Who Shall Separate Us?

By God’s sovereign grace, the very things that threaten to separate us from Christ are tools in His hands to make us more like Him. Today, Sinclair Ferguson concludes his reflections on the closing words of Romans 8.

Welcome to Friday’s Things Unseen, especially if you’re new to our weekday podcast. This week we’ve been thinking about a remarkable feature in Paul’s words in Romans 8:31–35: the way he asks a series of rapid-fire questions that begin with the personal interrogative, who, when we’d probably expect that his questions would begin with the impersonal pronoun, what. And I’ve been suggesting that the “who” he has in mind is Satan, the devil, the one Simon Peter calls our adversary, our enemy. And we’ve come to Paul’s fourth question: “Who can separate us from the love of Christ?”

The first items in this long list of potential separators are interestingly all impersonal: tribulation, distress, persecution, famine, nakedness, peril, sword. And then as his list continues, death and life, things present, things to come, height and depth—well, he does include personal agents like angels and rulers and powers—but it becomes very obvious that he’s really thinking about powerful personal forces, the devil and his angels, who are against us. So, how can we be so sure that we are secure against such opposition as this?

Paul doesn’t give the kind of very specific answer he had given to his three previous questions. Now, all he says is that “we are more than conquerors through him who loved us,” and that nothing can “separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.” And these seem to be statements more than arguments, confessions more than logical explanations. But there is a powerful logic at work here too.

Paul is picking up the threads of what he’d said earlier. We conquer through the love of God because that love is demonstrated to us in Christ. So, he’s now bringing together everything he’d said earlier and weaving it into a threefold cord that can’t easily be broken. Listen to what he’d said in Romans 8:28–30, when he laid the foundations for these verses.

First of all, he’d stressed that God’s power is perfect. He emphasized that all things work together for good for those who love God, but only because God Himself works them together. He works all things together—no exceptions, no limitations. In other words, nothing can happen to the Christian believer unless it is ultimately for his or her good.

And then, secondly, in verse 29, he had indicated exactly what that good is. It’s our being conformed to the likeness of His Son, Jesus Christ. The Spirit of God employs every event in our lives to bring this to pass. Whether encouraging or discouraging events, whether joyful or sad events, they’re all employed in the hands of the heavenly potter to make us like the Lord Jesus. The very things that seem to threaten our security in Christ can be used by Him to make us more like Him.

And then, in verse 30, Paul indicates that the One whose power is said to be perfect in verse 28, and whose plan is seen as perfect in verse 29, is also the One whose purposes are perfect. Those He predestined, He called, those He called, He justified, those He justified, He also glorified. Nothing can stand in the way of the God of sovereign grace as He fulfills His plan and purposes for His people, the people for whom His Son died and whose Spirit transforms into His likeness.

That I think is why we can sing the words of Augustus Montague Toplady’s hymn, “A Debtor to Mercy Alone”:

My name from the palms of His hands, Eternity will not erase; Inscribed on His heart it remains, In marks of indelible grace. Yes, I to the end shall endure, As sure as the earnest is given; More happy, but not more secure, The glorified spirits in heav’n.

That’s something, isn’t it? “More happy but not more secure, the glorified spirits in heav’n.” That’s something worth thinking about over the weekend, isn’t it? I hope it’s a good one for you, and that you have a good Lord’s Day, and that you’ll join us again next week on Things Unseen.