The Christian Life

Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword?  As it is written, For thy sake we are killed all the day long; we are accounted as sheep for the slaughter.  Nay, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him that loved us.  For I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, Nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.

–        Romans 8:35-39

As I read this passage recently, I remembered the end of the movie, Peter & Paul.  Anthony Hopkins plays Paul.  There is a scene of Peter being crucified upside down, while a voice reads these final verses of Romans 8. 

And that is exactly correct.  The whole point of Romans 8 is that for the children of God trials are inevitable, but they cannot separate us from the love of God.

In Romans 8, Paul is teaching us about assurance.  This is not some abstract theological exposition, as most people seem to believe, but rather a very practical doctrine.  Paul wants to build in us an assurance of God’s love that will last under affliction.

He had been teaching us that

*affliction is inevitable for God’s people.  Why? 

*because God has made us his children, and

*because we are his children he has prepared an inheritance for us,

*but we can only enter it by the same way as Christ Jesus,

*who has gone before us and secured the inheritance for us,

*namely, by the cross.

Now we come to the close of the chapter, the icing on the cake.  Paul has shown us that we are the children of God by adoption, that God gives us his Spirit to teach us that we are his children and to bear witness to our adoption in our hearts, that he gave us his only begotten Son as the proof and pledge of his fatherly love.  Now he shows us how far that love extends, and how long it lasts.  By the strength of that love he shows the weakness, in fact, the powerlessness, of our afflictions and every enemy that threatens to separate us from God.

Verse 35, “Who shall separate us from the love of God?”  Notice that he does not say “what.”  It seems that he ought to say “what” in view of what follows.  Remember, earlier in the chapter he personified all creation in its longing to see the final redemption of God’s children.  All things on our side cry out and groan waiting to see that redemption. Now he personifies all things that oppose us, as if to say, no matter how many enemies we have against us, for every one God will raise up a champion for us.

Paul now extends our assurance (the conviction of our safety) to all lower things.  Why does he keep hammering on this point?  Because whoever is persuaded of God’s kindness and love toward him can stand firm in the face of the heaviest afflictions.  Paul is inoculating us against despair.

How do afflictions harass us?  We interpret them wrongly.  We take them for tokens of God’s wrath, rather than tokens of his fatherly favour in chastising us.  We think God has forsaken us.  We think that the trials will never end.  We neglect to lift up our eyes and recall that after all this, we have everlasting life with God in heaven.

Once our minds are purged of these mistakes, we become calm.  We rest quiet.  But how will we purge them?  By these words:  “what shall separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord?”  They promise that we can believe that God, who once embraced us in love, will never let us go.  He will never stop caring for us.

Paul is not simply saying that nothing can tear God away from his love for us.  He means more than that.  The knowledge and sense of the love that God testifies to us lives so vigorously in our hearts, that it always shines in the darkness of our afflictions to keep us from despair. Through every obstacle our faith rises to heaven on God’s promise.

True, adversities are in themselves tokens of God’s wrath.  Yet when Christ goes before them with pardon and reconciliation for us, that changes everything.  Then we ought to be assured that although God chastises us, still he never forgets mercy.  True, the chastisements remind us of what we deserve, but just as strongly they also testify that he intends our salvation because he leads us to repentance.  This is exactly the same point the Apostle makes in Hebrews 12:3-8:

For consider [Jesus]  that endured such contradiction of sinners against himself, lest ye be wearied and faint in your minds.  4 ¶ Ye have not yet resisted unto blood, striving against sin.  5  And ye have forgotten the exhortation which speaketh unto you as unto children, My son, despise not thou the chastening of the Lord, nor faint when thou art rebuked of him:  6  For whom the Lord loveth he chasteneth, and scourgeth every son whom he receiveth.  7  If ye endure chastening, God dealeth with you as with sons; for what son is he whom the father chasteneth not?  8  But if ye be without chastisement, whereof all are partakers, then are ye bastards, and not sons

Paul calls this love “the love of Christ.”  Why does he qualify it that way?  Because in Christ God has opened up and fully revealed his compassion to us.  Because outside of Christ there is no way to look for the love of God.  And when we do look at the brightness of Christ’s’ favour, we see the peaceful face of our Father.  So Paul tells us, no matter what the adversity, do not let your confidence in this be shaken:  when God favours us, nothing can harm us.

In verse 35 Paul lists tribulation, distress, persecution, famine, nakedness, peril, and sword.  What are all these?  They are all material enemies and adversities.  A little farther down he will get to the spiritual enemies.

*Tribulation is every kind of evil that might befall us.

*Distress is that inward feeling when tribulation backs us to the wall so that we have no idea which way to turn, like Abraham so fearful that he was ready to give his wife over to prostitution, or Lot when he offered to give his daughters to save two strangers.

*Persecution is the tyrannical violence with which the ungodly undeservedly harass the children of God.

Then in verse 36 Paul ups the ante to our ultimate fear:  death itself.  He maintains that not even death is a reason to fall away from your assurance in God.  Rather, God’s children have almost always had death dangling daily before their eyes.  Why is that?  Because their enemies hate God and true religion, so they hate them, and threaten them constantly with death and destruction.

So Paul argues by quoting Psalm 41, “Look!  There is nothing new about your persecution.  It’s not new that God allows his saints to be exposed undeservedly to the cruelty of the ungodly, but he only does this for their  good.  With suffering for righteousness’ sake comes the blessing of God.” 

This is not something Paul invented.  Christ himself tells us the same thing in Matthew 5:10-12.  “Blessed are they which are persecuted for righteousness’ sake: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.   Blessed are ye, when men shall revile you, and persecute you, and shall say all manner of evil against you falsely, for my sake.   Rejoice, and be exceeding glad: for great is your reward in heaven: for so persecuted they the prophets which were before you.”

Verse 37, “We are more than conquerors”  No matter how low adversities may bring us, even unto death itself, as the children of God we always struggle and emerge.  God always gives us the victory.

How is that?  Though our own efforts?  No, “through him who loved us.”  God, because he loves us, takes us by the hand and leads us through every trial.  But note carefully how he does that:  through the love of Christ who has loved us and does love us and will love us.

Verses 38-39.  Now Paul can no longer contain himself and bursts out into the most extreme expressions as he describes how impossible it is to separate us from God’s love.  Whatever there may be in this life that seems capable of tearing us away from God, it will come to nothing.  Even the angels themselves can’t do it, for that is what he means by “principalities and powers,” ranks of angels. Not even the angels, nor whatever powers there may be, can tear us away from God.” Paul means to include every power unknown and even unimaginable to us.

No length of time can separate us from God, nor will the passage of time present any new power able to separate us from God.  So he teaches us that we should not anticipate or dread any new sorrows that might succeed in defeating us where the present powers have not.

NO!  Paul says, none of these evils, no matter how long they continue, can wipe out our assurance of God’s love.  On the contrary, we ought to feel and remain confident that he who has begun a good work in us will continue it until the day of the Lord Jesus.

At the very end, Paul points us to the pledge and proof of God’s love.  He points to Christ:  “There!  There is the bond!  There is the proof!  There is the downpayment.  There is the Son, in whom the Father is well pleased.”  So if we are united to God through Christ, then we can rest assured of God’s unchangeable and unfailing kindness toward us.  “The fountain of love,” he says, “begins in the Father, and flows to you through Christ.”

-- F. Sanders