Daily Manna · Day 28 · January 28
More Than
“Nay, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him that loved us.”
Picture Rome in the late fifties of the first century. A letter arrives for a church that meets in houses across a city that hardly knows they exist. Within a few years, the historian Tacitus tells us, Nero would be putting Christians there to death as a public show. Some of the people who first heard this sentence read aloud may well have died that way.
Keep that in mind as you read it, because we often quote it as if it were about a hard few months at work. Paul spells out what "all these things" means, and a hard few months is nowhere on the list: "tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword." Then he quotes an old psalm, "we are accounted as sheep for the slaughter," as a plain description of life for believers right then. He is not promising that the sword will miss. He is saying the sword cannot reach the thing that really holds you, which is "the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord." Then he spends the next two verses listing everything that has been checked and cleared: "death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come," and "height, nor depth, nor any other creature."
"More than conquerors" is one word in Greek, and it means to win completely, to more than win. A conqueror merely survives the battle. Paul says that in Christ even the battle is turned to our good.
Maybe you went back over the diagnosis, or the email, looking for a way out of it that the verse does not offer. Paul offers no such exit. What he offers is better: your hard thing was already on his list when he wrote "Nay," and he wrote "Nay" anyway. Nothing on that list, and nothing you are facing, "shall be able to separate us from the love of God."
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 28 is What Mean These Stones (Joshua 4:6).