But I say, Have they not heard? Yes verily, their sound went into all the earth, and their words unto the ends of the world.
But I say, Have they not heard? ('Did they not hear?') - Can Israel, through any region of his dispersion, plead ignorance of these glad tidings, or of God's intention that they should be everywhere proclaimed?
Yes verily, х menounge (G3304)] - see the note at Romans 9:20 - `Nay verily,'
Their sound went into all the earth, and their words unto the ends of the world. These beautiful words are from Psalms 19:4. Whether the apostle quoted them as in their primary intention applicable to his subject (as Olshausen, Alford, etc.), or only 'used Scriptural language (as Hodge says) to express his own ideas, as is done involuntarily almost by every preacher in every sermon' (so Calvin and many critics), expositors are not agreed. But though the latter may seem the more natural-since 'the rising of the Sun of righteousness upon the world' (Malachi 4:2), 'the day-spring from on high visiting us, giving light to them that sat in darkness, and guiding our feet into the way of peace' (Luke 1:78-79), must have been familiar and delightful to the apostle's ear-we cannot doubt that the irradiation of the world with the beams of a better sun, by the universal diffusion of the Gospel of Christ, must have been a mode of speaking quite natural, and to him scarcely figurative; not to say that in that very Psalm (as Alford and others justly observe) the glory of God in His Word is represented as transcending and eclipsing that of His works in nature, of which this verse more immediately speaks.