Positively Separate

Romans 8:38–39 pro­vides a list of all kinds of things. You’re prob­a­bly famil­iar with it. It goes some­thing along these lines, “Nei­ther A nor B, nei­ther C nor D, nei­ther E nor F, will be able to sep­a­rate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.” While I have always loved the verse and always loved what it was say­ing, I some­times missed what was going on. I, pos­si­bly like many oth­ers, knew the out­line of the verse but didn’t have it mem­o­rized. In my mind I sup­pose I was think­ing that it men­tioned things like: death, famine, pain, poverty, oppres­sion, etc.

But as I’ve reread the verse and reread it again and again, I’ve real­ized what you per­haps saw long ago: many of the things on the list aren’t neg­a­tive. In fact, I don’t know if they could be inter­preted as neg­a­tive in any light. I’d put life, angels, present, future, and cre­ation in that cat­e­gory. And then there are the neg­a­tives (death and demons), and those that are in the mid­dle. If I go back to what my ini­tial assump­tions were, I was think­ing this verse was about all the neg­a­tives. About things tear­ing God and I apart, and about the writer’s assur­ance that none of those things could con­quer the bond between a believer and their Lord.

But in many ways, it isn’t. It’s about the positives.

The pos­i­tives?

Strange, I know. We don’t often see life or angels or cre­ation as things that can tear us and God apart, but appar­ently they can. Nev­er­the­less, we have assur­ance from Paul that through God’s con­quest, they can’t.

We’ll get into some of those things next week.

Tak­ing Heart,

Paul Loewen