Inseparable

Romans 8:31-39

Welcome! We are at about the halfway point in the book of Romans, and before I get into today’s passage, I want to go back to some of the most encouraging verses we have seen so far in Romans. Now I believe most of you already know these verses – maybe not by chapter and verse, but if I start the verses, I believe you will be able to finish them (or at least come close). So I am going to present you with the first half of the verses, and then encourage you to complete them, one phrase at a time.

For I am not ashamed of the gospel, because it is the power of God that brings salvation to… everyone who believes: first to the Jew, then to the Gentile. – Romans 1:16

Do we all understand what this means? Are there any exceptions? Are there any people who believe that God does not bring salvation to? No!

For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and all are justified freely by… His grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus. – Romans 3:23-24

Are there any who have not sinned and fallen short of the glory of God? No. Are there any sinners who are not justified by His grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus? No. Are there any sinners for whom this justification is not free? Maybe they need to give some money to the church first? Or recite a phrase over and over a certain number of times? No.

However, to the one who does not work but trusts God who justifies the ungodly, their faith is credited as… righteousness. – Romans 4:5

Are there any people who trust God whose faith in Him is not credited as righteousness, that is, for whom God does not see the person exactly as if they actually had never sinned even once?  No.

But God demonstrates His own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, … Christ died for us. – Romans 5:8

Are there any people who need to get their act together and stop sinning before they come to Christ in faith? No.

Let’s consider the next two verses together.

For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is … eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord. – Romans 6:23

Who will rescue me from this body that is subject to death? Thanks be to God, who … delivers me through Jesus Christ our Lord! – Romans 7:24b-25

Are there any people, maybe those who sinned excessively, who will not be granted life forever with Christ if they put their faith in Him; maybe they only get a few thousand years instead? Or maybe they will be stuck in their old bodies subject to decay, but the decay is just slowed down? No and no.

Therefore, there is now no … condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus… – Romans 8:1

Are there some things a believer can do that could cause God to condemn them? Maybe not a lot of condemnation, but just a little? No.

The Spirit you received does not make you slaves, so that you live in fear again; rather, the Spirit you received brought about your … adoption to sonship. – Romans 8:15

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Are there some believers who didn’t get adopted, maybe because they were less desirable than others due to their sin? No.

These verses are tremendously encouraging. And none of them depend on us being good enough, or doing enough, or anything like this. They are based on what God does when we come to faith in Him.

With this encouragement, let’s go into today’s passage, which asks questions similar to mine, questions for which the answer is, again, and again, “No” or “nobody” or “never”.

What, then, shall we say in response to these things? If God is for us, who can be against us? He who did not spare His own Son, but gave Him up for us all—how will He not also, along with Him, graciously give us all things? Who will bring any charge against those whom God has chosen? It is God who justifies. Who then is the one who condemns? No one. Christ Jesus who died—more than that, who was raised to life—is at the right hand of God and is also interceding for us. – Romans 8:31-34

What shall we say to these things? By asking the question, Paul is implying that people might still object to all this good news. If you have been a believer a long time, you have heard these truths over and over for so long that you now take them without question. But to many of Paul’s readers or listeners, this was new. If you share the gospel with people, these truths will be new to them, and many people, even if they want to believe them, find them hard to accept. For someone who has their entire life assumed that if they were good “enough” they could go to heaven to hear that that’s not how it works at all – well, it is quite a radical change for someone to now agree that if it were based on people’s works nobody could get in, and if people put their trust in Christ, then they will get all these blessings even if they were the worst sinner in history.

So what kinds of objections might be made? One objection is that a person might be able to cause someone to lose these blessings, in effect, lose their salvation, and another is that some kind of event or situation could cause it. As we shall see, verses 31 to 34 are really addressing the person argument, and the following verses address the situation argument.

Let’s look at this person argument. The first category would be maybe some regular human person who could cause us to come back under condemnation. In the early church there were people we now call Judaizers who went in among the Christians and told them that unless they were circumcised and practiced the Mosaic ceremonies and festivals, they couldn’t really be of the people of God, the people God accepts.

What about a Muslim woman in a village practicing an extreme form of Islam who secretly comes to faith, and then her husband finds out and tells her that she must obey him and cannot be a Christian? Or bringing it more to home, what about a person in a marriage who comes to faith and whose spouse is living a wild life and who demands the spouse no longer go to church but instead participate in their sinful living?

Basically, in each case we are talking about a bullying kind of situation. This reminds me of fourth grade, when I made a friend named Carl Green. Now if you think I am short now, back then I was really short. In fact, in class pictures, they made us line up and I was the second shortest person in the room. There was one girl (always the same girl) who was shorter than me, but that was it. I don’t remember being particularly upset about this – I think I would have been if I was the absolute shortest – but the result was that I got picked on a lot. This problem became much worse in fourth grade, as this was a new school containing fourth through sixth graders. Now I was essentially the second shortest person in the whole school.

Now Carl Green was a huge guy. He was also a fourth grader, like me, but he was taller and more muscular than almost all the sixth graders. He wasn’t the brightest guy, and now I wonder if maybe he hadn’t been held back once or twice, but in any case, he was huge.

The details of what I am about to share are fuzzy now, but what I think happened is that Carl Green was accused of stealing things from one or more classrooms while we had recess. I don’t remember how I learned about this exactly, but I and several friends heard about this and knew he couldn’t be guilty, because every day he would be at a corner of the playground keeping to himself – we saw him there. Someone said that one of us should go tell the principal that he had to be innocent, but none of my friends wanted to do it. I did do it, and the principal must have believed me and also told him that I spoke up for him, because he later came to me and said thanks. He was not a talkative guy, far from it, but he also asked me to help him some with his homework, and I did so. His being such a huge guy, I’m not entirely sure I felt like I had a choice, but after a few times of this he told me that if anyone ever gave me any trouble, to let him know and he would take care of it.

Now, I was as lost as lost could be, but if the fourth-grade me had heard this verse, he would have applied it to his situation. What I felt was “if Carl Green is for me, who can be against me?” I continued to have problems with bullying, and at some point after this I told the person that if he didn’t stop, I’d send my pal, Carl Green, after him. He just laughed, saying something like, “Yeah, right.” So I told Carl, and he suggested we walk together talking like we were old friends in front of the bully, and that I could introduce the two of them. This is what I did, and, boy, did it work! The guy was terrified, and not only that, he told the whole school that anyone who messed with me would have to mess with him, and I had almost no bullying problems after that.

How much more in our case – if God is for us, who can be against us? We can ignore what other people tell us about whether we are saved Christians or not. What other people say is meaningless; these verses trump what any bully might say. That goes for anyone who might try to say you are self-deluded, or naïve, including friends and family, religious cult members, university professors, or anything you read on the internet.

Not that the “if” here is used in a legal sense – as Paul often does in Romans. To our ears, a better choice might be “since”. Since God is for us, who can be against us? Nobody. No human person, by what they say or what they do can take from us the powerful truths that God says about us as born-again believers.

Well, somebody might then say, “Well, what about God?” He’s entirely different. Couldn’t God take away your salvation if He wanted to? Paul addresses this question next when he writes, “He who did not spare His own Son, but gave Him up for us all—how will He not also, along with Him, graciously give us all things?” What is the argument here? It is that God won’t do that. It makes no sense for Him to do so! He gave up His own son, whom He loved, of His own free will, so that we could be in relationship with Him. Why would He possibly then undo that? It would mean He sacrificed His son for nothing! He is going to do whatever it takes to keep us “in the palm of His hand,” since He has already given everything to get us there in the first place. He did not spare, He did not hold back His son. In fact, Isaiah 53:10 says it was the Lord’s will to crush Him and cause Him to suffer. Recall how Jesus cried out, “My God, why have You abandoned Me?” Why? For us. So of course He won’t undo what He has done.

By the way, this is where my Carl Green analogy falls short. Carl Green didn’t really sacrifice anything for me, except maybe being willing to be seen with me. But I had no confidence that Carl would continue to be nice to me. But he was a nice guy, and he never undid my “salvation.”

Incidentally, the Greek verb translated as “graciously give” in “how will He not also, along with Him, graciously give us all things” is, as often as not, translated as forgive. If you think about what forgiving is really all about, it is just like the word says – it is a type of giving, a giving before you get revenge, or justice, or repayment. So the clear implication in this verse is that even if we blow it and sin, “how will He not also graciously forgive us all things?”

 

So no human people can take away our salvation, and God won’t take away our salvation. Any other person to worry about?

Why, yes, now that you mention it, there is Satan and the demons (fallen angels) that follow him. What about them? I believe Paul is addressing this when next he writes, “Who will bring any charge against those whom God has chosen? It is God who justifies. Who then is the one who condemns? No one.” Satan’s name literally means the accuser. We see the pattern in Job. Revelations 12:10 describes him as accusing believers before God day and night. What is going on? Well, even though we may be growing in faith and love and obedience to Christ, we still continue to sin, and Satan can make note of this and lay the charges against us to God just like a prosecuting attorney. In fact, the Greek word used for “bring any charge” is a legal term that means to do exactly this.

How does Paul answer this? With a legal argument. How can God simultaneously justify us and condemn us? If, because of Christ, He has declared us righteous with the righteousness of Christ, how can He then entertain charges against us that contradict His declaration? He can’t. Our salvation isn’t based on our personal righteousness or our sin. It is based on Christ. So our personal righteousness or sin is irrelevant to our standing before God, if we have put our faith in Christ. Your own righteousness didn’t get you into good standing with God in the first place, and it won’t keep it either. What a relief!

Is there anyone else? Well, maybe Christ? I know, we have already discussed God, and Christ is God, but we discussed God from the point of view of the Person of God the Father. What about the Person of God the Son?

The final part of these verses seems to speak to this: “Christ Jesus who died—more than that, who was raised to life—is at the right hand of God and is also interceding for us.” Does that sound like someone who is going to suddenly reverse course and start condemning us? There are four statements about Jesus in this verse. First, He died, on the cross, taking our punishment. To start condemning us would mean He would undo the whole purpose of the cross. Second, He was raised. The resurrection proved that God was satisfied, that Jesus’ death did in fact pay for our sin. So for Jesus to turn around and condemn us would put Him at odds with God the Father, an unthinkable situation. Third, He is at the right hand of God. God exalted Him to the highest place because of what He did. Would Jesus then reject this honor so as to condemn us? Would God rescind the honor? It makes no sense. And finally, Jesus is actively interceding for us. We mentioned Isaiah 53 earlier; the end of Isaiah 53:12 says that “He bore the sin of many, and made intercession for the transgressors.” Interceding also has legal connotations. The picture is that as an accuser stands before God laying out our “crimes,” the intercessor steps in over and over and says, “This charge can not be applied. In the eyes of the court, this person has the righteousness of Christ.”

Interceding also includes the idea that Jesus is praying for us. I think of His prayer in John 17:

My prayer is not that You take them out of the world but that You protect them from the evil one. They are not of the world, even as I am not of it. Sanctify them by the truth; Your word is truth.  As You sent Me into the world, I have sent them into the world. For them I sanctify Myself, that they too may be truly sanctified. – John 17:15-19

Father, I want those You have given Me to be with Me where I am, and to see My glory, the glory You have given Me because You loved Me before the creation of the world. – John 17:24

Does this sound like the action of someone who would turn on us? Absolutely not. I feel terrible even asking the question! So indeed, there is nobody who can or would cause us to lose what Christ has given us, whether human, angelic/demonic, or divine.

Let’s continue on in Romans 8:

Who [What] shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall trouble or hardship or persecution or famine or nakedness or danger or sword? As it is written: “For your sake we face death all day long; we are considered as sheep to be slaughtered.” No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through Him who loved us. – Romans 8:35-37

The “what” is my own; the Greek word can be translated either way, and I personally think “what” makes more sense given the verses that follow. The previous verses looked at the question of persons that might cause us to lose what we have in Christ; these verses look at situations.

Can situations in which we absolutely blow it threaten our standing before God? One of the movies we have shown this summer shows people washing one another’s feet in the style of what Jesus did for the disciples shortly before His death. This is described in John 13. John 13:1 says that “having loved His own who were in the world, He [Jesus] loved them to the end.”

It was a rather ignominious end! If you put the gospels together you see that Jesus told them that He was about to be crucified. They, however, were more interested (not for the first time) in who would sit at Jesus’ right hand. This is behavior in shockingly bad taste, right up there with the parable of the prodigal son in which the son tells his still-alive father that he would like his share of the inheritance immediately – such a thing was never done, and expressed a desire that his father would hurry up and die already!

Back to the disciples – it gets worse. They are reclining around a low table, and they have not washed their feet first. People wore sandals, and the roads were dusty and smelled like, well, the droppings of the many animals that were around. As a result, people’s feet smelled the same. Now, in a fancier dwelling, there would be a servant who would wash people’s feet as they came in. This was a basic service – Jesus once pointed out how offensive it was that nobody washed His feet when we went to a shin-dig of some well-to-do Jews. Now the disciples had rented a small upper room that did not come with a servant. Foot washing was considered an extremely lowly and degrading job, but when no servant was available, it fell on the lowest person there to do the job. Instead of arguing about who would sit at Jesus’ left and right, they should have been arguing about who had the honor of washing Jesus’ feet. But what happened? Nobody washed feet at all. I can imagine the argument beforehand – you do it, you’re the youngest. I won’t! So it simply wasn’t done, not for Jesus, not for the other disciples, not for anyone. And here they are all around this low table reclining with stinky feet pointing at each other. And it is in this context that Jesus took off his outer clothes and proceeded to wash the feet of his deeply offensive disciples. He loved them to the end! Do you think any situation could separate us from the love of Christ?

But what does Paul mean by “trouble or hardship or persecution or famine or nakedness or danger or sword?” How could these possibly separate us from God? I think there are two ways to view this. The first has to do with honor and shame. Each of these things, when they happened to someone, brought shame on the person experiencing them. Nobody wanted to associate with someone undergoing these things because the association would lower their own honor status to that of the person undergoing the trial. People also tended to assume that such trials were a result of a person’s sin. Job’s friends, to their credit, did not abandon Job, but they were guilty of this second thing. Paul’s verse is asking for us, “If I go through terrible stuff that destroys my honor, will God still stand by me? Or will He leave me as those around me do?” The answer is absolutely not! Based on what we have already talked about, God would never abandon us. He loves us, as the stinky feet situation so clearly reminds us. He will love us to the end.

The second view of this passage, and the one that most commentators that I looked at describe, is whether these difficult situations could somehow force us to reject God, force us out of the palm of His hand. The Greek word for “trouble” literally means outward pressure and could be anything from actions such as torture to threats against you or those you love. The Greek word for “hardship” has more to do with inward difficulty and could include having a breakdown or some other internal crisis. The word origin has to do with being herded into a narrow place that prevents you from escaping. “Persecution” is pretty clear; it refers to experiencing difficulties of all kinds from others specifically because of your faith. “Famine” perhaps expresses the fear that if you are starving, you will forsake God either out of spite or for the sake of some food. “Nakedness” refers to taking similar actions because you are so poor you cannot properly clothe yourself. “Danger” refers to anything that threatens your safety, and because of the state you are in, you give up on God. “Sword” refers to execution. The question is, could any of these situations cause the generic me to give up my faith, and in so doing, lose the relationship I have with God through faith in Christ?

Paul’s answer is interesting. He says, yet again, “no” because we are “more than conquerors,” literally super-conquerors in Christ. Does this mean that, as believers, we therefore won’t experience any of these hardships? Absolutely not. Jesus Himself warned us, “In this world  you will have trouble” – that’s almost a promise – but He also followed it up with “but take heart [or have courage] – I have overcome the world.”

So what does it mean to be a super-conqueror in Christ? Does it mean we will defeat our persecutors, find food and clothing, and so on? No, there is no promise of this. And the history of the church tells the opposite story. Many have been martyred for their faith in Christ, and many throughout the world face persecution today.

Does it mean that those who are tortured will never crack and choose in the moment to reject Christ to avoid further pain? Many in this situation have in fact found superhuman strength in Christ to endure unto death while keeping their “good confession of faith” – to read of many examples I recommend Foxe’s Book of Martyrs (although it is a very hard read and not for the young) – but many others have in fact broken down and “cracked.” But to crack in the moment is not to truly renounce Christ for eternity. Even the disciples fled. Even Peter denied Christ at the critical moment. But they were restored by Christ. And we can have faith that even if we crack under the pressure of a moment, that Christ will restore us as well.

In 2013, Muslim extremists took control of a mall in Nairobi and said that all Moslems could leave. One Christian person covered up his forename (which was clearly Christian, not Moslem) as he went past their checkpoint and escaped. Was he wrong to do this?

Another example is a Coptic Christian who, in order to flee from Libya, grew a beard, got and carried with him a prayer rug, and put a cast on his perfectly healthy arm to hide a Coptic tattoo. Is this OK?

The early church had to deal with these questions on a grand scale. For example, in 250 AD, the Emperor Decius made a decree that everyone had to obtain a certificate saying that they had sacrificed to Caesar and the gods. To fail to do so meant arrest and likely death. Many Christians died, but many others actually made a sacrifice to obtain the certificate, and still others procured faked certificates. Which actions were appropriate? Which were inappropriate?

Another example is during the time of Augustine. The Emperor Diocletian tried to wipe out Christianity with a terrible persecution in 303-311 AD. Again, there were a wide variety of ways people responded – some choosing martyrdom while others made sacrifices or gave over their Christian writings. Others made fake Christian writings and handed them over. Again, do you want to say what actions were warranted and which were not? These are very difficult questions.

But the bottom line is that Paul, guided by the Holy Spirit, says that these trials cannot separate us from Christ. Even if we break, even if we make the wrong decisions, our faith can survive. Indeed, it will more than survive. We, because of Christ, are super-conquerors.

The truth is that these trials ultimately will actually strengthen our faith, not destroy it. We may have setbacks, just as Peter did when He denied knowing Christ, but God is the one who holds us and uses everything to mold us. He is the Potter; we are the clay.

Paul sums everything up with this famous passage:

For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord. – Romans 8:38-39

The title of this message is “Inseparable.” Do you believe Romans 8:38-39 as it applies to your life? Do you worry that cancer might destroy your faith? The loss of a loved one? Mental illness or degeneration? The zombie apocalypse? You may laugh, but “powers” refers to supernatural events, so maybe I am not far off.

Nothing is strong enough to destroy your faith, says God, and He should know. So even if you haven’t had your own Carl Green in your life, trust God. He’s got your back.