Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? tribulation or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or danger, or sword?
Here Paul raises his third and final challenge, and it deals with real life: seven hardships that look like proof that we are not loved at all. The question is whether hunger, danger and the sword can cut a believer off from the love of Christ.
Two challenges have already gone unanswered. This one is thrown at a world full of enemies, and the only reply comes from a man who knew suffering well.
Hostile powers surround us. Enemies hate us. We battle with circumstances, we may face death, we endure hardships. In the middle of all this a third triumphant challenge rings out — and like the other two, it finds no one to take it up... What answer is there to this? We should listen to the one man able to answer — he had gone far in the school of suffering. "No," he says, "in all these things we are more than conquerors, through Him who loved us."
Paul's list can look like a random pile of miseries. It is not.
This leads to the third challenge, "Who shall separate us from the love of Christ?" The Apostle lists seven forms of trial. Every kind of evil we meet as we pass through this world fits under one or another of these trials. In varied measures and at different times we may have to face some of these trials, but not one of these things can separate us from the love of Christ.
Why line up the troubles at their worst? Because Christ has already been through them, and deeper.
Christ is set before us in the full extent of His work: His death on the cross, His resurrection, and His place now at God's right hand, where He intercedes for us. That is the ground of the challenge: Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? But there is more. The difficulties and dangers and sufferings along the road are also lined up in full strength, to prove how faithful that love is and how deep beyond measure... Which of our afflictions was He a stranger to? He felt them far more deeply than we ever could, for His person could measure and bear what we cannot. So they became simply the proof of His perfect love to us.
The chapter names this love twice, and the wording changes.
He went down to the depth for us, into sorrow and into the ruin of man. He has risen in power and victory over it, and He is now the exalted Man. He is interested in us and intercedes for us, so that we find the help and mercy we need. What then shall separate us from His love? Here it is the love of Christ, so that we may know Him and His love — a Man who went down to the depth and has gone up on high, still interested in us and caring for us. In verse 39 it is the love of God in Christ, so that we may know this love to be divine, supreme and unchangeable.
Trouble cannot touch the love itself, but it can dull our awareness of it — and that gap is where the enemy works.
None of these physical sufferings can separate us from His love, though often our souls may lose the sense of it. Then we get downcast and prone to complain in the middle of trial: and so Satan gains an advantage. But if our hearts are right, and we are dependent on the Lord, our great Intercessor, the tribulation only drives us closer to Him, and makes us prove again how blessed that love is — a love greater than the greatest trial.
You can read the same trials two ways: as evidence against God's care, or as a push toward it.
What about all those things that try our faith and test our heart? To the natural eye they can look like a contradiction of God's constant, unfailing care for souls... Are they not rather the very occasions that throw us more upon that love?
Paul wrote to people whose lives were in danger, and this is the comfort he sent them.
They were "killed all the day long" for Christ's sake, dying a slow death, so to speak, because of Him. Danger and the sword chased them and they lost everything here. Yet the love of Christ remained to them. It was their security, their sun, their shield, their everlasting arm, their unfading treasure when everything failed.
- Challenge. This is the third challenge in a row, and no one steps up to answer it.
- Complete. Paul names seven trials, and every evil we meet in this world fits under one of them.
- Deeper. The troubles stand at full strength only to prove the love, because Christ felt each one more deeply than we can.
- Twofold. Verse 35 names the love of Christ, proved on the road; verse 39 names the love of God, divine and unchangeable.
- Closer. Trial can dull our sense of that love, but it throws us more upon it.
According as it is written, For thy sake we are put to death all the day long; we have been reckoned as sheep for slaughter.
Paul has just asked what can separate a believer from the love of Christ — trouble, hunger, danger, the sword. He answers with a line of Scripture: God's people are a flock marked for killing. That raises the hardest question faith faces. If suffering is the settled portion of those God loves, does it prove He has left them?
The sentence is a quotation. It belongs to a psalm in which God's people describe themselves as cast off, scattered and sold cheap, yet insist they have not turned away from Him.
They are cast off and scattered. The enemy and avenger is among them; they are scattered among the nations, sold by God for no price (v. 17-22). Yet they have in no way swerved from their integrity. On the contrary, it is for His sake they are killed all the day long, and counted as sheep for the slaughter. (Note, the moment the Messiah was rejected, this began in principle: compare Rom. 8:36.)
Paul does not blur the difference between the psalm's speakers and his readers. He settles the Christian's own standing first. Only then does he reach back for words that fit both.
It was necessary to point out our distinctive position before quoting a psalm (v. 36) that pictures us in circumstances like theirs. Both are true. We share much with all saints until Christ comes. But we and they each have what is our own and distinctive.
Paul breaks off mid-psalm. One writer explains why he stops there, and whose voice the rest of the psalm carries.
On turning to Romans 8, we find a quotation from Psalm 44 — "For your sake we are being killed all the day long; we are regarded as sheep to be slaughtered" — and there the apostle stops. Turning to the psalm, the next words are ones a child of God could not now speak, for the Father loves him as He loved His Son. They could be the words of a Jewish remnant, who do not know the Father, nor the blessedness of the redemption the Son has accomplished.
The phrase does not mean one execution. It means a whole life lived under a death sentence.
Believers were "killed all the day long" for Christ's sake — living a chronic death, so to speak, on His account. Danger and sword pursued them. They lost everything here. Yet the love of Christ remained theirs. It was their security, their sun, their shield, their everlasting arm, their unfading treasure when everything else failed.
Three words name the cause: for your sake. The suffering is not random. It comes because of Christ, and it proves how real His love is.
It is for Christ's sake that these afflictions are allowed to come to the believer. They come to prove more deeply the reality of His love, and the power of that love. When that love is known in the soul, it is far more than a match for the worst ordeals anyone can face. We know this has been proven in practice in the cases of countless martyrs.
Scripture named this suffering long before it came. So it can never be a verdict against the people it falls on. It proves the opposite.
Paul quotes it as evidence of the portion of the remnant (v. 22 with Rom. 8:36), and since the Holy Spirit recognises it as the portion of the accepted remnant... it was evidence of anything but their rejection. And so the testimony of evil becomes the evidence of acceptance, to secure the faith of those on whom the evil falls when it comes...
In this verse, believers are on the receiving end. That reverses the world's whole idea of winning.
The conquerors whose names stand high in the world's temple of fame won their great place by killing. They strode through seas of blood to the goal of their ambition. God's children become more than conquerors by being killed, and killed all the day long... Those who killed them did so for their own pleasure — "to make a holiday for Romans," or to stamp a hated Name out of the world. Yet they did not know that they were crowning their victims with imperishable crowns.
Where the sword is absent, the same principle still finds its shape in smaller costs.
To suffer reproach, to be misunderstood, to be pushed aside, not to be wanted — in all these things we may be more than conquerors, if it is all for Christ's sake... His love is the great compensation, and no suffering can separate us from His love. On the contrary, suffering gives Him the opportunity to make His love a living, bright reality.
- Quoted — Paul borrows Psalm 44:22, where God's people are cast off and scattered yet have not swerved from Him. He stops before the psalm's next words, which a child of God could not pray today.
- Caused — the suffering has a stated reason: for your sake. It comes because of Christ, and it proves how strong His love is under pressure.
- Counted — "all the day long" means a life under a standing death sentence. In the world's eyes, such people are a flock kept for killing.
- Confirmed — Scripture named these sufferings beforehand. So the evidence of evil becomes evidence of acceptance, not of rejection.
- Conquering — the world's conquerors win by killing. God's children win by being killed, and the love of Christ stays theirs through it all.
But in all these things we more than conquer through him that has loved us.
Commentary for this verse has not been generated yet.
For I am persuaded that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers,
Commentary for this verse has not been generated yet.
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.
Paul closes his argument by naming everything that might break the tie between God and His people. The verse settles one question: can anything created pull us out of a love that rests in Christ Jesus our Lord?
Paul reaches the end of his argument, and the chapter's last word answers its first:
Paul, in closing this unfolding of the Christian condition, names the strongest things that could dare to rise up against the saints, and sees in them only powerless obstacles in the presence of the love that God has shown us in Jesus Christ. This eighth chapter, as it has been expressed, sets out by saying "no condemnation," and ends by adding "no separation."
The security does not rest on the strength of the believer. It rests on where the love is, and on who is there:
The answer is that none of these will separate us from the love of God for a single moment. That love rests on us in Christ Jesus our Lord. He is the worthy and all-glorious Object of that love, and we are in it because we are connected with Him. The love reached us in Him, and we, now in Him, stand permanently in that love. If Christ can be removed from the embrace of that love, we can be. If He cannot be, neither can we.
So this certainty does not rest on the strength of our own faith:
The love of God finds its anchorage, not in the feeble faith of His people, but "in Christ Jesus our Lord." No storm can drag the anchor from there. It is assured for evermore.
The earlier list in verse 35 named troubles we can see. This one reaches further, into what we cannot see:
Here we have still deeper difficulties: not the visible but the invisible, the spiritual. But sum them all up as the apostle does in his climax — they are only the creature. They stand lined up at their strongest only to be wiped out as nothing in the presence of the all-conquering love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.
Taken one by one, each supposed enemy turns out to be a servant or a witness of the very love it was meant to threaten:
Can death? That was the very thing in which it was expressed in all its greatness. Can life? Love is the very thing that has made me alive, and I have found that all life is in the love of God… Can angels? They are only the servants of that love, sent out to minister to those who are its objects… Can things present? These all work together for good to those who love God… Can height? It is in the height of heaven that we know it best. Can depth? Nothing can be deeper than the judgment we lay under, and love reached us there and removed the judgment from us. Can any other creature? No, because it is only a creature, and the love we boast in is the love of the Creator Himself.
Verse 35 asked about the love of Christ; verse 39 speaks of the love of God. The change of wording is deliberate:
Here, as the fitting close, note that it is the love of God, rather than of Christ as in verse 35. Each is exactly in place. The love of Christ showed itself in suffering to the utmost for us here, and He carries that same love into His intercession in heaven for us who still suffer where He suffered. The love of God is no less real if less in sight. This is His immense and unchanging love, whose grace planned all, gave all, forgave all, justified all, sustains all, and will bring all to that fulness of love and joy and glory that can satisfy such a God and the redemption of such a Saviour.
Paul speaks for himself, and readers are meant to notice the wording before claiming it:
Now the apostle says, "I am persuaded." He does not say the Romans were persuaded. It is our privilege to be persuaded as he was, but he does not say we are… He was personally persuaded, but he was as fully persuaded about the Romans as about himself.
The gap between his confidence and ours is therefore a challenge:
The apostle Paul puts the stamp of absolute finality on this… If Paul speaks so confidently, without any doubts, what about each of us? Should we not honour God with the same simplicity of faith? To doubt this would be to dishonour His own word.
- Frame. The chapter opens with "no condemnation." It closes with "no separation."
- Ground. The love rests on us in Christ. He is its Object, and we are in it because we are in Him. Nothing can remove us unless it first removes Him.
- Reach. The list runs past the seen into the unseen — death, life, angels, powers, time, height, depth. Every item on it is only a creature.
- Anchor. Our assurance holds in Christ, not in the strength of our faith, so no storm can drag it loose.
- Response. Paul settles the matter with no doubt at all, and to doubt it is to dishonour God's own word.