ROMANS 8: 33-39
33Who will bring any charge against God’s elect? It is God who justifies.
34 Who is to condemn? It is Christ Jesus, who died, yes, who was raised, who is at the right hand of God, who indeed intercedes for us. 35 Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Will hardship, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? 36 As it is written,
“For your sake we are being killed
all day long;
we are accounted as sheep
to be slaughtered.”
37 No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. 38 For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, 39 nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. †
Who Judges?
Who will bring a charge against God’s elect? Not Satan, though that is his purported charge. You know, that is exactly what “Satan” means—the Accuser. You have to picture a heavenly version of an ancient kingdom/state, which is the imagery we inherit from the Old Testament. You must picture a court, as in the court of a king. The king sits on the throne. At his right hand is the seat of authority—what we’d call a Prime Minister today—who has executive power and acts on behalf of the king. On the left side was seated a special person to the king—a trusted friend or perhaps his queen.
The members of the courtroom include a host of loyal subjects. The main work of an ancient king was to make decisions for his kingdom, which means he functioned much of the time as a judge, sorting out conflicts brought to his hearing. None of this is too foreign to us; we still have courts very much like this.
There are other special roles. One is the prosecuting attorney, or The Satan (and the word Satan is always preceded by the definite article “the” so that it functions as a title more often than a proper noun). It is the role of The Satan to bring to the Judge’s remembrance the sins of the accused. He is The Accuser.
So what Paul says to us is that the Accuser has no role. Verse 34:
Who is to condemn? It is Christ Jesus, who died, yes, who was raised, who is at the right hand of God, who indeed intercedes for us.
Jesus is at “the right hand” of God, which means he acts with all the authority of God.
About Larry
I got to spend 90 minutes a week with Larry for about 8 years as he attended my Tuesday morning Bible study. I know him pretty well. I know where he stands on most every issue. I also know that he could be stubborn and sometimes really irritating—though never intentionally.
Larry was a man of God—a man after Christ’s own heart—and he has been a strong Christian and leader for much of his life. Larry knew Scripture, and not only because of his years in service to the Gideons, but because he always made personal study his practice.
Those of you who have sat in my classes know what my teaching style is. You know how I like to enter into the central tension and crisis of a text, for I believe the Word of God speaks most clearly in disrupting us of our self-made comforts. It is only once we face the tension and crisis of a text that we learn at a deep, heart level what the text says to us.
One of the things Larry used to really got my goat. We would just be in the first steps of revealing the true crisis of the text and Larry would step in and say something like, “Well, you know, the main thing is that we should believe in Jesus and trust Him completely in all we say and do.” And I would say, “Larry! You keep stealing the punchline! Don’t blurt out the punchline before I’ve finished winding up the joke!” Larry knew the truth of Scripture and loved it with His whole heart.
At First Pres, Larry served as a Deacon, and Elder, a Trustee, and he was even on the Pastoral Nominating Committee that called me. I remember how, in the midst of my interviews, I would be answering questions about my pastoral management style or fielding questions regarding conflict resolution and so on, but when Larry asked a question, it was always the good stuff—who is Jesus and how will He be proclaimed? I always felt my heart calm and soften when Larry asked one of these crucial and most-important questions. I always loved and respected him for them.
And then came the fire. December 12, 2018: Jane awakes in the small hours to see a wall in flames. She wakes up Larry and gets him out of the house and then tries to return to salvage important items, but it is already too hot to try. Larry is taken to Arrowhead hospital in Rialto with 3rd degree burns over much of his body. He looked like The Mummy for the first few weeks. Jane walked away unscathed, un-scorched, but she needed to be with Larry. From the beginning, for those of us who attended Larry and Jane, keeping them together was their highest good and ours. We did all we could to keep them as close as possible, for whenever they were together, they both lit up tremendously. They were very good for each other.
Lingering
Months and months and months passed. Larry had some promising upticks and some disparaging setbacks. Once he had a tracheostomy inserted, he could not talk (not that it didn’t keep him from trying!). He wrote pages upon pages of notes. Last fall saw him degrade to the point that none of his writing was legible in the least. We made up pages for him so he would only need to point to what he wanted:
This is how we communicated. The boxes for “I want to see my wife, Jane,” and “Thank you so much” were his favorites by a hundred miles.
By January, Larry couldn’t even point. He couldn’t hear and began a downhill trajectory.
If you’re like me, you might be inclined to ask, as I did, “Why to good Christians suffer?” After all the prayers, why weren’t our prayers for Larry’s healing answered in the positive? Why isn’t every prayer for healing granted?
To know the answer is to know the mind of God which is far-removed from our simple experience.
Last week’s text ends with a disturbing line—Romans 8:17:
[We are] children, then heirs, heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ—if, in fact, we suffer with him so that we may also be glorified with him.
In Sunday school, I was asked, “What does it mean, ‘if we suffer with him’?” While it may refer to suffering for the name of Jesus, or for following him, as it did for many Roman Christians in Paul’s audience, it also refers to all of us. Though we may not suffer “for Christ” explicitly, we do suffer. We are born into life in the flesh, sin-stained and subject to the forces of decay and death. In this sense we suffer. Larry suffered in this sense more than most ever will. How can we say that Larry’s sufferings also were suffering with Christ? Quite easily—I for one can say that Jesus was there in the hospital room every time I visited. Jesus was with Larry the entire journey of suffering. Larry did suffer with Christ, and I think Larry’s sufferings brought him closer to the image and likeness of Christ than anything else he did. What could be more Christlike than to suffer the anguish of the flesh while praising God and investing all one’s trust in Him?
The early saints counted themselves lucky to suffer—blessed that God had considered them worthy of suffering for Christ. Why? Because in that suffering they took on the most complete image of Christ any Christian can take. We are right to consider all of our sufferings as participation in the suffering of Christ. We, who are His children, can keep hope and trust intact even when we feel abandoned and alone, because this is what our Master did on the cross. It is in suffering that we most resemble Jesus, and in suffering that our heartfelt prayers to be made Christlike are best answered.
Larry’s prayers were answered indeed, though not as we may have expected.
What Can Separate us from Christ?
Paul asks the question for us and all who wonder over the reality of suffering in this life:
Who shall separate us from
the love of Christ?
The list:
The answer? None of the above. He continues to add to that list:
The answer again: nada, nothing—nothing can separate us from Christ and His love. He is our Trust, and by Him we are more than conquerors despite what happens to us in this life. What is more, we share that promise with one another. We will see Larry again, once the promises are completed by our loving Lord.
May we live and encourage each other with this hope as we await that day! †