Romans 8:26-39 Commentary

Over the years God has graced me with people whom we sometimes call “prayer partners.” Those brothers and sisters in Christ not only promised to pray for me but also received my promises to pray for them. God used those partnerships to bless me in more ways than I can even begin to count.

In this Sunday’s Epistolary Lesson, however, Paul refers to the greatest prayer partner ever. In fact, this partner helps make all other prayer partnerships meaningful. Without this partner’s prayers on our behalf, Christians’ prayers would be woefully short-sighted and flat.

The apostle insists Jesus’ followers’ powerful and perpetual prayer partner is the “Spirit” [pneuma*] (26a). Of course, that’s not Romans 8’s first reference to the Holy Spirit. Its verses 1-25 contain no less than 10 references to the Spirit’s life-giving power. Last Sunday’s Epistolary Lesson included Paul’s reference to the Spirit’s “partnership” with our spirit to confirm our adoption into God’s family (16).

In this Sunday’s Lesson Paul refers to yet another kind of partnership between the Holy Spirit and God’s beloved people’s spirits. The Spirit, Paul sings in verse 26, “helps [synantilambanetai] us in our weakness [astheneia].” In fact, the Greek antonym syn adds to this “help” a sense of partnership between the Spirit and our spirit. It suggests our human frailty is something these spirits somehow together grab hold of and deal with.

Paul suggests among those human vulnerabilities with which Jesus’ friends struggle is not knowing “what we ought to pray for [proseuchometha]” (26b). We generally assume we know how and what we should pray. Yet we may wonder if we should pray, for example, for the physical and emotional healing of an injured 89 year-old widower whom dementia stalks. How should Christians pray about a war a nation wages because it fears its survival is at stake?

Thankfully, Paul insists, both then and always, “the Spirit himself intercedes [hyperentynchanei] for us through wordless groans [stenagmois alaletois]” (26c). Even when God’s adopted children don’t know what to pray for, the Spirit graciously prays for us. Even when we pray for the “wrong” things, the Spirit steps in to pray for us. In fact, even when we’re unable to pray, the Spirit somehow intercedes for us on our behalf.

So it doesn’t matter if Jesus’ followers don’t know how exactly to pray. In one sense, it doesn’t even matter if our prayers are somehow lacking in their content or focus. The apostle insists, as The Message paraphrases verse 26, the Spirit “does our praying in and for us.”

In fact, Paul goes on to add in verse 26b, “the Spirit himself intercedes for us through wordless groans.” The Greek isn’t especially clear about whose groans are offered. The Message paraphrases this verse as the Spirit “making prayer out of our wordless sighs, our aching groans.”

The Holy Spirit always knows what to pray. After all, as Paul celebrates in verse 27, “the Spirit intercedes [entunchanei] for God’s people [hagion] in accordance with the will of God.” The Spirit of the Triune God never has to question whether the Spirit’s prayers align with God’s will. While even Jesus’ closest friends sometimes wonder about God’s will for specific situations, the Spirit knows God’s will perfectly.

Yet preachers can admit verse 27 offers some theological mystery. The Triune God, we profess, is one God. So it’s hard to fully understand how the member of the Trinity that is the Spirit can intercede for God’s people before another member of the Trinity that is the Father. Perhaps, then, mystified preachers need to say little more than that Paul is emphasizing the accuracy of the Spirit’s prayers on our behalf.

Some Christians can recite by heart verse 28’s stirring profession, “In all things God works for the good of those who love him.” Yet fewer of us may know how this affirmation relates to Paul’s profession that immediately precedes it: “the Spirit intercedes for God’s people in accordance with the will of God.”

Might the apostle be alluding to the disappointment of what from time to time seems like God’s failure to answer our prayers? Is the apostle speaking to the grief that sometimes grows out of God’s “no” to some of God’s adopted children’s prayers that seem most right and appropriate to us?

Paul may be insisting that even when God answers “no” to our prayers, God is somehow still providentially “working” [synergei] for our “good” [agathon] (28). Preachers, however, want to be pastorally wise in handling this profession that Christians have sometimes used to accidentally bludgeon suffering Christians. Some of God’s adopted children have basically told brothers and sisters in Christ to quit mourning because God is busy transforming our grief into something good.

That, however, implies that God doesn’t really care about the misery God is somehow using for our good. It also implies that Jesus’ friends know the good God is producing through our misery. It, what’s more, ignores the question of why God doesn’t use something less painful to produce the good for which God longs for Jesus’ followers.

When preachers link verses 26-27 to verses 28ff. we want to do so with deep humility and care for those to whose prayers God has said “no.” Then the Spirit can help us gently but hopefully mine some of verses’ 28-39’s almost indescribable riches.

Verse 28 reminds God’s dearly beloved people that God is graciously committed to the well-being of all people whom God has kletois (“called”). In fact, insists Paul, God is actively synergei (“working”) for our benefit. God is turning into our good not just the things that are good, but panta (“all things”).

Preachers can admit to some mystery surrounding “together” (the syn part of synergei). The Message paraphrases verse 28a as “In every detail of our lives of love for God is worked into something good.” The New Living Translation (NLT) paraphrases it as “God causes everything to work together for those who love God.” The bottom line? Even when God says “no” to our prayers, we want to trust God is working not for our harm or even neutral impact, but for our good.

Verse 31 suggests not even God’s “no” to our prayers is a sign of God’s opposition or even indifference towards us. “If God is for [hyper] us,” Paul asks in verse 31, “Who can be against [kath’] us?” Paul structures this question in a way that strongly implies God is, in fact, our ally – even when God offers a negative response to our prayers. God is our relentless victor even in the face of the forces of sin, Satan and death.

On top of all that, the apostle insists God has promised “all things” (32b) even to those to whose prayers God sometimes says “no.” There he writes, “He who did not spare [epheisato] his own Son, but gave him up [paredoken] for us all – how will he not also, along with him, graciously give [charisetai] us all things?”

In yet another rhetorical question, Paul points to the gift of God’s own Son, Jesus Christ our Lord, as a sign of God’s extraordinary generosity. Since God gave up God’s only Son in order to be tortured to death for the sakes of God’s adopted children, we can be utterly confident that God will give us ta panta (“all things”) that we really need.

So even God’s “no” to some of Jesus’ friends prayers is not a sign of God’s stinginess. As The Message so lyrically paraphrases verse 32, “If God didn’t hesitate to put everything on the line for us, embracing our condition and exposing himself to the worst by sending his own Son, is there anything else he wouldn’t gladly and freely do for us?”

In fact, as Paul so gloriously asserts in verses 38-39, not even God’s “no’s” to some of our prayers can separate Jesus’ sometimes suffering followers from God’s love. Here the apostle alludes to some of things to which God seems to say “yes” when we pray. God sometimes says “yes” to the thanatos (“death”) of a child for whose healing we fervently pray. God sometimes says “yes” to the dynameis (“powers”) that equip despots and tyrants to harm innocent people.

Yet Paul insists not even those kinds of painful “yes’s” can separate us from God’s unconditional love for us in Jesus Christ. In the end death and life, angels and demons, the present, future and powers, as well as height and depths must submit to God’s gracious love for all that God creates. “Absolutely nothing,” as The Message paraphrases verse 39, “can get between us and God’s love because of the way Jesus our Master has embraced us.”

*I have here and elsewhere added in brackets the Greek words for the English words the NIV translation uses.

Illustration

In his June 22, 2015, article in the New York Times entitled, “Humankind’s Existentially Lucky Numbers,” George Johnson perhaps inadvertently offers an example of God’s providence. In it he notes how four fundamental forces rule reality but then asks why the number isn’t three or five or 17.

Matter is built from a grab bag of particles whose masses differ so wildly that they appear to have been handed out by what Johnson calls “a punch-drunk God.” The proton weighs 0.9986 as much as the neutron, and each is more than 1,835 times as massive as the electron.

These values, like all the others making up the spec sheet of the universe, seem so arbitrary. Yet if they had been slightly different, theorists tell us, the universe would not have given rise to intelligent life.

Rejecting the possibility that this was nothing more than a lucky accident, physicists have been looking for some underlying principle — a compelling explanation for why everything could only have unfolded in this particular way…

With a slight suspension of disbelief, we can imagine what it would be like if John F. Kennedy had lived out his presidency. But physics isn’t played that way: If a number called alpha, which governs the strength of electromagnetism, were infinitesimally larger or smaller, stars could not have formed, leaving a lifeless void.

Alpha’s value seems no more predictable than digits randomly spit out by a lottery machine: 0.0072973525698. One of the greatest mysteries of physics is what the physicist Richard Feynman called, “a magic number that comes to us with no understanding by man.” Other values, like the mass of the Higgs, or the strength of the force that binds together the cores of atoms, appear to be just as finely tuned. “Bump the dials just barely,” Johnson notes, “and nothing like our universe could exist.”