Nothing Can Separate Us

One thing I always tell people about Romans is that Paul wrote it before he had ever set foot in the city. He says as much early on, that he had often planned to come and been kept from it (Romans 1:13). So this is not a man writing to people he had baptised and pastored for years. He is introducing himself by letter, laying out the gospel from start to finish, hoping believers he has mostly never met will read it and recognise the same Lord they already love.

That changes how I hear these closing verses. By the time Paul reaches the end of chapter 8, he has taken the reader through sin, the law, grace, the Spirit and the groaning of creation. This is not a throwaway line tacked on to round things off. It is the high point he has been climbing towards. The church in Rome was a mix of Jewish and Gentile believers in the capital of an empire that had no interest in protecting them, and Paul wanted them to know, before he arrived, exactly how secure they already were.

It is worth slowing down on the verb, because in the Greek it sits in the perfect tense. That points to a settled, finished state rather than a mood that rises and fades. Paul is not reporting that he feels convinced this morning. He is saying he has been brought to a conviction that now holds firm. Something persuaded him, and the persuading is over and done.

The other thing I would not want to rush past is the shape of the list. Several of the items arrive as opposites: death and life, things present and things to come. He is reaching for the far edges in both directions, before and after, this side of the grave and the other, and refusing to leave a gap. Then comes the phrase I find does the quiet heavy lifting: “nor any other created thing.” That is the hinge of the whole sentence. Everything he has named, and everything he has not thought to name, shares one feature. It is made. None of it is the Maker, so none of it can outrank the love that brought it into being in the first place.

Notice where Paul finally puts the love. Not in the air around us, as if it were a warm climate we hope to stay inside, but “in Christ Jesus our Lord”, fastened to a person with a name and a history.

This runs back a long way. Israel knew a God who kept covenant, who promised through Isaiah that his steadfast love would not depart even if the mountains did (Isaiah 54:10). What Paul announces is where that love now lives. It lives in Christ, who went down into death and came up out of it, which is the very thing Paul has just leaned on a few lines earlier, where Christ is raised and now intercedes for us (Romans 8:34). So when he says death cannot separate us, he is not bracing himself against the dark and hoping. He is pointing at the one place death has already lost. The love holds because the person it lives in could not be held by the grave.

What this passage did in my own life was take a measuring tape out of my hands. There have been stretches, after a death in the family, in the flat grey of exhaustion, when I could not feel God at all, and I caught myself grading my faith by how strong it felt before breakfast. Weak feeling, I assumed, meant something had worked loose.

The list is long, I think, so that everyone eventually finds their own trouble somewhere in it. Things present: the bill I cannot pay, the results I am waiting on. Things to come: the news I am dreading. Paul has already ruled every one of them unable to separate me from God. Slowly I have learnt to stop asking whether I am holding on well enough and to ask instead who is doing the holding. On the worst nights that is the only sentence I have left, and it turns out to be plenty. He has not let go.

• Where am I quietly grading my standing with God by how strong my faith feels, rather than by how firmly he holds me?
• Which item on Paul’s list, present or still to come, am I most afraid could cut me off, and what changes when I let Paul’s verdict sit over it?
• The love has an address, “in Christ Jesus”: does my sense of being loved rest on him and his rising, or on how well I am performing?
• Who in my life feels far from God just now, and how could I carry this assurance to them this week?

If you would like to stay with this a while longer, you might read on through the rest of Paul’s letter at /bible/romans/ or sit with something gentler on the days the feelings run dry at /bible-verses-for-how-you-feel/.