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Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? You may be seated.
Dear saints, I suspect that many of you have some of those verses and words from St. Paul in the Epistle Lesson, Romans chapter 8, as your confirmation verses. Or if not, as verses that you’ve memorized as a child, verses that you’ve clung to throughout your life. This is some of the most beautiful and wonderful preaching of the gospel in all of the Holy Scriptures, here from St. Paul, who wants us to know that while the devil is trying to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord, his works are in vain because there is nothing, no height nor depth, nothing in all of creation that is able to pull us apart from Christ or pull Christ away from us. Not sin, not guilt, not shame, not suffering, not tribulation or cross or nakedness or peril or sword, not death itself, not all the hordes of demons gathered against us are able to accomplish this, their task. And Paul wants us to have this confidence.
Now, to press this into our hearts, I’d like to begin by thinking about the prophet Job. Remember Job? The Lord was visiting with the holy angels, and the devil, Satan the accuser, came before the Lord, and the Lord asked if Satan had considered Job. Have you considered my servant Job? He’s righteous and upright. The Lord had declared Job to be holy, to be forgiven. He had justified Job, forgiven all of his sins. When the Lord says that Job is upright and holy, that doesn’t mean he was sinless. All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, including Job. But the Lord had declared Job to be His own man, to be holy. He had called him through the gospel.
And Job knew that his sins were forgiven, and I’ll tell you how. It’s a little part in Job chapter 1 that we often miss. Do you remember how it says that Job had all these great treasures, huge flocks, and he was a man of great wealth? He had eleven children, and that his children would get together and feast. And do you remember what Job would do after his children feasted? He would offer a sacrifice, lest they might have sinned, and then their sin would be forgiven. In other words, Job was a priest, and he had an altar, and he was offering on that altar sacrifices, the blood that was shed and it was burned there at the altar so that Job knew the forgiveness of sins through the preaching of the altar.
Now that’s the key to understanding Job because what’s going to unfold in the book of Job is the devil attacking that assurance, the devil attacking the preaching of the altar, the devil going after that word that Job knew from the sacrifice, and how does he do it? He first takes away everything from him. Job’s great wealth is all destroyed, one thing after another, after another, and the servants are left one at a time to come and to tell Job one after another that your camels are gone, your flocks are gone, all your livelihood is gone, and then the last one, the worst of all, your children were feasting in the house and the winds knocked down the home and all eleven of them have died.
God, and Job with great mourning says, the Lord gives, the Lord takes away, blessed be the name of the Lord, and in all of this Job didn’t sin. So the devil back up into heaven says, well, look, the only reason Job is still believing and trusting in you is because he still has his health, and so the Lord in fact gives the devil permission to come to Job and to take away his health, just spare his life. That’s all the Lord says. And so the devil, Satan, comes and afflicts Job with the worst affliction you could possibly imagine, sores on his body, foot to head, so that he’s there in misery, scraping his sores with a piece of broken pottery as he sits in the ash heap, moaning, mourning the loss of his family and his livelihood and his health.
And his wife comes to him and says, curse God and die. And Job says, you speak as one of the foolish women. Naked I came from my mother’s womb, naked I shall return. Should we receive good from the hand of the Lord and not evil? All this Job did not sin.
Now here’s the point. Job’s life was a contest. Job could believe what God thought about him from the things going on around him, from the things happening in his own body, from the things happening in his own family, from the things happening in his life. He could believe what God thought of him by looking around or he could believe the sacrifice of the altar. Everything in Job’s life, and it doesn’t help that he has friends who come and remember for a week they sit with him in silence, which was the best thing that they probably could have done, but then they start to preach to Job and they’re constantly preaching this.
Job, look, nobody can possibly be loved by God and have this much suffering. This suffering that you’re going through indicates that you’re a sinner, or that God hates you, or that God’s forgotten about you, or that you’ve done something wrong and you’re experiencing the justice of heaven. You cannot be righteous. God has to be angry with you. He cannot be pleased with you. And they preach it over and over and over to Job.
In all of this, everything is trying to separate Job from the love of Christ, to separate Job from his confidence in the preaching of the gospel, to separate Job from his faith that trusts in the forgiveness of sins. And this is how it is also for us. This is really what Paul is getting after in Romans. The devil comes to us and he says, your sin separates you from God. After all, how can a holy God dwell with sinful people? Your law-breaking, your iniquity, your selfishness, your greed, your laziness, your disobedience, your anger, your bitterness, your lust, your idolatry, your trust in everything but God, your fear in everything but Him, your love for everything more than Him, all of this separates you from God.
That’s what the devil wants to say, but here comes the Lord Jesus who says, I came not to save the righteous but sinners, to call sinners, to die for sinners, to suffer for sinners, to bleed for sinners, to be the sacrifice for those who need a sacrifice, and the Savior for those who need a Savior. Your sin, and this is the amazing promise of the gospel, your sin cannot separate you from God, not when Jesus is dead and raised, not when His blood is spilt for you. He is the atoning sacrifice, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.
Now, we know that, but then the devil comes with a second try. We know the forgiveness of sins, but then we leave church and we sin again and then the devil tries to pile on this guilt. He cannot present your sin before God in heaven. Who is to accuse? It is Christ who died and who is at the right hand of the Father and who intercedes for us. But the devil again tries to bring our own guilt to us and our own shame to us and our own weakness to us and that perpetual temptation that we have. But still Jesus comes and He says, I still love you, I still forgive you, I still have mercy on you. You cannot out sin my love. You cannot run past the grip of my mercy. You cannot stain yourself with a sin that cannot be washed out by the power of my blood. You cannot do it.
So your sin cannot separate you from God. Your guilt cannot separate you from God. Your shame cannot separate you from God. So then the Lord comes with another strategy. The devil comes and he tries to say that your suffering means that God has forgotten you. That your suffering means that the Lord has abandoned you, that your suffering means that God is mad at you. After all, if you were truly His children, why would He let that happen to you, to the one that you love, to those that you care about, to the people around you, to His church? Why would God abandon His people in such a way?
So that it must be that when we see our suffering, it must be that God is angry. That was the argument that was happening earlier in Romans chapter 8. The Jewish people were accusing the Christians in Rome; they were saying, look, if you’re being afflicted and driven around and persecuted so much, it must mean that God has forgotten you. And Paul said, remember last week, he said that our suffering are not the throes of death, but rather the birth pains. They’re waiting to reveal the glory that will come in the resurrection of the body so that we receive suffering not as an indication that God has forgotten us, but rather as a reminder that the Lord loves us, that He too has suffered for us, and now He suffers with us, and that He uses all things for our good.
You can’t see this. When you look with your eyes at your life, you cannot see all things working together for good, but we believe it because the Lord has promised it. Listen to the first verse of the epistle again, it’s Romans chapter 8, verse 28, and we know by faith, remember, not by sight, we know that for those who love God, all things work together for good, for those who are called according to His purpose.
The Lord is working all things together for your good, even the terrible things, even the wicked and evil things that you experience and that you see and that you feel, the Lord is using all of those things for your own good. The picture is of a rug weaver. Have you ever seen someone weaving a rug? Do you know how this happens? I remember we were watching someone weave; I probably was watching a video of someone doing it because I can’t remember when I was in a rug weaver place. I remember I was watching and they were weaving and I said, what is this? It just looks like a mess. It doesn’t look like there’s any pattern at all. It just looks like total chaos. And then they finished weaving the rug, and they turned it around. And on the other side, you could see this beautiful picture.
Well, this I think is how our own lives are. We just look at the lives that we’re living, and we look at the lives around us, and we say, what is happening? What is going on in the world? It looks like God has forgotten us, or abandoned us, or He’s punishing us for something. But on the last day, the rug will be turned around, and we will be able to see what we now know by faith, is that all of these things that are happening to us, and around us, and in us, and against us, all of this is the Lord working everything together for good, for good, your good, for those who are called according to His purpose.
Because those whom He foreknew, He predestined, and those whom He predestined, He called, and those whom He called, He justified, that is forgave, and those whom He justified, He will glorify. That is you. You are the called. You are the ones who have heard the gospel. You are the ones that know that your sin cannot separate you from God, and your suffering cannot separate you from God, but in fact through your suffering the Lord draws you closer to Himself.
So there’s one more thing for the devil left. If he can’t use sin to separate us from God, if he can’t use suffering to separate us from God, then he comes and says that death will separate us from God. But look at what the Lord Jesus does even to our death. He dies in our place and comes up out of the grave on the third day and by His resurrection destroys the power of Him who had the power of death, that is the devil. He knocks the teeth out of the grave so that there is no more victory for the grave, no more triumph in death. The Lord makes a way out of death to life eternal for you and for all of the saints so that even death is nothing for us to be afraid of. In fact, death now comes to us as a blessing. To live is Christ, to die is gain for you and for all the saints. Not only does death not separate us from the love of God in Christ, but death brings us even closer to God in Christ.
When we die, we—can you imagine this? When we close our eyes in death, we open them to see the face of Christ, to behold Him and to be known by Him and to know Him even as He is and to rejoice in that. So we come back to the question that Paul asks, who shall separate us from the love of Christ?
Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or danger, or sword? As it is written, for your sake we’re being killed all day long, we’re regarded like sheep to be slaughtered. But in all of these things we are more than conquerors through Him who loved us.”
Remember Job? Remember the test? Was Job going to believe what happened around him? Was he going to believe the preaching of his friends? Was he going to believe that God was mad at him because he was a sinner, surely? Or was he going to believe the preaching of the altar? In the end of the book, it’s Job who believes the preaching of the altar. And not only that, do you remember the surprise at the end of Job? Do you remember how the whole time when we’re reading the book of Job, we’re wondering if he’s going to keep the faith? We’re wondering if he’s going to be steadfast? We are wondering if he is going to be saved or if the devil is going to get a hold of him and take him over into the company of his friends. Remember how the whole time we were worried about Job, and it turns out we shouldn’t have been worried about Job at all. The devil should have been worried about Job’s friends.
Because at the end of Job the Lord comes to Job and tells his friends, go and ask Job to offer a sacrifice for you, and I will forgive your sins as well. I’ll bring you into the church. I’ll rescue you from the devil and the darkness of his kingdom. I’ll make you my children.” And so now at the end of Job, it’s not just Job and the forgiveness of sins, but also his three friends. The whole time we thought that the Lord might lose Job, but the Lord was working all things so that he would gain his friends. Can you imagine?
And this is the confidence in which we live. This is the confidence in which we suffer. This is the confidence in which we confess our sins and hear the Lord’s mercy. This is the confidence in which we die. For I am sure that neither death nor life nor angels nor rulers nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor heights, nor depths, nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.
May God grant to each one of us this confidence. In the name of Jesus, Amen. The peace of God which passes all understanding, guard your hearts and minds through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.