More Than Conquerors
W. Carl Ketcherside
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"What shall we then say to these things? If God be for us, who can be against us?" (Romans 8:31).
What is included in "these things?" Of one thing we can be certain, and that is it is of such a nature as to provide complete assurance for the believer that God will not fail him in time of need, and no foe will be powerful enough to overcome him who is shielded by divine love. The prophet Isaiah wrote, "No weapon that is formed against thee shall prosper, and every tongue that shall rise against thee in judgment thou shalt condemn. This is the heritage of the servants of the Lord, and their righteousness is of me, saith the Lord" (54:17).
Paul wrote, "Now thanks be unto God, which always causeth us to triumph in Christ" (2 Cor. 2:14), or as another rendering expresses it, "Wherever I go, thank God he makes my life a constant pageant of triumph in Christ" (Moffatt). "These things" which contribute to our strength and hope are those which have just been enunciated by the apostle in the three preceding verses. They begin with the tremendous declaration, "We know that to those who love God, everything fits into a pattern for good" (Phillips).
If everything fits into a pattern for good, then nothing that happens can work our ultimate defeat. Victory is a foregone conclusion for those who march to the clear sound of the glorious trumpet. So the conclusion based upon these things must be that if God is for us no one can really stand against us. Adam Clarke makes an appropriate comment at this juncture. "He who is infinitely wise has undertaken to direct us; he who is infinitely powerful has undertaken to protect us; he who is infinitely good has undertaken to save us. What cunning, strength or malice, can prevail against his wisdom, power and goodness?"
Isaiah records the challenge of God to those who would seek to thwart his purpose. "Who would set the briers and thorns against me in battle? I would go through them, I would burn them together" (27:4). In ancient times a hedge of thorns was considered to be an effective wall, and an impenetrable barrier. But God will not be hindered or frustrated by barriers thrown up by his enemies. All I need to do to overcome is to stay behind God and go through with him!
"He that spared not his own Son, but delivered him up for us all, how shall he not with him also freely give us all things?" (Romans 8:32).
The problem of doubt about future victory is settled for the believer from the moment in which he accepts intellectually, emotionally and unreservedly that God actually and purposely delivered up his own Son for us all. The force of the apostolic argument will be lost upon
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I reject as wholly unworthy of my time or thought the misled and misleading mouthings which seek to explain away the sacrifice of God's own Son, or to water down the fact that it was the working of the divine will. Agape is the love which knows no bounds. It is affirmed that "there is nothing love cannot face" (1 Cor. 13:7). It is that active and beneficent goodwill which stops at nothing to achieve the good of the beloved object.
And it was this love which caused God to give his only begotten Son. It is a dynamic so great, a motivation so powerful, that it holds back nothing in the pursuit of its goal. It "endures without limit" (1 Cor. 13:7), and will certainly "bring forth judgment unto victory." Those who do not grasp the intensity of agape can never understand how God could "spare not his own Son." Those who do grasp it can realize that what happened was inevitable, a corollary to the nature of such love.
He was "delivered up for us all." The expression "delivered up" involves more than the crucifixion. It conveys the thought that he was handed over to men who would mock and abuse him, and then kill him. Peter said, "Him being delivered in accordance with God's definite plan and with his previous knowledge, you with the help of heathen men, nailed him to a cross and put him to death" '(Acts 2:23).
This was done for all, regardless of ethnic origin, national identification, social standing or previous condition of servitude. Jesus was the free gift of God to rescue men from the bondage of sin. He is thus a veritable exemplification of divine grace, that undeserved kindness which assumes that all else which is essential to our wellbeing and ultimate glory will be forthcoming from God. The whole thing is very simple. If God did not forbear to give his own Son, surely he will not hesitate to bestow all else that is required to fulfill the divine purpose as relates to all of us.
"Who would dare to accuse us, whom God has chosen? It is God who acquits us?" (Romans 8:33).
This is legal language, the terminology of the courtroom. With such language the apostle was, by training, thoroughly familiar. If the judge of all the earth has acquitted us and pronounced us guiltless, if the Supreme Justice has actually chosen or adopted us, then who would have the audacity to appear and file an accusation against us?
I need not be at all concerned about what men may say or do. If I am in Christ, wholly trusting in his righteousness, I am impervious to their attack. Even if my motives are assailed, and my name maligned, I will be vindicated. God will have the last word. The divine purpose in my life will be victorious. What a thrill it is to know that only God can justify. For this reason only he can condemn. But he cannot condemn one whom he has justified, for justification is the antithesis of condemnation.
Justification is a judicial act. It takes place in heaven. It is a pronouncement of the divine mind. It cannot be earned, purchased, or procured by works. It is solely the gift of grace, and having been accorded, it is not subject to reversal by virtue of additional testimony from an outside party. Justification takes into account all of the factors, and the case will not be re-opened. In Christ I am free. I am safe. I am made to be guiltless by divine fiat.
"Who is he that condemneth? It is Christ that died, yea rather, that is risen again, who is even at the right hand of God, who also maketh intercession for us" (Romans 8:34).
The only one who could possibly pass
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(1) He died for us in order that we might believe in and accept him as the atonement for our sins. Thus he has said, "Verily, verily, I say unto you, He that heareth my word, and believeth on him that sent me, hath everlasting life, and shall not come into condemnation, but is passed from death unto life" (John 5:24).
(2) He is risen again, and the apostle declares in this very letter that the justification granted Abraham on the ground of his trust in God, is "for us also, unto whom it will be reckoned, if we believe on him that raised up Jesus our Lord from the dead, who was delivered up because of our offences, and was raised to life for our acquittal" (Romans 4:24, 25). The very purpose of the resurrection was for the justification of those who trust in the righteousness of Jesus.
(3) Jesus is at the right hand of God, a position of eminent majesty, power and authority. And he is there as the sovereign head of the whole ekklesia, the very body of the called out, the chosen ones. That body of the elect is "the completeness of Him who everywhere fills the universe with himself." Certainly Jesus will not condemn the very body of which he is the head, and if he does not there is no power in the universe which can do so. He is above all rule, authority, power and lordship (Eph. 1:21.-23).
(4) He also makes intercession for us. In verse 26, we learn that the Holy Spirit makes intercession for us, and in the passage we are considering it is affirmed that Jesus does also. The Spirit makes intercession from within us, while Jesus does so in heaven. Instead of condemning us, Jesus pleads our case, and assists us, presenting our interests and interceding in our behalf. "He is able to save absolutely all who approach unto God through him, because he always lives to intercede for them always" (Hebrews 7:25).
"Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword?" (8:35).
The first question can be taken in either of two ways. It may relate to our love for Christ, or to his love for us. I gather from the context that the former is the correct interpretation, and that the question deals with the power of the love we have for Jesus who has cleansed and justified us. My reason for believing this is that the things which are enumerated are those which might cause us to grow weary of serving the Lord, but I do not see how tribulation or persecution would cause Jesus to cease from loving us.
Albert Barnes says, "The argument, therefore, is drawn from the strong love of a Christian to his Saviour; and from the assurance that nothing would be able to separate him from that love." Adam Clarke writes, "The question is not, Who shall separate the love of Christ from us? or prevent Christ from loving us? but, Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Who or what shall be able to remove our affection from him?"
We must never forget that this letter was written to followers of Christ in Rome and that Rome, driven to desperation by the spread of the faith, used every kind of persecution and duress to separate Christians from Christ. Indeed, there was a real test between the pagan love for power and the Christian power of love. Rome was struggling to survive while the saints were surviving to struggle, and it was a real question as to who would win the battle.
Tribulation is from thlipsis, the root of which means to compress or oppress. The English word is from the Latin tribulum, a threshing instrument. Suf-
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Distress is from stenochoria, which signifies a strait or narrow confine. It is from stenos, strait, and choros, a place. It was sometimes used for a mountain passage so restricted that one had to literally worm his way between the rocks. Both tribulation and distress indicate pressure, but the first has to do with pressure from without, the second from pressure within. The import of the original for distress is to be hemmed in on every side. We use the expression, "Everywhere I turned I ran into a wall!" This is the mental state of distress.
Persecution is from diogmos, to pursue or chase, with a view of destroying the obJect of hostility. Famine is from limos, to fail. It refers to the failure of crops or food supply and the consequent hunger which results. Nakedness is from gumnotes, the word whose root gives us our own modern terms gymnasium and gymnastics. The Greek athletes engaged in physical exercises wholly in the nude. In Paul's use of the term he refers to one who has no clothing, having been divested of every stitch of clothing, stripped by his persecutors.
Peril is derived from kindunos, the danger which continually surrounds or hovers over one, affecting the mental state with alarm and constant fear of calamity. There is about it the idea of impending disaster, so that one is left in a constant condition of foreboding and genuine unrest. Sword is from machaira, and stands for the taking of life, especially by beheading, at the order of the civil magistrate.
As one reads the gloomy catalog of suffering, degradation and jeopardy, he becomes aware of what a tremendous force is found in that love which these things cannot crack or shake loose. No wonder Paul says of that love, "It gives us power to endure anything" (1 Cor. 13:7). Armed with such love the Christian is impervious to all attack by the world, the flesh and the devil.
"As it is written. For thy sake we are killed all the day long; we are accounted as sheep for the slaughter" (Romans 8:36).
This quotation from Psalm 44:22 is introduced to show that faithful followers of the Messiah would be harassed and persecuted by a wicked and unbelieving world. The forces of a dissolute and pagan society will make those who are loyal to the true and living God their daily sacrifices. It is worth asking if the lack of persecution today results from the improvement of the men of the world or from the spirit of compromise on the part of the church which has become the very symbol of the status quo, the image of respectability and the guardian of the caste system. It is questionable whether the institutional church is a garrison of troops eager for the encounter and fervent for the fray, or if it is an expensive stable for sheltering the sacred cows which must be fed, curried, pampered and protected.
Lewis Mumford in Faith for Living, says, "The divine discontent has been replaced by a complacent pedestrianism." Pierre Berton in The Comfortable Pew writes, "The church to its opponents has become a straw man, scarcely worth a bullet." Nothing should frighten us quite so much as being accepted by the pagan culture. When those in the church are bored to death and those outside are wholly indifferent, we are no longer an effective movement, but an attractive monument. And monuments are made to visit and cause momentary reflection
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We are not in a great deal of danger now for we are no longer plowing the seas with banners flying and guns trained on the enemy. We have sailed into harbor and tied up at the wharf as if the war was over. Our activities are mostly on shipboard and consist of entertainment for the apathetic and indolent troops who have never smelled the smoke of battle and have only engaged in games with wooden guns. We are no longer killed all the day long. We are not accounted as sheep for the slaughter. We are sheep, but we will die in the pasture, from fat which makes it difficult for us to waddle to the feeding trough.
"Nay, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him that loved us" (Romans 8:37).
This is a powerful statement in which Paul once again draws from an arsenal of terms in a military vocabulary to write to persons in a city which had developed the mightiest military machine in the world. Tribulation, persecution, distress, peril, the sword--these are the shock-troops thrown at the forces of faith. And those forces are not only able to overcome the onslaught, but actually to use the opposition to help produce a glorious victory.
The story is told of the captain of an invading force who was asked what he would do if a superior army of defenders came out to block his attempt to storm a city wall. "Climb over them," was his reply. It is a very homely saying that, "It is not the size of the dog in the fight, but the size of the fight in the dog which counts." Men are not overcome by externals who do not first surrender inside themselves.
To be a conqueror is honor enough, to be more than a conqueror is to be invincible, or unconquerable. This is our lot and destiny through him who loved us! "Thanks be unto God which always causeth us to triumph in Christ" (2 Cor. 2:14). "Our sufficiency is of God" (2 Cor. 3:5). "Therefore I take pleasure in infirmities, in reproaches, in necessities, in persecutions, in distresses for Christ's sake: for when I am weak, then I am strong" (2 Cor. 12:10). The man who trusts in his own strength and power is a fool. He is like a bushman with a crude homemade bow and arrow attempting to overpower an enemy equipped with sophisticated long-range rifles. There is a difference between humanistic bravado and the humble bravery which results from complete trust in Jesus.
The apostle now enumerates a list of things of powerful and frightening aspect which acted as real enemies in the minds of the superstitious Romans and Greeks of his day. These were things which were commonly regarded as in conspiracy to thwart the will of the gods, or which forced the pantheon of deities to engage in devious methods to circumvent them. Thomas Bulfinch referred to them as "gorgons, hydras and chimeras dire."
But Paul confidently affirms that none of these can overthrow the purpose of the living God. The love of God is not dependent upon the Three Fates-- Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos, whose task was to spin the thread of human destiny, and to cut it off with their shears when they pleased. The filament of each man's life is not spun on the wheel of chance. The more I study the last two verses in Romans 8, the more absorbed in their message do I become. I think they constitute at once the most beautiful and comforting sentence in human language which I have ever read.
"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 creation, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord" (Romans 8:28,29).
1. We generally speak of life and death, in that order, but Paul mentions death first. I cannot be sure of his rea-
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A good example is found in the writings of the Latin poet Catullus. He died about fifty years before Jesus was born, but his death only served to increase the interest in his works. At the time when Paul wrote to the Romans, Catullus was making the best-seller list in the Imperial City, with his posthumously copied works. Like most of the Roman writers of the time, Catullus produced some fairly pornographic material, specializing in sexual intrigue and purple passion.
One of the famous poems of all ages is that which Catullus addressed to Lesbia, the beautiful wife of one of his friends. In it he says, "Let us live, my Lesbia, and let us love, and let us value at a single denarius the advice of stern old men who would inhibit us. Suns can set and then come up again, but for us, when once our brief light goes out, there is but one perpetual night through which we must sleep."
The Greeks knew no relationship which death could not sever. They had no way to penetrate the black pall or look behind the curtain. They preferred the worst kind of life to death. Euripides expressed this in these words, "Yet mortals, burdened with countless ills, still love life. They long for each coming day, glad to bear the thing they know, rather than face death the unknown." It must have come with dynamic power when Paul affirmed that death cannot sever us from the love of God. This struck a blow at the futility of life and the finality of death.
2. Life cannot separate us from God's love either. Sometimes it is easier to die for a cause than to live for it. It is not the sudden risk or danger of death which is the true test of the soldier. Rather, it is the daily slogging through mud and slush, the living in mildewed trenches, the eating of monotonous canned rations, which proves the mettle. We must fight the erosion of faith by the sheer fact of endurance. But the matter is settled for the one who knows the adventure of being in Christ, and sharing in the power-packed life.
3. Angels, Principalities, Powers. The casual reader may wonder why angels should be included in a list of things which attempt to create separation from God, but this results from a lack of knowledge about the matter as understood in the day when Paul wrote. The Jews had developed a complex "angelology," and had engaged in a great deal of acrimonious controversy about it. As is usual, such debate caused two extreme positions to develop, and these were defended by rival schools.
The followers of Sadoc denied the existence of angels. They were Materialists. It was the Pharisees who had worked out an elaborate set of traditions about angels, and Paul was a Pharisee. The Pharisees believed that every living thing, including trees and flowers, had a special angel. They held that the angels were created before this material universe was made and that they were opposed to bringing man into existence. They thought that the angels resented someone made in the image of God and were jealous for fear that God would give more attention unto man than unto themselves.
They also became hostile because, being created before mankind, they did not want to be servants of God to those who possessed an elemental body and were limited by time and space. The Jews believed there was a recognized hierarchy of angels, divided into principalities, powers, mights, dominions, archangels and angels. Each of these orders occupied a liasion position between God and some realm in the universe.
They taught that there had been a revolt against the authority of God, before the creation of the earth, and after a celestial struggle the rebels had been thrown out, and that their leader thereupon pre-empted the sphere called At-
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It was not the purpose of Paul to carefully distinguish between tradition and truth when they conflicted. Neither is it my purpose to do so. His thesis was that whatever was factual about angels, they were powerless to tear us loose from the love of God. I accept this without quibble. I trust in it implicitly.
4. Things present and things to come. Once again, the fertile Jewish mind divided time into the world that now is, and the world to come. But the word which we translate by world is often aion, age. So the Jewish mind contemplated this present age, and the age to come. This present age was temporary, transient and characterized by evil. God would eventually break through and end it. Then a new age would commence. It would be the Golden Age. In it, only righteousness and peace would exist. It would be directly under the rule of God. He would be supreme in every heart.
Now Paul is saying that regardless of the nature of things presently existing and regardless of the nature of what lies in the future, one thing is certain. No power will be able to break the bond of love which welds and links us to our Creator. We are sheltered in God's affection regardless of what transpires!
5. Height and depth. This does not mean that things of measurable elevation will not affect our relationship to God, although that is true. But these were technical terms dealing with the ascendancy of the stars or planets. Ignorant pagans, taking a leaf from the Persian astrologers, thought that human destiny was determined by astral calculations, or by a horoscope. If the stars were favorable they would conduct their affairs on the presumption that the gods would prosper them. If the horoscope was unfavorable they would postpone any planned activity.
Height is from hupsoma, the word used to designate the meridian of the sun, or the zenith of a star or planet. This was the time when the maximum of one's "lucky star" would be exerted, or when his chances for success were said to be the "brightest." Depth is from bathos, the time when the star was lowest and the influence was least likely to affect one for good. But there is only one star which can produce our relationship to God--the Bright and Morning Star. And there is only one sun which can affect us spiritually--the Sun of Righteousness who has risen with healing in his wings.
6. Any other creation. There is nothing in all creation, now existing, which can separate us from the love of God. When this present order passes away there will be nothing brought into existence which will change things. The love of God is certain. It is constant and consistent. It is safe and sure. This is the hope of the weary, the strength of the weak, and the refreshment for the way-worn. I rest my faith fully, completely and unreservedly in the love of God and in the God of love.
There's part of the sun in an apple,
There's part of the moon in a rose;
There's part of the flaming Pleiades
In every leaf that grows.
Out of the vast comes nearness;
For the God whose love we sing
Lends a little of his heaven
To every living thing.