Romans 8:28-39

The Christian Assurance.

Romans 8:28. One thing we do know, that all goes well for those that love God including their worst sufferings (Romans 8:18; cf. Romans 5:3).

Romans 8:29 f. This assurance rests on God's manifest purpose toward them a purpose disclosed in five successive steps: foreknowledge, pre-ordination, call, justification, glorification. The foreknowledge covers everything about the persons concerned; God never acts by guess (cf. Romans 3:3, Romans 11:29). The predestination aimed at the conforming of the chosen to the image of God's Son, so that the Firstborn may be surrounded with many brothers; God designed that all those marked out for salvation should share His Son's likeness and be of His family. With this object He called them into His Son's fellowship (1 Corinthians 1:9); on their obeying that call, He cleared them of past sin, and shed His glory on them. Glorified is past in tense (future in Romans 8:18): despite humiliation, it is glorious to be sons of God (see Romans 8:14; cf. 2 Corinthians 3:18; John 17:22, etc.): the father's kiss was justification for the Prodigal Son, the robe and ring were glorification.

Romans 8:31. The believer's justification, the corner-stone of his security, supports the challenge of these verses. All goes to show that God is for us it matters nothing who is against us; cf. Psalms 118:6. That God is for us He showed by the sacrifice of His own Son having given Him, He can withhold nothing! (cf. 1 Corinthians 3:21). Who is going to impeach God's elect? when God justifies, will anyone dare to condemn? If any should, there stands Christ Jesus to speak for us, He that died but, more than that, was raised from the dead and is now at God's right hand.

Romans 8:35. From his present security the Christian looks on to the eternal future: the Love that bled for him on the Cross, and pleads for him on the throne, is his in deathless union (Romans 8:35; Romans 8:39; cf. Romans 5:5; cf. Romans 5:8; also Galatians 2:20; John 10:28 f.).Affliction, distress, etc., resembling the cruel martyrdom of OT saints, tend to separate Christians now (cf. Romans 8:18) from Christ's love, suggesting doubts of His sympathy or power to aid. Nay, but in all these things we gain a surpassing victory, etc.; God's assured love silences the contradictions of life.

Romans 8:38 f. Paul defies all conceivable separators: death and life, things present and future, height and depth, represent the opposites of condition, time, and space. Angels are supernatural potencies, principalities the highest angels, powers being elsewhere coupled with these (Ephesians 1:21; Colossians 1:16 *) so here in AV; the exacter order of RV associates powers with time and place; cf. 1 Corinthians 2:8; Ephesians 6:12. The passage has the lilt of Hebrew poetry; it was penned in a rapture, like Romans 11:33.