Yesterday we discussed the first half of Romans 10, looking at the clear message of how a person is saved...by faith in the message of Jesus; His life, death, and resurrection.  Paul was very clear on that.  He has built up to this point in the first 9 chapters, now he’s given this message clearly, and now he is about to start moving towards some of the more practical applications of God’s message through Jesus - we have just a little more to go before there yet, though.

Today, we are tackling the second half of Romans 10, and with it a question that generally plagues believers at some point in their journey.  That is this question: “If the gospel, the good news of Jesus, is the message that must be heard and received in order to be accepted as God’s child, and adopted into God’s kingdom...what about all of those people who never get to hear this message?”

So, let’s start with the ‘fairness’ angle on this.  People will rightly say, “Well, that isn’t fair...how could God not give everyone an equal chance to be saved?”  And that’s a reasonable position to take, I suppose.  And I don’t have a great response for that.  How about this, if I said , “Well, if your house were burning down and you have 3 kids and your spouse inside the house, and you were going to run in and grab the first one and then go back for a second, etc...who would you grab first?  And, once you got that person out safely, if you turned around to go back for the next one and the house collapsed and exploded, would you be an unfair person for choosing one person over another?”...I think that’s a good line of thought.  However, that gives rise to another question, which is a good one too, “Why couldn’t God just save everyone?”.  To that question, at least we are more into the spiritual realm and I think a satisfactory answer is “He can, and He could have, but for whatever reason, He didn’t.”  And then we circle back to “Well, how could a good God do that?”.  The point I am making is this - we don’t know.  Remember, we can tell a lot about a painter by looking at the painting, but we can’t know everything about Him; and we certainly lack a lot of information about God.  He is what I CAN say though, I would guess that these passages aren’t meant to answer that question, but rather, they are meant to motivate us.  IF this is the only way everyone would be saved...by the sharing of the gospel, shouldn’t that motivate us to get our butts in gear?  Shouldn’t get that get our minds spinning and get us strategizing on how to display the gospel message to our children in a way that would cause it to be attractive to them, and relatable, and understandable?

There ARE parts of the Bible where God alludes to the fact that, perhaps, there is a sort of universalism in the message of Jesus in one way or another, you can look at Psalm 19:4 and Colossians 1:5-6 and in v23 as well...but there is much less clarity about this than would be needed to truly satisfy this question.