Nothing Can Separate Us

What is the scariest thing you can think of? Now imagine someone writing you a letter that lists every frightening thing there is, one after another, and then says: none of it, not one, can take God's love away from you.

Paul is in Corinth, writing to the believers in Rome. Rome is the beating heart of the empire, full of marble temples, soldiers and the emperor's power. The church there is small, meeting in homes. Some of its members had already known trouble. A few years earlier, the emperor Claudius had ordered Jews to leave the city, and Jewish believers like Priscilla and Aquila had to pack up and go. Now many have come back. But they know life can turn upside down at any moment. In the middle of his long letter, Paul reaches a high point. He has been explaining what God has done in Jesus. Now he tells them what that means when life is hard.

He begins with a promise. “And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose.” Not that everything that happens is good. But that God is at work in all of it, for those who love him. Paul says God had a plan from the start: to make his people more and more like his Son, Jesus, so that Jesus would be the eldest in a great family of brothers and sisters. Those God called, he made right with himself. And those he made right, he will one day share his glory with. Then Paul asks a question, and you can almost hear his voice rise. “What shall we then say to these things? If God be for us, who can be against us?”

“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?” If God already gave the greatest gift, his own Son, would he hold back anything else we truly need? Who can accuse God's people, when God himself has declared them right? Who can condemn them, when Christ Jesus died, was raised, and is at God's right hand praying for them? Then Paul names the dangers his friends might really face. “Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword?” Trouble. Hunger. Danger. Even violence. Paul does not pretend these things never happen. He quotes a psalm: for your sake we are killed all day long, counted as sheep for the slaughter.

And then he says: no. “Nay, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him that loved us.” Not just survivors. More than conquerors. And Paul finishes with words that have comforted people for nearly two thousand years. “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 creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.” Death cannot do it. Life cannot do it. Nothing now, nothing in the future. Nothing high above, nothing deep below. Nothing in all creation.

The Roman historian Suetonius, writing about the emperor Claudius, says he expelled the Jews from Rome because they kept causing disturbances at the instigation of someone he calls Chrestus. Many historians think this is a garbled reference to arguments about Christ. The book of Acts tells us that Priscilla and Aquila came to Corinth because Claudius had commanded all Jews to depart from Rome. Paul's readers knew what it was to have their lives disrupted.

Nothing can separate us. You'll find these words in Romans chapter eight, verses twenty-eight to thirty-nine. A letter to a small church in a powerful city, promising them a love bigger than any empire and stronger than any fear. So here is a question to carry with you. What are you afraid of, and how does it change things to know that it cannot separate you from God's love?