Romans 8:34b-39, God's Everlasting Love Part III

The question of Christian confidence was vital for Paul’s hearers in Rome—as it is, indeed, for many today. The main issue he was addressing, which is as important today, is that people in Paul’s culture (and ours) might well interpret the bad things that were happening to God’s people as signs that God was angry with them, that they had done something wrong. As with Job’s comforters, many in Paul’s day, as in our own, assumed that if someone was in tune with God, they wouldn’t have any problems. Thus, if there were or are obvious catastrophes and problems, that must mean that the people concerned, or indeed the whole movement, had obviously gone off the rails.

How should we today look upon a world in such a mess—floods, viruses, Ukraine, Gaza, Yemen, Afghanistan, North Korea, China, Syria, and so on? Especially when the mess in the wider world seems to be reflected or embodied in our own communities and personal lives? Paul addresses not only ultimate assurance but also addresses penultimate assurance. We are to see one another’s misfortunes and sorrows, not as signs of God’s displeasure, and hence of our own superior virtue or spirituality, but rather as part of the calling to share in the messianic woes in which the Spirit is calling out to the Father from the heart of pain and perplexity.

Paul nails this point in verse 36, quoting Psalm 44, one of the great psalms of complaint. In Psalm 44, the psalmist initially celebrates God’s great promises, but complains that they have not been coming true. The psalmist concludes, dramatically, that all this is happening “because of you: it is for your sake” (44:22). He doesn’t suppose for a minute that God might no longer be in charge. He recognizes that there must be stranger, darker, and deeper things going on than one would see on the surface. Paul’s point seems to be that those facing severe troubles are somehow sharing in the Messiah’s present redemptive sufferings. This is our vocation. It isn’t just something we have to get through in order to arrive at our own salvation. We are called to bear, in the Spirit, the pain of the world, to stand at that place so that God’s Spirit may be groaning right there. This is part of our salvific ministry in and for the world. Paul is, as it were, applying the unique fact of Jesus’ crucifixion to the present suffering of Jesus’ people as they stand in prayer at the heart of the suffering world. God’s suffering people are part of the means by which the victorious death of Jesus is applied to the world. With the Spirit’s groaning within us, we are called to share in God’s rescue plan for the whole world.

What’s more, this verse closely echoes the plight of the Servant as set out in the Septuagint of Isaiah. Psalm 44:22 says that we have been accounted “as sheep of slaughter.” If we look at Isaiah 53:7, we find the Servant being led like a lamb to the slaughter. The sufferings to which Paul has referred are therefore to be seen as the “messianic afflictions.” They are not just “nasty things to get through.” As in 8:17-18, they are part of the redemptive vocations to be embraced, so that the love of the Messiah and the prayer of the Spirit may be made known in the dark places of the earth. This is where the wounds of Jesus meet the wounds of the world. Easy-going preaching and teaching sometimes lull Christians into supposing that we can avoid being caught up in this, but it is what Jesus himself said would happen to those who decided to follow him.

Verses 31-39 draw together the whole scripture, all human experience, the whole hostile world, and the whole victorious gospel. The point is that none of these things—whether events, as in 35, or forces and powers as in 38 and 39—can separate us from God’s Messiah-shaped love. The “us” here is those “in the Messiah,” the people in whose hearts the Spirit witnesses that they are God’s children, and groans with their pain at the world’s dark depths. And Paul at last makes it explicit that this is all about love.

It is possible that Paul, reaching the height of his theological rhetoric, wants to reclaim Love as the deepest truth about the creator God. Whereas the imperial rhetoric of the day spoke regularly about Caesar providing rescue, salvation, justice, and peace, Paul declares that in the gospel of Jesus, God’s genuine justice has been unveiled, bringing genuine salvation and resulting in genuine peace. It all fits. Here, at the climax of the first half of the letter, Paul homes in on the ultimate reality: not Rome but the unconquerable, unbreakable love of the one true God.

So what exactly is this love of which Paul speaks so passionately? John and Paul, in particular, use this word to indicate the biblical theme of gratuitous divine love, God’s faithfulness to his covenant, his determination to see the covenant purpose through for the sake of the world—and their strong sense that this purpose had been fulfilled in Jesus. The gospels speak of Jesus looking with love at the rich young ruler; of Jesus touching the unclean, bringing healing and hope; of him weeping at Lazarus’s tomb; and in general of what we might call a sovereign kindness in so much of what he did. His closest followers knew what sort of a person he was. When the resurrection revealed—as he had tried to hint at the Last Supper!—that his death was to be seen as the great rescuing act of new exodus, they naturally spoke of his crucifixion itself as the supreme act of love. “He had always loved his own people in the world,” says John (13:1); “now he loved them right through to the end.”

This passage is designed to give comfort and assurance; but underneath that is Paul’s revolutionary theology of incarnation of God being in and with the Messiah, Jesus. When we join that up with the pneumatology (theology of the Holy Spirit) earlier in Romans 8, the whole chapter offers itself as one of the greatest expositions of Trinitarian thought from any point of Christian history. Like all true Trinitarian theology it takes the form, not of cold theory but of gratitude and allegiance of faith, and hope, and answering love. It is a shout of praise, a song of joy: nothing will be able to separate us from the love of Jesus!