📜WEB · Romans 10:16
What does Romans 10:16 mean?
"But they didn’t all listen to the glad news. For Isaiah says, “Lord, who has believed our report?”"
— Romans 10:16 (World English Bible)
Surrounding context
For, “Whoever will call on the name of the Lord will be saved.”
How then will they call on him in whom they have not believed? How will they believe in him whom they have not heard? How will they hear without a preacher?
And how will they preach unless they are sent? As it is written: “How beautiful are the feet of those who preach the Good News of peace, who bring glad tidings of good things!”
But they didn’t all listen to the glad news. For Isaiah says, “Lord, who has believed our report?”
So faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the word of God.
But I say, didn’t they hear? Yes, most certainly, “Their sound went out into all the earth, their words to the ends of the world.”
But I ask, didn’t Israel know? First Moses says, “I will provoke you to jealousy with that which is no nation, with a nation void of understanding I will make you angry.”
Explanation
Romans 10:16 addresses a painful reality Paul is wrestling with in this section of his letter: not everyone who hears the gospel responds to it with faith. The "glad news" refers to the gospel message about Jesus Christ, and Paul acknowledges plainly that even though this good news has gone out, many have not obeyed or embraced it. He then quotes Isaiah 53:1, where the prophet himself lamented that his message about the suffering servant was met with disbelief by his own audience centuries earlier.
To understand this verse, it helps to see where it sits in Paul's argument. Paul, writing to the church in Rome around the mid-first century, has just spent much of chapter 10 explaining that salvation comes through faith in Christ, and that this faith comes by hearing the word about Christ (v. 17). He is grappling with the fact that Israel, despite having access to the message and the Scriptures, largely did not believe. Rather than seeing this as a failure of the gospel or evidence that God's promises had failed, Paul points back to Isaiah to show that this pattern of unbelief was already foreseen and described in Israel's own Scriptures. The rejection Paul witnessed in his own day was not a new problem but one with deep roots in Israel's history of resisting prophetic messengers.
Theologically, this verse makes an important point about the nature of faith and the gospel. First, it clarifies that "obeying" the gospel is essentially synonymous with believing it — the response God calls for is faith, and refusing to believe is a form of disobedience
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