Romans 10:14 “And how can they believe in the one of whom they have not heard?”

How can someone believe in a God they never heard of? There is a saying I sometimes hear that wants to encourage people to have humility about their expertise, or practice a certain calm when the unexpected happens. “You don’t know what you don’t know.” It seems self-evident, doesn’t it? And if you don’t know it, you can’t take it into account. You can’t do anything about it. You certainly can’t put any faith in it.

It’s not as though things somehow work differently in God’s world. If the Lord had wanted, he could have put faith into everyone’s heart directly. He has the power to do it. There are certain things our bodies do automatically. I don’t have to think about breathing. No one ever gave me lessons. Most of the time I don’t even think about it. It’s always been something I do, obviously. Maybe believing in God could have worked like that.

There are certain things that work on us, whether we know about them or not. Sir Isaac Newton is sometimes credited with “discovering” gravity in 1687. That does not mean everyone was floating around like astronauts in space before then. Newton simply gave a natural phenomenon, a force of nature, a name. But it was holding everything to the floor long before any of us started thinking about it. When we were preschoolers, we didn’t need to be tethered to keep us from floating away. We hadn’t heard of gravity, but we it was working on us just the same. Maybe the Lord could have dispensed with faith, and dispensed with us knowing about him, and just let his salvation work on us anyway.

It doesn’t work like that. His whole idea is to restore us to himself as people who trust and love him. He craves our attention. He wants to share life with us, like friends or family do. That assumes we must know who he is.

He has chosen to make that happen through a message, a message that tells us what he hates, and that he will cut us off from him if we live that way; and a message that tells us he loves us like no one else ever has. He loves us all the way becoming one of us, and dying to save us, and moving heaven and earth and driving the whole course of history to seek us and find us and bring us the message that introduces us to him. The answer to the question: “You can’t believe in a God you never heard of.”

But you can believe in Jesus, because he is showing himself to you right now in his word.