NOTES for Rom 10:14-15
It is impossible to believe anyone if no one tells you about that person. So it is with Christ: you will not believe Him or trust Him until you get to know Him. The main meaning of Christian witness is precisely to give everyone the opportunity to get to know Him.
Of course, acquaintance in itself does not yet mean that relationships of trust will arise. In fact, acquaintance by itself does not yet oblige anyone to any relationship: we have to become acquainted with all sorts of people. Not all of them later become our friends. But much depends on what the acquaintance was like. And what the communication was like. One can communicate in different ways: seriously or superficially. And if a person does not want real, deep relationships, they will not exist even after a very long acquaintance.
One can know a person for years and still not know him at all. It is the same with God: one can know Him, and not know Him. Trust comes from what was heard, and hearing from the word of Christ. Or from the word about Christ; the expression used by the apostle can be understood this way as well. One is not very far from the other. Behind the word about Christ, if it is heard and if the one who speaks it is trusted, the word of Christ Himself will then certainly begin to sound. If, of course, it is heard. And here problems arise.
It happens that a person does not want to hear. Sometimes it is simply easier to pretend one did not hear. This kind of selective deafness is at times very useful to deceitful people. But here it is not always conscious deceit. Sometimes a person unconsciously turns on a mechanism of this kind of psychic filtering. For example, when he feels that if he takes what he has heard seriously, life will have to change, and change radically. He does not want to change, and it is frightening.
Then the defense mechanisms switch on, those very filters about which the person does not think and perhaps does not even know precisely because they work automatically. But the person himself initially switches on this automatic operation, by his fear or his laziness. Therefore Paul speaks here of human responsibility: in the end it is the person's own position that determines whether mechanisms will begin to work in his soul that reliably separate their owner from God, from Christ, and from the Kingdom, or not.