Romans 8:26-39 Commentary

Few biblical passages offer a greater wealth of preaching material than Romans 8:26-39. Several earlier commentaries on this site examined some of its most glittering treasures – in 2017, Scott Hoezee’s, and in 2020, mine. However, preachers whom the Spirit leads toward one of this Sunday’s Epistolary Lesson’s other glorious themes might focus on verses 29-34’s theology. There, after all, Paul describes the grounds of God’s providential, enduring and unbeatable love that he spends the rest of the chapter celebrating.

In verse 28 the apostle makes an assertion that’s almost as mysterious as it is beloved: “In all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose” (28). This helps introduce one of Romans 8’s most prominent themes: God’s unbeaten and unbeatable love. Here the apostle asserts that God’s love is so mighty that not even evil circumstances can thwart its good purpose: “the good (agathon)” of those whom God has called to love the Lord.

Yet wise preachers will help our hearers understand what Paul is not claiming in this mysterious assertion. As the New Testament scholar Anna Bowden writes, the apostle isn’t claiming that humans’ positive actions always result in positive outcomes. Nor does he claim that all things that happen to God’s dearly beloved people are good in and of themselves.

What Paul insists, instead, is that God is at work in God’s world to use all things for God’s good purposes. That God’s love is so mighty that it sovereignly bends even evil in such a way that it must ultimately somehow enhance Jesus’ friends’ wellness.

“After all” (hoti), Paul continues in verse 29, “those God foreknew (proegno) he also predestined (proorisen) to be conformed to the image of his Son (symmorphous tes eikonos tou Huiou).” This is, of course, a passage that preachers need to let the Spirit help them sort out and proclaim through the lens of their own faith and theological traditions.

But most preachers may be able to “land” in one common zone about verse 29: our destiny lies in God’s loving, powerful hands. God isn’t just in charge of our current well-being (28). The apostle insists that God is also sovereign over Jesus’ followers’ character. So preachers might note that this at least implies God sovereignly bends even the most painful things in a way that helps shape our character into greater Christlikeness (cf. v.28).

After all, while some Christians concentrate on Jesus’ friends’ predestination to eternal glory, that’s not what Paul emphasizes here. He insists that we’re “predestined to be conformed to the likeness of his Son.” God, in other words, chose God’s adopted sons and daughters not just for eternal life, but also to become more and more like God’s only natural Son, Jesus Christ our Lord.

While Genesis 1:27 reports that God created our first parents in the image of God, sin has in many ways blurred that “family resemblance.” But in Christ, Paul sings in verse 29, God is recreating God’s dearly beloved people to resemble our Lord and Savior once again more closely.

However, Paul insists that that remodeling work has a very specific goal. God, he says in verse 29, predestined God’s dearly beloved people “to be conformed to the likeness of his Son, that he might be the firstborn (prototokon) among many brothers.”

Of course, Christ is the firstborn among many brothers and sisters. But Paul may limit his focus to Christ’s adopted brothers in order to draw a grammatic parallel between God’s various sons. Yet the apostle’s basic message is that the Spirit transforms all of God’s adopted children to be more and more like our Big Brother so that the family likeness might become stronger and stronger.

Those children God “predestined,” Paul continues in verse 30, God “also called (ekalesen); those he called, he also justified (edikaiosen), those he justified, he also glorified (edoxasen).” Again the apostle seems to emphasize God’s sovereign and loving care for God’s people.

God, he insists here, doesn’t just predestine people to become more Christ-like. God also predestines God’s adopted children to be called, justified, and glorified. God, in other words, does all the “heavy lifting” in Jesus’ friends’ lives. God, asserts Paul, finishes what God starts.

With this assertion, the apostle can turn in to what is in some ways the theme of the rest of Romans 8’s glorious hymn of praise. What, he asks, can we say to all of God’s sovereign work? What conclusion can we draw from all this predestining, conforming, calling, justifying and glorifying?

“If God is for us (hyper hemon),” we can almost hear the apostle sing in verse 31, “who can be against us (kath’ hemon)?” It is, of course, a rhetorical question whose grammar implies an answer that’s a lot like, “Since God is for Jesus’ friends, no one can be against Jesus’ friends!” In verses 29-30 Paul elucidates at least some of the ways that God is “for” us. In verse 31 he goes on to insist that nothing can be against God’s adopted sons and daughters.

However, plenty of things are “against” God’s dearly beloved people. Paul, in fact, lists some of that opposition in verses 35 and 38. Christians’ opponents may include trouble, hardship, persecution, famine, nakedness and the sword. The things aligned against Jesus’ friends also sometimes include death, demons and a variety of powers.

As Hoezee noted in his 2017 commentary, those threats hit quite close to home to Rome’s embattled Christians. However, they may seem rather remote to many of Jesus’ 21^st century friends. So Romans 8 offers preachers a chance to list some of those things that are now aligned against God’s people.

“Who can be ‘against us’?” we might ask. “Is it gun violence, climate change, or political and ecclesiastical partisanship? Is it physical or mental illness, Alzheimer’s Disease, cancer or some pandemic? Are divorce, miscarriage, infertility, abuse or neglect ‘against us’?”

What, then, might preachers say about that as well as other people and things’ sometimes fierce opposition to God, God’s purposes and people? Perhaps this: none of them can align against Christians in such a way that they overcome or frustrate God’s plans and purposes for us. Our spiritual enemies may be so ferocious that they cause great harm. But God and God’s love for all that God creates is, finally, unconquerable.

As if to offer proof for that, Paul goes on to insist that God “did not spare (epheisato) his own Son, but gave him up (paredoken auton) for us all” (32). God was so determined to transform God’s adopted children that God would let nothing, including the crucifixion of God’s only “natural” son for the sake of us all, block God’s work. So it’s as if Paul insists that God’s sovereign love isn’t just irresistible. It’s also self-sacrificial.

Preachers might draw an analogy between God’s adoptive work and humanity’s adoptive work. At least in North America, it can be very costly to adopt children. No adoptive parent I know has, like God, given up a biological child in order to adopt another. However, many adopted parents must give up a great deal in order to include a child into their family.

If this even more self-sacrificing and -giving God, adds Paul in verse 32, was completely willing to give up God’s only Son for our sake, won’t God also, with that Son, “graciously give (charisetei) us all things (ta panta)?” This is another rhetorical question the apostle structures so as to anticipate a positive answer: God will, in fact, grace Jesus’ followers with everything that we need.

Illustration

 The dustcover of Mary Elise Sarotte’s The Collapse describes one of history’s greatest surprises. It notes how “On the night of November 9, 1989, massive crowds surged toward the Berlin Wall, drawn by an announcement that caught the world by surprise: East Germans could now move freely to the West.

“The Wall — the infamous symbol of a divided Cold War Europe — seemed to be falling. But the opening of the gate that night was not planned by the East German ruling regime — nor was it the result of a bargain between either Ronald Reagan or George H.W. Bush and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. It was an accident.”

Or was it?