“But I ask, ‘Did they not hear?’ Yes, they did: ‘Their voice has gone out to the whole earth, and their words to the ends of the world.’ But I ask, ‘Did Israel not understand?’ First, Moses said, ‘I will make you jealous of those who are not a nation; I will make you angry by a nation that lacks understanding.’ And Isaiah says boldly, ‘I was found by those who were not looking for me; I revealed myself to those who were not asking for me.’ But to Israel he says, ‘All day long I have held out my hands to a disobedient and defiant people.’” (CSB – Read the chapter)

For the last two chapters now, Paul has been talking about Israel and their rejection of the Gospel. He has struggled with it emotionally even as he understands it experientially. But even though he understood the fact of it, he nonetheless marvels at it with his audience. Here, at the end of chapter 10, Paul begins asking some more hard questions about Israel’s rejection, God’s plans in light of it, and what this all means for non-Jewish followers of Jesus. Let’s start digging into this with him.

How do we make sense out of people who don’t and won’t follow Jesus? That’s a question that faithful believers have wrestled with since the beginning. Once you have truly seen the world through the lens of Jesus, you can’t see it in any other way. Yes, it’s possible for reasonable people to understand the world differently. They’re wrong of course, and the only real question is whether their blindness to the truth is ignorant or willful, but that is a possibility. But once someone has seen and accepted in their heart of hearts what is true, they’re in, and it becomes difficult – sometimes frustratingly difficult – to understand how anyone else could not see it.

That’s the question Paul is wrestling with here when it comes to Israel. His first attempt at an explanation is gracious. Perhaps they simply didn’t know. As Paul quickly responds to his own question, though, ignorance is no excuse. Paul has already made that point back in chapter 1 of the letter. Here he doubles down on his point then with a reference to the Scriptures to show he wasn’t just blowing smoke at people. “Their voice has gone out to the whole earth, and their words to the ends of the world.”

This is a quote from Psalm 19 where David opens his hymn of praise with a bold declaration that all the world can know of God’s existence through a simple observation of the natural world. “The heavens declare the glory of God, and the expanse proclaims the work of his hands. Day after day they pour out speech; night after night they communicate knowledge. There is no speech; there are no words; their voice is not heard. Their message has gone out to the whole earth, and their words to the ends of the world.”

In other words and again, everybody can know who God is through an examination of the natural world. No, the natural world doesn’t speak with an audible voice like you and I do, but the message is clear nonetheless. And this is indeed the case. The more scientists learn about the world and especially about the origins of life and the complexity of the cell, the clearer it becomes that neither chance nor necessity are viable explanatory options.

Because the existence of life is an information problem, and because the only source of specified and complex information we know of over the full course of humanity’s uniform and repeated experience is a mind, the existence of some sort of a mind, a designing intelligence, is the best explanation for the existence of the information that allows for life in all of its forms. Scientists committed to a naturalistic worldview framework have been very creative in their attempts to find a workaround for that uncomfortable (for them) fact, but their efforts just keep failing. Many of them have a strong faith in naturalism, but it is becoming increasingly obvious that theirs is a misplaced faith.

I think Paul is pointing to more than merely the natural world’s speaking of God’s existence here. When it comes to the problem of the Jewish rejection of the Gospel, Paul has already made clear and the rest of the New Testament authors do as well in their works that God has long since made His plans to send a Messiah abundantly clear. Indeed, in addition to the clear evidence of the natural world for God’s existence, as we have talked about recently, Christianity is a missionary movement. There are thousands and thousands of believers around the world who have left their homes and their jobs and their families and everything that might make them secure in this life in order to go to foreign places and proclaim the Gospel to those who have never heard it.

So, no, ignorance is not a viable explanation here.

This leads Paul to consider a second option. “But I ask, ‘Did Israel not understand?'” Here, he doesn’t give us a straight answer. But what he does say is interesting, to say the least. He starts by quoting from Moses in Deuteronomy 32. Toward the end of his farewell address, Moses turned his attention to warning the people of the dangers of rejecting the law and trying to forge their own path. Speaking about Israel’s past rejection of the Lord, Moses said this on God’s behalf: “They have provoked my jealousy with what is not a god; they have enraged me with their worthless idols. So I will provoke their jealousy with what is not a people; I will enrage them with a foolish nation.”

The way Paul understands and applies what Moses said here is that if the people were going to turn from Him, God was going to take the favor He would otherwise have poured out on them, and pour it out on others who did not have their history with Him and their knowledge of Him and His ways. He would invite them into a relationship with them.

Paul then quotes from Isaiah to double down on this move on God’s part to include these folks who didn’t previously know Him in His works and plans. “And Isaiah says boldly, ‘I was found by those who were not looking for me; I revealed myself to those who were not asking for me.'” In other words, if Israel was going to reject God’s ways and plans, He wasn’t going to throw them away. He was going to offer them instead to others who would be interested in them. He was going to offer them to others who had nothing of His history with Israel.

As for Israel, He wasn’t going to quit trying, but they weren’t willing to accept. This comes once again from Isaiah. “But to Israel he says, ‘All day long I have held out my hands to a disobedient and defiant people.'”

I think what we are seeing here is that while Paul doesn’t answer his second question directly, he does point toward the answer fairly clearly. No, Israel didn’t not understand the Gospel or the plans of God. They understood perfectly well. They had all the time in the world to understand. The problem is that they rejected it. They wanted what they wanted more than they wanted what God wanted. And, they deluded themselves into thinking that wasn’t a problem. Or, worse yet, they deluded themselves into thinking that what they wanted was the same thing as what God wanted. They put God into a box of their own making , and insisted He play by their rules instead of the other way around.

I think all of this points us toward something worth considering when thinking about people who refuse to accept the Gospel today. While a genuine lack of understanding can certainly be a part of the problem, that is fairly easily overcome. The Gospel is not complex. It is so simple that a young child can grasp it sufficiently to be rightly declared a follower of Jesus. There is also depth sufficient for the most erudite scholar to spend a whole lifetime delving into it without coming anywhere near the bottom, but complexity is not the problem with the Gospel.

Secularists of varying stripes will sometimes gripe about a lack of evidence. That’s nothing more than an excuse, and a bad one at that. The problem is not evidence and understanding. The problem is one of will. Like Israel stuck in their own understanding of God, His ways and His plans, folks who reject the Gospel today are stuck on wanting what they want or confusing what they want with what God wants.

Now, given their circumstances and life experiences, their being stuck in a posture that has resulted in their rejecting the Gospel may be totally understandable. It could be that they had a bad experience with the church. They may have been hurt by someone claiming to be a follower of Jesus. Perhaps they endured a hopelessly legalistic church environment and grew to hate what they came to understand as the church for it. It could be a personal tragedy they couldn’t square with the goodness of God and never received help from a wise, compassionate believer to navigate personally and intellectually. There could be all sorts of things that explain their rejection. Whatever the precise reason for the thing, though, it all stems from the same basic place: will.

Problems of will aren’t ultimately overcome with evidence. Again, though, evidence isn’t the problem. Problems of will are ultimately overcome by relationship. The illusion of reason yields to the reality of relationship. To perhaps put that another way, love is the means by which a heart is softened and turned.

Apologetics matter because being able to give an answer for the reason for the hope we have is a biblical mandate for believers. We need to be able to explain why we believe what we believe in evidentiary terms. Fortunately, there’s a mountain of evidence available for us to use to do this. But evidence doesn’t create faith. Evidence bolsters and encourages it. Love is the fertile soil in which faith gets planted, takes root, and grows to produce a rich harvest of spiritual fruit. So, answer questions. Counter bad arguments. Wrestle with hard objections. But do all of that in the context of patiently loving people with the love of Jesus. That’s where the real power lies.