The Word of God · The Dipper, Volume IV
Gary W. Boyd, PhD · Wells in the Wilderness
The preaching of the word of God unto the people is called meat. Scripture calleth it meat, not strawberries, that come but once a year, and tarry not long, but are soon gone.Hugh Latimer · Sermon on the Ploughers, preached at Paul’s Cross · 1548
Latimer was complaining about clergy who preached rarely and called it enough. He goes on: the people must have meat that is familiar and continual and daily given them to feed upon; many make a strawberry of it, ministering it but once a year. He was burned at Oxford seven years later.
Week 18 · Day 6 · One verse, all the way down
Romans 10 · Berean Standard Bible
Choose your depth. Springs is a few minutes; Wells is the full dip; Aquifer is for the morning you have time to go down.
Paul builds a chain of four questions, each one dependent on the last, and then states the conclusion in a single line.
How can they call on one they have not believed in? How can they believe in one they have not heard of? How can they hear without someone preaching? And the fourth: how can anyone preach unless they are sent?
Four links, running backward from a man calling on the Lord to somebody being sent.
And then the conclusion.
Read Romans 10:14–15 and count the links in Paul’s chain backward. Then find which link is the one most often missing.
Faith comes from hearing, and hearing through the word of Christ.
Take the two prepositions seriously, because they are the whole verse.
Faith comes from hearing — not from reasoning to a conclusion, not from a feeling, not from an experience. Something has to be reported to a person from outside himself.
And hearing comes through the word of Christ — the report has content, and the content is His.
Which explains why this volume exists and why it has spent eighteen weeks on a book rather than on a method.
There is no version of Christian faith in Paul’s chain that does not begin with a message. Not a message about a message, and not a general sense that God is good. A word about Christ, delivered by somebody, to someone who did not have it.
And the link most often missing is the one Paul puts last and mentions least: how can they preach unless they are sent?
The chain does not begin with a hearer’s need. It begins with a sending.
Then Paul does what he does in every argument: he quotes. How beautiful are the feet of those who bring good news — from Isaiah 52, where the good news being announced is that God reigns and has comforted His people.
The verse has a shadow side he states immediately: but not all the Israelites accepted the good news, for Isaiah says, Lord, who has believed our message? Hearing does not compel faith, and Paul knew it from the same prophet.
The verse also rules out a mistake in the other direction. Hearing is necessary, and Paul says so, but the chain does not make the messenger the cause. Two verses earlier he quotes Joel: everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved. The sending, the preaching and the hearing are how it reaches a person; the calling and the saving are between that person and God.
So the verse is not a formula. It is a description of the only door there is. Nobody comes to faith another way, and everybody who has come, came because somebody said something.
Read Romans 10:14–15 and count the links in Paul’s chain backward. Then find which link is the one most often missing.
The word rendered hearing is akoe, which can mean the act of hearing, the faculty, or the thing heard — a report or message. Isaiah 53:1, quoted two verses earlier, uses it in the last sense: who has believed our report? The ambiguity is productive rather than confusing.
There is a textual question in verse 17: some manuscripts read the word of Christ and others the word of God. The evidence favors Christ, and modern versions generally print it with a footnote. Either reading leaves the argument unchanged.
The chain in verses 14–15 is a rhetorical device Greek writers called sorites — a series of linked steps run backward to a first cause. Paul uses it to move from the individual’s calling on the Lord all the way to the church’s sending of messengers.
The Isaiah 52:7 quotation sits in the passage immediately before the fourth Servant Song, which means Paul is quoting the sentence that introduces Isaiah 53. His argument and his proof text are both about the same message.
Romans 10:17 has been carried by the whole missionary movement of the church, and it is worth noting where Paul puts it: in the middle of three chapters wrestling with why Israel had not believed. The most quoted verse about how faith comes sits inside the hardest passage in his letters about why it sometimes does not.
Look it upG189 ἀκοή akoe, hearing, report, message · G4100 πιστεύω pisteuo, to believe · G2784 κηρύσσω kerusso, to herald, preach · G649 ἀποστέλλω apostello, to send with a commission
Where this touchesRomans 10:8–21 · Isaiah 52:7; 53:1 · 1 Corinthians 1:21 · James 1:18 · 1 Peter 1:23–25 (Week Five, Day Two). Psalm 19, 2 Timothy 3:16–17, Isaiah 55:10–11, Matthew 24:35, Psalm 12:6, Matthew 5:18, Romans 15:4, Hebrews 4:12, Psalm 119:89, Joshua 21:45, Isaiah 66:2, Psalm 138:2, Jeremiah 1:12, Hebrews 1:1–2, Psalm 33:6, Deuteronomy 29:29 and John 5:39–40 were the earlier single-verse days.
Read Romans 10:14–15 and count the links in Paul’s chain backward. Then find which link is the one most often missing.
Scripture quotations are from the Berean Standard Bible, which is in the public domain and carries no restriction on its use.
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The Word of God · The Dipper, Volume IV · Gary W. Boyd, PhD · The Anchored Institute
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