SPEAKER_00: Who shall separate us from the love of Christ?
SPEAKER_00: What a powerful question.
SPEAKER_00: Romans 8.
SPEAKER_00: Our scripture reading today is honing in on what is really the crescendo of Paul's argument that he's been making the entire time in Romans.
SPEAKER_00: All the preceding chapters are leading up to this claim.
SPEAKER_00: The rhetorical burden of everything that has come before this is leading to this.
SPEAKER_00: And this powerful claim that Paul makes.
SPEAKER_00: A claim that we should believe regularly.
SPEAKER_00: But it is also a claim that we need to know deeply, experientially, as Paul no doubt did.
SPEAKER_00: It is the claim, of course, that nothing can separate us from the love of God.
SPEAKER_00: Which Paul makes without qualification, or actually with enormous qualifications, such that it doesn't qualify anything.
SPEAKER_00: Leading up to this moment in Romans, see, Paul has been making an argument.
SPEAKER_00: Paul is riding to a church in Rome, and this church is made up of some.
SPEAKER_00: We could, this is a little bit um inappropriate to call it this, but Jewish Christians and Gentile Christians, those categories weren't really around at this time, but but this community is struggling a bit with each other, how to relate to each other as this body of new believers, and and in this community, questions were coming to the surface.
SPEAKER_00: Fundamentally, the question of is God faithful to God's covenants?
SPEAKER_00: Is God faithful to God's promises?
SPEAKER_00: Does God keep God's word?
SPEAKER_00: Because if you are in this time, Paul being a Jewish man, looking at his Jewish sisters and brothers, his kinsmen of the flesh, many of whom are not claiming Christ as Messiah, and many of Israel who are not experiencing the power of the Spirit that's in this fellowship of believers?
SPEAKER_00: One would ask, has God abandoned God's people?
SPEAKER_00: Did God get rid of this thing called Israel and start this new thing called the church?
SPEAKER_00: Is a question that keeps coming up in Romans, right?
SPEAKER_00: Does their faithlessness nullify the faithfulness of God?
SPEAKER_00: And this is a good question to answer and to ask.
SPEAKER_00: Does God keep God's covenant?
SPEAKER_00: Is God faithful?
SPEAKER_00: Because if we encounter a God who is capable of not keeping his promises, then we should be terrified.
SPEAKER_00: Because that God will leave you too.
SPEAKER_00: But Paul is resolved in his argument.
SPEAKER_00: His argument is, of course, that the faithfulness, the covenant faithfulness of God has been made manifest in the faithfulness of Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: Paul has this claim where he says that God's covenant faithfulness, the righteousness of God, has been manifest apart from the law and the prophets, although they bear witness to it.
SPEAKER_00: It's taken place in a surprising way.
SPEAKER_00: Now the language of covenant is the language of binding, loyalty, faithfulness.
SPEAKER_00: When God makes a covenant with Abraham, God, by God's word, is binding God's self to Abraham and his posterity, his offspring, his future.
SPEAKER_00: When God makes a covenant with Moses, God is binding God's self to Moses and by extension the people of Israel.
SPEAKER_00: The language of covenant is the language of loyalty, binding, commitment, faithfulness.
SPEAKER_00: This is what covenant means.
SPEAKER_00: And for Paul, Jesus, Christ is the manifestation of God's covenant faithfulness.
SPEAKER_00: Who is Christ for Paul?
SPEAKER_00: This is the good news.
SPEAKER_00: This is the gospel for Paul.
SPEAKER_00: This is what everything is leading up to in this passage that we just read.
SPEAKER_00: Who is Christ, according to Paul?
SPEAKER_00: One way to say it is Christ is the Father's refusal to let go of you.
SPEAKER_00: Christ is the manifestation of God's refusal to let go of you.
SPEAKER_00: Christ is the mediator.
SPEAKER_00: Christ is the grip, the loving, tenacious grip of the Father on our lives.
SPEAKER_00: Such that the possibility that anything could sever us from this grip is itself inconceivable.
SPEAKER_00: It would be making Christ a walking contradiction.
SPEAKER_00: It's like, uh, can you make glue not sticky or something like that?
SPEAKER_00: Can anything separate us from the love of Christ?
SPEAKER_00: The one who is the embodiment of faithfulness, even in the midst of our faithlessness.
SPEAKER_00: It is, in the words of theologian Chris Green, Christ here is the manifestation of God, who God is, namely, that God would rather be a God with us than God without us.
SPEAKER_00: Christ is the manifestation that God would rather be God with us than God without us.
SPEAKER_00: Who shall separate us from the love of Christ?
SPEAKER_00: I love Paul's language here because it seems to go and move from prose to like an elevated form of poetry and praise, like worship.
SPEAKER_00: Paul begins this section, right, Who shall separate us from the love of Christ?
SPEAKER_00: And then he goes on, shout tribulation or distress, persecution, famine, nakedness, danger, sword.
SPEAKER_00: No.
SPEAKER_00: By the way, he just lists like all the conditions of wrath and death as it's understood by the covenant and Deuteronomy.
SPEAKER_00: This is the worst of the worst that Paul is naming.
SPEAKER_00: He's pulling right from the curses of Deuteronomy.
SPEAKER_00: That's as low as you can get.
SPEAKER_00: No.
SPEAKER_00: None of this can separate us from the love of Christ.
SPEAKER_00: No, he says, in all these things, Paul says we're more than conquerors.
SPEAKER_00: More than conquerors through him who loved us.
SPEAKER_00: For I am sure, this is where Paul's like confidence, his like certainty in faith seems to be like brimming over the pages here.
SPEAKER_00: Paul is very serious.
SPEAKER_00: He's very sure.
SPEAKER_00: He's very confident.
SPEAKER_00: For I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, 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.
SPEAKER_00: It doesn't get any clearer than that.
SPEAKER_00: Nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: This is the image that we get from the book of Nehemiah, the scripture that was just read.
SPEAKER_00: Nehemiah is cataloging all of ancient Israel's grievances and sins.
SPEAKER_00: Nehemiah says of our fathers, his forefathers, our forefathers.
SPEAKER_00: He said they acted presumptuously.
SPEAKER_00: He's describing Israel.
SPEAKER_00: They acted presumptuously.
SPEAKER_00: They were a stiff-necked people.
SPEAKER_00: Nehemiah says they didn't obey your commandments.
SPEAKER_00: He even says they refused to obey and were not mindful of the wonders that you performed among them.
SPEAKER_00: And they stiffened their neck.
SPEAKER_00: And they even appointed a leader to return to their slavery in Egypt.
SPEAKER_00: Like they're they're groveling and groping to get back to the pit that God just redeemed them out of.
SPEAKER_00: They're wanting to go back to sin, back to slavery.
SPEAKER_00: Nehemiah says, stiff-necked, crawling back, wanting to return to slavery in Egypt.
SPEAKER_00: And Nehemiah says, But you are God ready to forgive, gracious, merciful, slow to anger, abounding in steadfast love, and did not forsake them.
SPEAKER_00: Wow.
SPEAKER_00: He goes on.
SPEAKER_00: Even after they're brought out of Egypt, Nehemiah says, and they even they even made this golden calf and they they held it up for all the people of Israel, and they said, This is your God who brought you out of Egypt, Israel.
SPEAKER_00: Full-fledged idolatry.
SPEAKER_00: And they committed blasphemies, Nehemiah says.
SPEAKER_00: But you, in your great mercy, did not forsake them.
SPEAKER_00: You led them, Nehemiah says, with a pillar of cloud and a pillar of fire by the way that they should go.
SPEAKER_00: And he says that you gave them your good spirit to instruct them.
SPEAKER_00: And even in the midst of all this unfaithfulness, all this bickering and grumbling and complaining and stiff neck, in the midst of all this, Nehemiah says, You didn't withhold your manna.
SPEAKER_00: And you gave them water for thirst.
SPEAKER_00: And they lacked nothing.
SPEAKER_00: Forty years long, Nehemiah says, you sustain them.
SPEAKER_00: Sustain them when?
SPEAKER_00: In disobedience.
SPEAKER_00: Sustain them in their stiff neckness.
SPEAKER_00: That this is the image that precisely, this image of covenant and binding and loyalty and not forsaking that Paul sees manifest in Christ.
SPEAKER_00: That though, even in the midst of our sin, even in the midst of our faithlessness, even in the midst of darkness, famine, sword, nakedness, pestilence, nothing, Paul says, can separate us from the love of Christ.
SPEAKER_00: I don't know everything that you're going through.
SPEAKER_00: I don't know what season of life you're in, what season of your spiritual life that you're in.
SPEAKER_00: I don't know if you're in a season where you're giving yourself and your heart to things, to sin, to shame, to guilt, to addiction, to pain.
SPEAKER_00: I don't know what is going on fully in your life, but I do know this.
SPEAKER_00: According to Paul, yeah, nothing can separate you from the love of God.
SPEAKER_00: Christ is the Father's tenacious, powerful refusal to let go of us.
SPEAKER_00: Christ is the embodiment of God's loving grip on our life.
SPEAKER_00: Just a few weeks ago, I saw a bumper sticker.
SPEAKER_00: I love it.
SPEAKER_00: It said, God loves you, and there's nothing you can do about it.
SPEAKER_00: I love that.
SPEAKER_00: It's like you've been stripped of all control.
SPEAKER_00: I'm sorry to tell you, you're not in control whether you're loved by God.
SPEAKER_00: You have no say in the matter.
SPEAKER_00: Sorry.
SPEAKER_00: Nothing is more powerful than the love of God.
SPEAKER_00: This is why Paul is totally convinced that anything, angels, rulers, present, past, height, depth, anything in creation, nothing can separate us from this God who is totally resolved to be God with us.
SPEAKER_00: This is good news, friends.
SPEAKER_00: This is good news.
SPEAKER_00: This is news that I feel very comfortable saying, whatever you're in right now, whatever is going on, I can just in the authority of the gospel, just tell you, yeah, nothing can separate you from the love of Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: Nothing can separate you from the love of God.
SPEAKER_00: Does this mean we won't be in the wilderness?
SPEAKER_00: No.
SPEAKER_00: Does this mean that we won't be ourselves stiff-necked?
SPEAKER_00: I love how sometimes we can read ancient Israel and kind of look down our nose.
SPEAKER_00: You know, what a bunch of disobedient, grumbling, complaining people, as though we're any different.
SPEAKER_00: This is the only hope we have is that God is faithful, even though we have been found and proven to be faithless.
SPEAKER_00: That Christ is the embodiment of God's total resolve to be with us.
SPEAKER_00: Total resolve to be with us.
SPEAKER_00: Amen.