If God is For Us (Romans 8:31-39)
Big Idea: Nothing can defeat you, deprive you, condemn you, or separate you from God's love.
Here's a question for every personality test and dating profile: how many tabs do you have open right now on all your devices?
The average person has somewhere between 9 and 11 browser tabs open at any given time. Some people keep just a few. Others have dozens, maybe hundreds, scattered across every device they own.
Your tab count likely shows more about who you are and how you live than any test could. People with few tabs open often marry those with many tabs open. They do this to spend their lives driving each other crazy.
According to Paul in this passage, the Christian life only needs two tabs open. If you hold on to these two realities, you will have everything you need. You need both, but if you have both, you will be able to face your life with confident hope no matter how hard things get.
Two Tabs
Tab One: Difficulty. Lots of difficulty. Christian, you can expect your life to be hard. Take a look at this passage and you will get an honest assessment of what life will be like.
There are two categories of difficulties that this passage mentions. Verse 35 mentions tribulation, distress, persecution, famine, nakedness, danger, and the sword. Paul knew firsthand what he was talking about, because he had experienced all of these except possibly the last one. He then quotes Psalm 44:22, in which God’s people cry out to him after suffering defeat from their enemies. In other words, Paul is saying that the experience of suffering as one of God’s people is not unique. Believers still face suffering, even because they are faithful to God, just like God's people in the past.
But that’s not all. In verses 38 to 39, Paul lists all the bad things that any Christian might face. He mentions every force that can come against a Christian: death, life, angels, leaders, things happening now, future things, powers, and the heights and depths. Paul is throwing the kitchen sink of everything that stands against us as Christians. He names every difficulty that a Christian may face, and reminds us that some of our opposition is supernatural.
Christian: expect suffering in your life. Not just a little, but a lot of suffering. This includes many difficulties and tough challenges. That’s the first tab you need to keep open in your life. If you don’t have this tab open, you won’t understand how hard life can be.
Tab Two: Here's the other tab you need to keep open: since God stands with us, no opposing force against us will prevail. He cares for his people, keeps them safe from all enemies, and will one day give them eternal life in a new creation. No matter how difficult life becomes, God's people are always the objects of his loving care.
You need both of these tabs open in your life. Expect suffering in your life, massive suffering. But know that no matter what happens to you, you are held by a God who loves you, stands with you, and will bring you safely home. No enemy — not sin, not flesh, not decay, not death, not shame — can prevail against you. No power in heaven or on earth can separate you from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. Nothing can thwart his purposes or rob you of your final glory.
Five Unanswerable Questions
Today, we’re coming to the end of one of the greatest chapters in the entire Bible. This paragraph concludes not only this magnificent chapter but Paul's entire argument so far. Every human being stood under God's wrath, and yet God acted through Jesus to justify guilty sinners. If you are in Christ, there is no condemnation for you. He has given you a completely new way to live, poured his Spirit into you, and adopted you as his own child. And he will finish what he started. This is the beauty of what God has done in saving you.
As Paul concludes this amazing chapter, he asks a question: “What then shall we say to these things?” (8:31). With this question, Paul signals that he’s drawing his conclusions from what he’s said in this chapter. He’s saying, “In light of what I have been teaching, what conclusions follow?”
Paul draws his conclusions in the form of five unanswerable questions. Each question connects to the one before. It goes from creation to the courtroom, then to the cross, and finally to God's unbreakable love. Together they form one of the most powerful sustained arguments in all of Scripture. These questions tell us how we can live with assurance with both the reality of ongoing suffering and an unshakable confidence in God’s enduring love.
Here are the five rhetorical questions Paul asks in Romans 8:31-39.
If God is for us, who can be against us? (8:31)
That’s the first question.
If you took only the second half — "Who can be against us?" — the answer is, “Where do I start?” The unbelieving world is against us; persecution is something we can and should expect. Our own flesh is against us, with remaining sin and desires that war within us. The devil and his demons are against us. We do not fight against flesh and blood (Ephesians 6:12). Satan is a roaring lion seeking someone to devour (1 Peter 5:8). Death itself is against us. We have no shortage of enemies.
But that is not the question Paul asks. Paul asks, "If God is for us, who can be against us?" And that changes everything. If God is for us, and he has foreknown, predestined, called, justified, and glorified us, who can stand against us? There is no answer to that question. All the powers of hell may set themselves against us and still they cannot prevail, because God is on our side. As James Montgomery Boice puts it:
It is as if Paul is challenging us to place all the possible enemies we can think of on one-half of an old-fashioned balance scale, as if we were weighing peanuts. Then, when we have all the peanuts assembled on the scale, he throws an anvil onto the other side of the balance. That side comes crashing down, and the peanuts are scattered. “If God is for us, who can be against us?” Who can stand against God? The answer is “nobody.” Nothing can defeat us if the Almighty God of the universe is on our side.
If God is for us, who can be against us? Nobody. Absolutely nobody.
Second question:
He who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all, how will he not also with him graciously give us all things? (8:32)
Paul answers with what Mark Dever calls perhaps the most comforting verse in the entire Bible. He makes an a fortiori argument, a form of reasoning that says if something is true in the greater case, it must be true in the lesser. If a father pays $500,000 in tuition to put his daughter through medical school, he is not going to complain about buying her a $30 stethoscope.
Paul's argument is this: if God was ready to give up his Son on the cross and made the biggest sacrifice for our salvation, is there anything he would keep from us now? Whatever you need, he will give you, because he has already given you his Son. Spurgeon puts it this way:
What must it have cost God to give up his Son to die for his people?… All the wants of all of us put together could only make one little drop in comparison with the tremendous ocean of benevolence which flowed out of God’s heart when he spared not his own Son, but delivered him up for us all. As we look at Christ, whom God has given to us, we must believe that, with him, he will give us whatsoever we need.
He has already given you his best. He is not going to hold anything back from you now.
So far Paul has established two things: no enemy can prevail against you, and no good thing will be kept from you. Now he pushes even deeper with his third question:
Who shall bring any charge against God’s elect? (8:33)
Questions three and four return us to the courtroom. Who will bring charges against us? The temptation is to answer with a long list. Our conscience, for one. The devil, who never stops pressing charges. Scripture calls him "the accuser of the brothers" (Revelation 12:10). He is always ready to say: there you are, failing again, as evil as ever. And no doubt there are plenty of other voices willing to point the finger.
But none of those charges can be sustained. Why not? Because God has chosen us, and God has justified us. Every accusation fails because Satan is arguing his case before a Judge who has already decided in our favor. We have already been cleared in this courtroom. The verdict has been rendered. The charges will not stick.
Then Paul asks a related question:
Who is to condemn? (8:34)
Even if a charge were somehow filed, who has the authority to pronounce condemnation? Paul's answer is stunning: the one person who could condemn is instead the one pleading our case. “Who is to condemn? Christ Jesus is the one who died—more than that, who was raised—who is at the right hand of God, who indeed is interceding for us.” The one person who could condemn — because he bore the sin — is instead the one pleading our case. Paul closes off both ends of the courtroom. No charge can stick because God justifies. No sentence can be handed down because Christ intercedes. No cosmic court can undo what God has done.
Martin Luther once said:
You should tell the devil, ‘Just by telling me that I am a miserable, great sinner you are placing a sword and weapon into my hand with which I can decisively overcome you; yea, with your own weapon I can kill and floor you. For if you can tell me that I am a poor sinner, I on the other hand, can tell you that Christ died for sinners, and is their Intercessor … You remind me of the boundless, great faithfulness and benefaction of my Lord and Savior Jesus Christ … to Him I direct you. You may accuse and condemn Him. Let me rest in peace; for on His shoulders, not on mine, lie all my sins.
No enemy can prevail against us, no good thing will be kept from us, no charge can be made to stick, and no condemnation can be handed down. And Paul is not finished yet. Here’s his fifth and final question:
Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? (8:35-39)
This is the climactic question, and the answer is what one commentator calls "the highest rung in the ladder of comfort." Who can separate you from the love of Christ? Paul scans the horizon. He goes through pain and struggles, facing powerful forces from above. He moves through all dimensions of time and space, naming the worst things that could come between us and Christ's love. And his conclusion is unambiguous: not one of them can do it. Stack every destructive force against you. None of them can sever you from the love of God.
John Stott says:
The apostle hurls these questions out into space, as it were, defiantly, triumphantly, challenging any creature in heaven or earth or hell to answer them or to deny the truth that is contained in them. But there is no answer, for nobody and nothing can harm the redeemed people of God.
Christian, you are secure in the Savior because of the promises of the gospel. No enemy can defeat you. No good thing will be denied to you. No accusation can be proven true. No judgment can be given. Nothing in all of creation can separate you from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. God is for you, he will provide for you, he has cleared you, Christ intercedes for you, and nothing can ever take you from his love. Nothing can defeat you, deprive you, condemn you, or separate you from God's love.
How wonderful, how glorious, how secure is the gospel! Those who are in Christ Jesus are as secure as the love of God, the merit, power, and intercession of Christ can make them. They are hedged around with mercy. They are enclosed in the arms of everlasting love. (Charles Hodge)
So keep those two tabs open. Tab one: the Christian life is tough. Paul wants you to expect not just regular pain but strong, ongoing struggles coming at you from all sides, including unseen opposition. Tab two: you are held by a God whose love is stronger than every enemy, every accusation, and every force in heaven or on earth. The God who is for you will never stop being for you, and nothing in all creation can take you from his love.
These truths are not reserved for the mountaintop; they are meant for the valley floor. When the diagnosis is frightening, God is for you. When the marriage is strained, Christ is not your accuser but your Intercessor. When grief sits heavy and words won't come, nothing in that sorrow can separate you from his love. When the enemy rehearses every past failure, remember the verdict has already been handed down: justified, cleared, held. Whatever form suffering takes — relational, physical, spiritual — you face it not as someone abandoned, but as someone anchored. No force in heaven or on earth can loosen that grip.
Keep these two truths together, and they will give you something the world cannot offer and cannot take away: the freedom to look your life honestly in the face, knowing that the God who gave his Son for you will never, ever let you go.
