Romans 8:28 does not promise that the thing happening to you becomes a good thing. What the chapter around it promises is that nothing will separate you from the love of God, which is a different offer, and Paul makes the difference plain further down by listing what does not stop.
The sentence on its own
And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.
Romans 8:28 (NIV)
Quoted by itself it sounds like a guarantee about how matters end up, and that is how it gets used, on the wall of a waiting room or in a message sent three days after a funeral. Read where it sits, it is the hinge of an argument that Paul keeps building for eleven more verses, and the argument has a subject. Whether the one doing the working is God or all things is a genuine question that the translations split on, and I have written about that split elsewhere, though it is not the question here.
Six questions and one flat sentence
Look at how the rest of the chapter is built. What shall we then say to these things. If God be for us, who can be against us. How shall he not with him also freely give us all things. Who shall lay any thing to the charge of God’s elect. Who is he that condemneth. Paul asks five of those before he arrives at the sixth.
Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall trouble or hardship or persecution or famine or nakedness or danger or sword?
Romans 8:35 (NIV)
Seven items on the list, and he never says that any of them turns into a blessing. He asks one thing about them: whether they can get between a person and Christ. The answer he gives is no, and the answer he is never asked for, and never volunteers, is whether they are going to end. The last stretch of the chapter is made mostly of questions, and the flat declarative sentence sitting near the front of it is the one that ended up on the mug.
He goes to the Old Testament and brings back a lament
Then Paul does the thing I read past for years. He goes to the Old Testament for support, and what he brings back is a lament. Anybody assembling an argument this confident has his pick of the triumphant material, and Paul walks past all of it.
As it is written: “For your sake we face death all day long; we are considered as sheep to be slaughtered.”
Romans 8:36 (NIV)
The line is Psalm 44:22. That psalm opens by remembering everything God did for the fathers, drove out nations, planted them, saved them by his right hand, and then it turns and says he has stopped. The writer insists his people have kept the covenant and have not forgotten God, and that they were broken anyway, and the psalm finishes without ever getting an answer.
Awake, why sleepest thou, O Lord? arise, cast us not off for ever. Wherefore hidest thou thy face, and forgettest our affliction and our oppression?
Psalm 44:23-24 (KJV)
Paul had the whole psalter in front of him, and plenty of it is triumphant. In the middle of the most confident paragraph he ever wrote he reached for the psalm that accuses God of sleeping through a slaughter, and he set it down without repairing it.
How fast I get to verse thirty-seven
I have read the end of Romans 8 out loud to people who had lost the thing their life was built on. Psalm 44 has not once been on the page I opened to.
Paul’s ending is better, and it is also the one that lets me leave the room. Whether I reach for it because I believe it, or because I would rather not sit across from somebody and say out loud that God looks asleep, I haven’t worked out. What I notice is the speed.
In all these things
No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us.
Romans 8:37 (NIV)
In them. The King James has the same preposition, and so do the New International, the English Standard, the New American Standard and the Christian Standard. The New Living Translation breaks ranks with despite all these things, which is precisely the reading I am arguing against. And Paul was not short of prepositions: the second half of that same sentence uses through, for Christ. 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.
The promise that closes the chapter is built the same way. Death, angels, the present, the future, height, depth. Paul does not tell you these are absent, only that not one of them reaches far enough.
The last verb has not happened yet
And those he predestined, he also called; those he called, he also justified; those he justified, he also glorified.
Romans 8:30 (NIV)
Predestined, called, justified, glorified, and all four in the past tense, with the same ending on all four in the Greek. Nobody who first read that letter had been glorified, and Paul wrote it as done anyway, which tells you the chain describes what God has settled, not what the reader is managing to achieve.
Paul had already set the scale earlier in the chapter, telling them the sufferings of this present time do not weigh against the glory coming, and a man who writes glorified in the past tense is not making a forecast about anybody’s year. He is reporting a decision that was taken without consulting the reader at all, which is either the coldest thing in the chapter or the warmest, depending on how your week has gone.
The mug offers a smaller thing than the chapter does. It offers that your situation will resolve, which Paul does not say anywhere, and which his own list of seven quietly contradicts. What the chapter offers instead is that the worst item on that list is not long enough in the arm to reach you.