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Click on this link to open the Scripture passage in a new window: Romans 10:18-21ESV
Romans 10:18-21 - Weeding in the Garden of Faith
I don't much like gardening. Maybe it was the cruel form of injustice I suffered as a kid when my mom sent me out to weed the garden? I carry these feelings with me into adulthood and somehow have come to feel like this about yardwork in general. I probably could say I feel about yardwork and gardening the way Terry does about Winter. In Winter at least I can say, as I read somewhere, that now finally my lawn looks as good as my neighbour's. But about Summer, I agree with the words of James Dent, who said,
A perfect summer day is when the sun is shining,
the breeze is blowing, the birds are singing,
and the lawn mower is broken.[i]- James Dent
As I studied Romans 10 this week, especially these verses, I realized however that there is a certain parallel here with the world of gardening. The point of having a garden is to grow vegetables for eating or flowers for beauty-at any rate, to grow something for some purpose. Verse 17 is the garden in this text: [read] the goal is to harvest faith out of this garden; the way you plant is by preaching the "Word of Christ"; the way faith grows is by "hearing" the Word of Christ, and the "garden" is in the hearts of each of us. We saw last week that according to the logic of verses 14-17, this preaching and hearing of Christ's Word, the Bible, is necessary to produce faith so that, as verse 13 says, the believer can then "call on the name of the Lord" and be saved. As someone has said, "A person's character and their garden both reflect the amount of weeding that was done during the growing season". I think the same can be said about a person's belief in God.[ii] There is a particular weed God uproots from the garden of a person's heart every time someone comes to faith in Christ. It seems to me that this is what God is doing through Romans 10:18-21.
Identifying the Weed
•1.[read v 18] The reason, I think, Paul raises this question, "have they not heard?" goes back to verse 16: many Jews in Israel, in fact most, did not believe the Gospel. But Paul says in verse 17 that "faith [does] come from hearing the Gospel"-Gentiles are believing the Good News all over the place (c.f., v 12). Why were they receiving the Truth but the Jews were rejecting it? I think Paul is saying that the Jews have no one to blame but themselves for God's judgement on Israel. In other words, their unbelief can't be blamed on anything external but on something internal. "Indeed they have [heard]"; their ears were not the problem: their hearts were.
Most of you will remember the parable Jesus told about the king who threw a wedding banquet for his son who was getting married. The king sent out his servants to bring in the special guests who had been invited but they did not RSVP; they ignored the invitation and even assaulted the servants who came out to get them. So Jesus said, "the king was angry, and he sent his troops and destroyed those murderers and burned their city" (Mt 22:7). Then the king said to his servants, "The wedding feast is ready, but those invited were not worthy. Go therefore to the main roads and invite to the wedding feast as many as you find.' And those servants went out into the roads and gathered all whom they found, both bad and good. So the wedding hall was filled with guests" (8-10). Do you know what the leaders of the Jews did when Jesus was finished with this story? They plotted against Him. Why? Because Jesus offended their pride with the implication that God would reject Israel but accept good-for-nothing Gentiles into His Kingdom. In their view, God would not reject Israel-and He would not seat Gentiles at the same table as Jews: the Jews are special; Gentiles are dogs!
Now, in verse 18, this is interesting here, how Paul uses Psalm 19:4. This is the psalm that begins, "The heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky above proclaims his handiwork" (Psa 19:1). When David said in this psalm that "their voice" had gone to the whole earth, he was talking about the testimony of nature, of God's creation. God has always revealed His divinity and power to the whole world, Jews and Gentiles, through the things in Creation that He has made. Israel should have understood this. You see, God has always been inviting people to Himself. And, in spite of the Jews' own inflated egos, God has always been inviting all people to Himself. One of the reasons the Jews rejected the Gospel was apparently because Jesus sent this Good News to the Gentiles. But the Jews would not share their God with such Gentilesinners. The next verse makes this clearer.
•2.[read v19] Paul asks next, "Didn't they understand?" What he says in verse 19 is unexpected. I would have expected him to ask, "Did Israel refuse the Gospel because they didn't understand it?" However, it's not the Gospel that the Jews failed to understand; it was God's missionary heart and purpose for the Gentiles that the Jews failed to understand. But even then, Paul quotes from Moses to show that Israel should have understood God's mission. They should have been glad God was also going to save Gentiles. But instead they were jealous. They thought they deserved God's special favour because they were a specially chosen nation. So the proud, blessed nation became jealous of a non-nation. I think this arrogant pride is the weed Paul was addressing here; the weed that prevented faith from growing in Israel. The next verse seems to prove the point.
•3.[read v20] As I thought about this verse, I began to wonder why Paul said Isaiah was "so bold" as to prophesy with these words from God? After all, they are God's words, not merely Isaiah's words, so why does Paul call Isaiah, "bold"? Well, imagine that you're the prophet Isaiah, and God has given you these words to speak. And now you have to take this message and repeat it to your fellow Israelites, knowing that they are arrogant, proud, racist in their attitude towards people from "lesser" nations. [read v 20a] Isaiah's words are meant to make you go, "hunh?" How can God be found by people not looking for Him? The very idea is a contradiction... until we see his point in the second part of the quote: "I have shown myself to those who did not ask for me." Sinners don't go looking for God-that much is obvious. But the Jews, for all their religion, didn't find God's salvation either. God chooses those whom He saves. When Isaiah announced this to Israel, he must have been adding insult to injury. Now every Israelite is hopping mad. Proud Jews, and proud church-goers for that matter, hate nothing more than the idea that God would choose unworthy people and save them unconditionally (You can almost hear them say, "We were here first! God owes us! We earned it!"). Sounds like the prodigal's older brother.
•4.[read v21] These people had a weed in their garden of faith: their own pride. "Grace" was not in their vocabulary. They really believed that as long as they went through the motions of obeying God's rules, that they then deserved God's goodness. They didn't really think they needed saving from God's wrath against sin; the only salvation they were interested in was salvation from being conquered by Gentiles so that the world could see how special they are. And this was the better half of Israel! The rest of the people rejected God outright and worshipped the false gods of the nations around them, indulging in extreme sexual immorality in the name of religion and even in sacrificing their own children to please the demon god, Molech! Through the pages of the Old Testament, Israel is convicted with these and a thousand other crimes of idol-worship. But they did not worship the One who literally held out His hands to them:
John 1:11-1311 He came to his own, and his own people did not receive him.12 But to all who did receive him, who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God,13 who were born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God.
Are we so different? Some of us need to repent of pride; all of us need to keep turning from sin to Christ.
Pulling the Weed
I hope you can see by now that there is a threatening tone to these verses of Romans 10? Yes God is a saving God; yes, the Gospel of Jesus Christ promises salvation freely, by grace, to everyone who trusts in Jesus; yes the Gospel invitation had gone out to the whole world, to the Gentiles. But when Israel shrunk back from sharing God's favour with foreigners, God shrunk back from Israel. And yet, Paul was a Jew; many who heard this letter read out loud in the churches of Rome were Jews; all of the Apostles were Jews. At the beginning of chapters 9 and 10, Paul shows that his heart was broken with longing for the Jews to know Christ. And, as I showed you last week, there was a sense of urgency to Paul's preaching of the Gospel because he knew there was no other way than this for the Jews to hear, believe and be saved. So the tone of warning in these verses is not just meant to condemn the pride of Israel, but to lead individual Jews (& Gentiles!) to repentance. God was not just aiming, here, to identify the weed in Israel's garden of faith, but by a warning using Israel as an example, to pull that weed up by its root so that faith can grow where the Gospel is planted.
This makes me think of the story of the prophet Hosea. He preached to the northern kingdom of Israel during a 30 year period of incredible fear and political turmoil leading up to the complete overthrow of the kingdom by the powerful Assyrian Empire. Hosea believed that God was bringing Assyria down on Israel because Israel had abandoned the proper worship of God in favour of worshipping the idol Baal. No matter what chances we've had in the past to repent of every sin and pride and false worship and turn to believe in Jesus, God will judge us if we fail to respond to the invitation of the Gospel and come to Christ. In Hosea's ministry, Israel's idol worship is portrayed as adultery and prostitution in graphic detail and in ways that brought great pain to Hosea himself. Israel was a nation joined to God like a bride to her husband. So what was she doing worshipping Baal?
To make this point, God told Hosea to go and find a prostitute named Gomer, marry her and have a child with her. Hosea obeyed God and did as He instructed (Hos 1:2-3). But Gomer, instead of loving Hosea, left him to prostitute herself again with other men and became pregnant by one of them (2:4-5). Again God tells Hosea to go, find his wife, bring her home and renew his marriage covenant with her. Hosea writes,
Hosea 3:2-52 So I bought her for fifteen shekels of silver and a homer and a lethech of barley.3 And I said to her, "You must dwell as mine for many days. You shall not play the whore, or belong to another man; so will I also be to you."4 For the children of Israel shall dwell many days without king or prince, without sacrifice or pillar, without ephod or household gods.5 Afterward the children of Israel shall return and seek the LORD their God, and David their king,[referring to Christ] and they shall come in fear to the LORD and to his goodness in the latter days.
As we turn in coming weeks to Romans 11, we'll see that, as Hosea reminds us, God has future grace yet in store for Israel. But I want each person here this morning to know that the grace of God to Israel is a message of grace for you and me. God says, "You must dwell as mine... You shall not play the whore... so will I also be [with] you." As long as I, or any other preacher, have breath to preach the Gospel, as long as you have ears to hear, it is not too late to repent and put your trust in Jesus Christ. Paul quoted Isaiah's prophecy about Israel and so I'm quoting it for you: "All day long [He is holding] out [His] hands to [you]." Again from Paul, in Romans 2, "Or do you presume on the riches of his kindness and forbearance and patience, not knowing that God's kindness is meant to lead you to repentance?"
As the worship team comes, I'd like you to stand and bow your heads and pray as I read these words from Jesus' own mouth in the Gospel of John, chapter 3, verses 17, 18 and 36. And if you would like someone to help you pray right now to confess your sin to God, or to receive Jesus Christ as your God and Saviour, just come to the front while we sing and one of the deacons will come and talk with you.
John 3:17-1817 For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.18 Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe is condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of the only Son of God.
John 3:3636 Whoever believes in the Son has eternal life; whoever does not obey the Son shall not see life, but the wrath of God remains on him.
