I wanted to focus on the ending of the chapter in a few blog posts - a section that has a very simple, but life-altering point.
Paul is saying that there is an assurance that we can have that can absolutely change your life through Christ. He is saying that this assurance is a thing you can get out everyday and use.
Romans 8:28-39
Today I wanted to write about WHAT the assurance that Paul talks about is, tomorrow WHY we can be assured, and a day after that HOW we can be assured (or HOW we can make this assurance not just an abstraction but an operative thing in our lives)...
WHAT WE CAN BE ASSURED OF in Romans 8:
What is Paul’s point? There is a joy to be had and if you have it, it can enable you to face anything in life without sinking or crumbling. This joy is a certainty that God doesn’t JUST love you now (it is a certainty that he loves you now in Christ), but that he ALWAYS will. It also assures that nothing can shake you from that or separate you from that. The Lord of the universe does not just love you now but always will.
Once you have connected with God through Jesus Christ this assurance is two folded. It means that God loves you no matter what bad stuff is happening inside of you AND no matter what bad stuff is happening outside of you. No matter what happens you can be assured that God still loves you.
Sometimes we do awful things. There is stuff in your heart (mine I am sure more so) that you don’t know about yet and that when it pops up you will say, ‘I cannot believe that I am capable of that!’ When this happens you are going to be very disillusioned and mad at yourself... you could possibly say in response, ‘I can’t believe that God could love me after I have done that...’ And yet here is Paul saying, “Who shall bring any charge against God’s elect? It is God who justifies. Who is to condemn? It is Christ Jesus who died and more then that was raised and is ever at the right hand of God interceding for us...” Not one thing you can possibly do today can bring you back into condemnation. It is ALL covered, it is ALL paid for. When real bad stuff happens inside of us we say, ‘Look at the mess I am in, God could not love me.’ But we are given an assurance here in Romans 8 that says God loves you no matter how much or what kind of bad stuff happens inside of you.
On the other fold, when bad stuff happens to us we say, ‘Look what a mess life is, obviously God has abandoned me’ or ‘There can’t be a loving God!’ But Paul says here, ‘Oh yes there can be.’ Do you see this list in Romans 8: tribulation, distress, persecution, famine, nakedness, danger, sword... Whenever this bad stuff happens, when everything is going wrong you could feel either that God doesn’t love you, because he would not let all of this stuff happen to me or a loving God is not there. But no matter how bad the mess is on the outside Paul says that you still can be assured that God loves you. He says in verse 28, “All things are working together for good for those that love God.” What does that mean? I think it means taken together, as a whole, looked at from the long-term, in every single thing that happens God is working together into a plan for our good and (as the Bible says) God’s glory.
Let me share two examples from the Bible that displays this principle. They both are found in the Old Testament at a place called Dothan. In Genesis, a man named Joseph is thrown into a pit by his brothers for the purpose of selling him into slavery. He is looking at a whole life of suffering in front of him as he cries out to God to save him. But God is silent and he is sold into slavery and has a horrible life for many years... Many centuries later in Dothan a man named Elisha prays to God. By this time Dothan is a city and it is besieged by an enemy. Elisha cries out to God to save the city from capture. This time God acts, wipes out the enemy army and the city is saved... If you know the story of Joseph you know that if he hadn’t been sold into slavery and hadn’t gone through all of those years of misery, not only hundreds of thousands of people would have died from famine, but his own family would have been destroyed by their own sin. What all of that means is that God was just as actively working everything for good in Joseph’s life as he was in Elisha’s. He was just as actively working in the seeming slowness and non-answer to Joseph as in the swift noisy answer to Elisha. Paul says that this is ALWAYS the case. No matter how much bad stuff is happening inside or outside of you, you can be assured that God absolutely and infallibly and unchangeably loves you.
When Paul gets to the very end of chapter 8 in Romans he says that he is “absolutely certain.” He uses a word here that means, ‘absolute, intense certainty and persuasion.’ And then he just bursts, pushes and stretches to the limits of possible language to say, “neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor power, nor heaven, nor hell, nor height, nor death... nothing! can separate you from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
There are people, though, who have looked at this passage and have said, ‘Oh yes, but... you can separate yourself from God because if you start out to follow Jesus and you turn back you can lose your salvation and lose his love.’ This is not the right way to read this text because Paul specifically states that CREATION cannot separate us from the love of God. We are all apart of creation last time I checked! Paul is trying to say here that EVERY possible situation that might turn you away from God cannot - even persecution or torture if you want to take it there. God’s love is so powerful that it will keep you facing him, keep you loving him, keep you in his arms - no matter what.
Here is our assurance: no matter how powerful the evil inside of us or outside of us, it is unable to separate us from the love of God. Once you give yourself to God through Christ he is yours, you are his, and NOTHING ever can change that.
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