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 entrust yourself to Him until you become acquainted with Him. The main meaning of Christian witness is precisely to give everyone the opportunity to become acquainted with Him. Of course, acquaintance by itself does not mean that a relationship of trust will arise. In fact, acquaintance by itself does not obligate us to any relationship at all: how many people do we have to meet? Not all of them become our friends afterward. 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 that person at all. It is the same with God: one can know Him, and not know Him. Trust is born from what is heard, and hearing from the word of Christ, or from the word about Christ; the expression used by the apostle can be understood both ways. In any case, one is not so far from the other. For behind the word about Christ, if it is heard and if one trusts the one who speaks it, the word of Christ Himself will then surely begin to sound, provided, of course, that the person is ready to hear.

And here problems sometimes arise. It happens that a person does not want to hear, because sometimes it is simply easier to pretend that nothing has been heard. Such a peculiar selective deafness is at times very useful to deceitful people. But conscious deceit is not always hidden here: sometimes a person unconsciously turns on this mechanism of a kind of mental filtering. For example, when he senses that if he takes what he has heard seriously, his life will have to change, and change radically. And he does not want to change, and is afraid. Then the protective mechanisms turn on, the very filters about which a person does not think and which he may not even know about precisely because they work automatically. Yet this automatic system is initially turned on by the person himself, by his fear or his laziness. Therefore Paul speaks in this case about human responsibility, for in the end it is precisely a person's position that determines whether mechanisms will start working in his soul that reliably separate their owner from God, from Christ, and from the Kingdom, or whether they will not.