Daily Manna · Day 228 · August 16
God For Us
“If God be for us, who can be against us?”
A tally kept in a room. Who is with you, who is not, and the quiet scanning that never entirely switches off after the first time you were outvoted.
If God be for us, who can be against us? Take the sentence apart, because Paul does not use it as a slogan. The first clause is the kind of conditional Greek uses when the condition is assumed to be true: since God is for us. And he has spent thirty verses establishing why anybody would think so, finishing on the Son who was not spared, which is the costliest ground available and the ground he has already worked. The argument runs from the greatest to the least. The expensive thing has been done already; nothing cheaper is going to be refused.
Read what follows, because it is not what the slogan implies. Within a few lines Paul is listing what will in fact come against you: tribulation, distress, persecution, famine, nakedness, peril, sword. And he quotes a psalm about being killed all the day long, and does not soften it or explain it away. His question was never whether anything would oppose you. It is whether anything can hold a verdict over you when the judge has already ruled.
Which is where the warning belongs, and it should be plain. This verse gets used as a charm for outcomes, and it will fail anybody who uses it that way; the first famine or the first sword finishes that reading. Taken as Paul wrote it the promise is narrower and far stronger. Nothing that comes against you gets the last word about whose you are. Everything else on his list, up to and including the sword, is still on the table.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 228 is When I See the Blood (Exodus 12:13).