it, already took them
away from us? This is how God demonstrates His righteousness now by
passing over the sins that were previously committed, sins that have
already been paid by Jesus Christ.
Faith
in the righteousness of God comes by the Word of Christ because the
Word of Christ itself contains the very righteousness of God. By
demonstrating His righteousness, God showed not only His righteousness,
but also the righteousness of those who believe in Jesus Christ. God rid
us of all our sins, and we, too, believe in our hearts that Jesus has
taken away all our sins. This is why we have become as sinless and as
justified, as we have put on the same righteousness of Christ (Galatians
3:27). Because both God and we are righteous, together we are all
family, and you and I are His children. Do you believe in this beautiful
news?
Does
this mean that we have something of our own that we can boast of? Of
course not! What is there of ours to boast about when in fact, our
salvation is possible only by hearing and believing in the Word of
Christ? Were we saved because of our own works? What is there to boast
of? Nothing! Were you saved because you had attended early-morning
church services? Were you saved because you had never missed a Sunday
church service? Were you saved because you had made sure to offer
tithes? Of course not.
These
are all works, and the faiths based on works and/or the faiths
supplemented with works are wrong faiths. We were saved from our sins
only by believing in the righteousness of God in our hearts. Faith comes
by hearing, and salvation comes by faith in the Word of Christ.
Trying
to receive the remission of sins through prayers of repentance, after
believing in Jesus, is also a false faith, for true faith comes only by
believing in the righteousness of God, not by the deeds of the law. As
the Word of God says, “Where is boasting then? It is excluded. By what
law? Of works? No, but by the law of faith. Therefore we conclude that a
man is justified by faith apart from the deeds of the law. Or is He the
God of the Jews only? Is He not also the God of the Gentiles? Yes, of
the Gentiles also” (Romans 3:27-29).
Salvation
comes, for both the Israelites and the Gentiles, by hearing and
believing in their hearts that Jesus Christ has saved them with His
water and blood. We are saved from our sins when we believe in the
righteousness of God. When we believe in this righteousness, which is
Jesus Christ, we are saved from our sins. God becomes our Father and we
become His children. This is the salvation by faith in the righteousness
of God, by hearing and believing in the Word of Christ. Our faiths come
by believing in the righteousness of God.
Our
salvation comes by our faith in the Word of Christ. Do you, then,
believe that Christ came to this earth as your Savior, that with His
baptism, He took upon all the sins of the world as a propitiation to
God, and that he died on the Cross, arose from death on the third day,
and sits at the right hand of God the Father? Do you truly believe in
this salvation, in this atonement of our Lord Jesus Christ?
There
are many people who ask God to appear in their dreams, who say that
they will believe if they can only see Him once with their own eyes.
Some even claim to have seen Jesus in their dreams, that He told them to
do such and such things-build a church here, a prayer center there,
etc., but usually something requiring money-and being deceived by such
false claims, many are misled and go astray. There are too many sad
happenings in this Christian world. You must realize that all these are
not the work of our Lord, but of the Devil himself.
If,
by any chance, you see Jesus in your dream, don’t take it too
seriously. Dreams are only dreams. Jesus is not someone who would appear
before you in such a manner-otherwise, there would be no need for the
Bible. If Jesus appears before us even once, then we must close the
Bible, for there is no need for it any longer. But this will have a
devastating effect on Christ’s work of salvation.
If
we were to believe in Jesus without the Bible, He would have to appear
before everyone. But there is no need for this, for our Lord has already
fulfilled all the requirements of salvation. This is why faith comes by
hearing and believing in the Word of Christ. Have all the people, then,
heard of Jesus Christ? They may have heard of the name Jesus Christ,
but not all of them have heard the true gospel. This is why Paul asked,
“And how shall they hear without a preacher?”
We
must, therefore, preach this gospel that contains the righteousness of
God. But with what and how? By what method or how the gospel is preached
is not important; all methods of spreading the good news, through
spoken words or printed materials, should be used. Faith comes by
hearing, and hearing comes by the Word of Christ. Printed materials
preaching the gospel, too, can lead readers to true faith. Regardless of
the method, you must remember that faith can come only by hearing, and
hearing only by preaching the good news.
If
you really have faith in the Word of God in your heart, then you will
know that you are a true Christian. I hope and pray that you know this;
that you have been saved from your sins. I also hope and pray that you
will hold onto the Word of the water and the Spirit dearly. Let us,
then, conclude our discussion by reading Romans 10:17 together.
“So
then faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the word of God.” Amen.
Those who believe in their hearts by hearing this written Word of God
are those who have the true faiths. Do you have this true faith? Our
Lord has delivered us from all our sins.
How
thankful and happy we are that the Lord has taken away all our sins!
Without the gospel, people are always discouraged, but just by hearing
that Jesus took upon all our sins with His baptism, our hearts can be
filled with joy and our faiths can begin to grow.
I thank the Lord for saving us.
No comments:
Post a Comment