God For Us

Maybe you keep a quiet count in your head of who is with you and who is not. Ever since the first time you were outvoted, part of you has never stopped scanning the room.

"If God be for us, who can be against us?" Paul does not use that sentence as a slogan, so it is worth taking apart. The "if" at the start is the kind Greek uses when the speaker takes the condition to be true, so Paul means that God really is for us. Paul has spent thirty verses showing why that is so, and the very next verse gives the strongest reason of all: "He that spared not his own Son, but delivered him up for us all, how shall he not with him also freely give us all things?" The argument runs from the greatest gift down to the smaller ones. God has already given the most costly thing there is, His own Son, so He is not going to refuse you anything less.

Then read what follows, because it is not what the slogan suggests. Within a few lines Paul lists what really will come against you: "tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword." He even quotes a psalm: "For thy sake we are killed all the day long." He does not soften any of it or explain it away. His question was never whether anything would oppose you. His question is whether anything can hold a sentence over you when the Judge has already ruled, and he has answered it: "It is God that justifieth."

So the warning should be plain. People use this verse like a lucky charm to get the outcome they want, and used that way it will fail them the first time famine or the sword arrives. Read the way Paul wrote it, the promise is narrower and far stronger. Everything on his list, even the sword, can still happen. Yet none of it gets the last word about whose you are, because nothing "shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord."

Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 228 is When I See the Blood (Exodus 12:13).

All 365 readings in Daily Manna