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.
Romans 8:28 (KJV)
It hangs on the wall of a waiting room, and it arrives in a message three days after a funeral. Romans 8:28 promises that all things work together for good to those who love God, and the next verse names where that good is going. It does not say that each thing that happens is good. And the chapter ends on a firmer promise: nothing can separate you from the love of God.
The verse after it
For whom he did foreknow, he also did predestinate to be conformed to the image of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brethren.
Romans 8:29 (KJV)
The verse opens with For, and it names the purpose the good serves: to be “conformed to the image of his Son.” People reach for 8:28 to prove that everything happens for a reason, and verse 29 does not give a reason for each loss: it names one purpose for all of it. Paul does not make anyone’s death the price of that purpose, and he never says that a child is lost so that someone else can become a better Christian. He says that God’s work of making his people like his Son goes on, and that no loss can stop it.
The promise is to “them that love God,” and grief does not cancel it. If you cannot pray right now, the same chapter speaks to you: “we know not what we should pray for as we ought: but the Spirit itself maketh intercession for us with groanings which cannot be uttered,” in 8:26. Paul writes “we,” himself included: when the words run out, the Spirit prays.
Who shall separate us?
From verse 31 the chapter turns into a run of questions. “What shall we then say to these things? If God be for us, who can be against us?” Then “Who shall lay any thing to the charge of God’s elect?” and “Who is he that condemneth?” and then the one Paul has been heading for:
Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword?
Romans 8:35 (KJV)
Seven things on the list, and here Paul does not call any of them good. He asks one thing about them: whether they can get between a person and Christ.
He brings back a lament
Then Paul quotes the Old Testament, and what he brings back is a lament.
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 (KJV)
The line is Psalm 44:22. That psalm insists in verse 17, “All this is come upon us; yet have we not forgotten thee,” and in verse 23 it says to God, “Awake, why sleepest thou, O Lord?” It ends with a plea, “Arise for our help, and redeem us for thy mercies’ sake,” and no answer. Paul reached for the psalm that accuses God of sleeping through a slaughter, and he set it down without repairing it. His next word, “Nay,” answers whether the slaughter separates, not why it happens. The psalm’s words stay as they are.
I have read the end of Romans 8 aloud in the counseling room at church and never once Psalm 44, and I do not know whether I reach for Paul’s ending because I believe it or because it lets me leave the room.
In all these things
Nay, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him that loved us.
Romans 8:37 (KJV)
In them, not out of them. The famine is still famine at the end of Paul’s sentence, and the conqueror is the person standing in the middle of the list, still attached to the one holding him.
Paul does promise an end. In 8:18 he writes that “the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory which shall be revealed in us,” and in 8:23 that believers wait for “the redemption of our body.” In 2 Corinthians 4:17 he calls the trouble “our light affliction, which is but for a moment” only by weighing it against “a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory,” and he wrote it in a letter that opens with a trouble he did not expect to survive. Romans 8 promises an end in glory, and it gives no date for this trouble.
The promise at the end of the chapter
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.
Romans 8:38-39 (KJV)
Paul does not tell you these are absent, only that not one of them reaches far enough. So read 8:28 with 8:29 beside it, and read both on the way to 8:39.
Death is on Paul’s list by name, the first thing on it. Whatever is on your own list, Paul’s ends with “any other creature,” and nothing on it can separate you from the love of God.