Daily Manna, Year Two · Day 232 · August 20
How Shall They Hear
“So then faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by the word of God.”
It gets printed on bookmarks and read as a guarantee that faith arrives while you read your Bible, and the people it damages most are the ones who took it seriously. So they read, for years. Nothing arrived, and now there is a verse to be failing at as well.
Follow the chain Paul is building, backwards, which is the direction he writes it in. How then shall they call on him in whom they have not believed? and how shall they believe in him of whom they have not heard? and how shall they hear without a preacher? And how shall they preach, except they be sent? Five links, ending at somebody being sent, then a quotation about feet: How beautiful are the feet of them that preach the gospel of peace. Verse seventeen concludes that argument, and the argument is about a message travelling out of people's mouths. Many manuscripts read the word of Christ here rather than the word of God, and either way the subject is the preaching.
One more link makes it plain. Verse sixteen: But they have not all obeyed the gospel. For Esaias saith, Lord, who hath believed our report? Report and hearing are one word in the Greek, and Paul is turning it over. Who has believed the hearing, and faith comes by the hearing. He is working at why some believed and some did not, in a chapter carrying the grief of his own nation. So what the verse gives you is smaller than the bookmark and it points backwards. Faith reached you through somebody's voice: a mother, a poor preacher in a cold hall, a friend who would not let the subject drop.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year one reading for day 232 is Not by Might (Zechariah 4:6).