Daily Manna · Day 28 · January 28
More Than
“Nay, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him that loved us.”
Rome, the late fifties of the first century. A letter arrives for a congregation meeting in houses across a city that does not know they exist. Within about a decade, Tacitus records, Nero will be using Christians there as a public spectacle. Some of the people who first heard this sentence read aloud died that way.
I want you to hold that while you read it, because we quote it as though it were about a difficult quarter. Paul lists what all these things means, and a difficult quarter is nowhere in it: tribulation, distress, persecution, famine, nakedness, peril, sword. Then he quotes an old psalm about being counted as sheep for the slaughter, and he quotes it approvingly, as a description of the present. He is not promising that the sword misses. He is saying the sword cannot reach the thing that actually holds you, which is the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord, and he spends the next two verses listing everything that has been checked and cleared: death, life, angels, principalities, powers, things present, things to come, height, depth, any other creature.
More than conquerors is a surplus word. A conqueror survives the thing. What Paul claims is that the thing gets used, that it is worked into the account rather than merely endured.
You went back over the diagnosis, or the email, looking for a loophole that is not in the sentence. There isn't one. The truth on offer is not that the sentence will be revised. It is that the sentence was already inside Paul's list when he wrote nay, and he wrote nay anyway.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 28 is What Mean These Stones (Joshua 4:6).