³⁵ Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Will tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? ³⁶ Just as it is written, “For Your sake we are being put to death all day long; We were considered as sheep to be slaughtered.”

Grace saved us and grace keeps us. Therefore we have nothing to worry about with God’s love. Nothing can separate us from the love of Christ. This poetic outburst of Paul’s is bookended with the answer, “[Nothing] will be able to separate us from the love God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Rom 8:39). This makes up our complete security package.

Paul uses his famous theological use of a question to advance his logic, in this case to lead in to the conclusion. Remember the issue of justification, the main focus of Romans, deals with how sinful, fallen humans can become right with God. It comes not through our efforts of righteousness, but by God’s grace working through our faith: “[A]ll have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, being justified as a gift by His grace through the redemption which is in Christ Jesus … so that He would be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus” (Rom 3:23-24, 26).

Justification by grace, therefore, is axiomatic. A corollary to this foundational truth is that our relationship with God is now secure, for it is His grace that keeps us. We are eternally secure. If it is true that “God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us” (Rom 5:8), then how could we possibly lose His love? We did nothing to earn it, qualify for it or merit it. He loved us while we were sinful, fallen creatures who were rejecting Him. How much more, now that we are justified and loved by Him, will we be secure in that love? If our sin, when we were unjustified, did not keep Him from loving us to begin with, how could our sin, now that we are in a state of being justified (see Rom 7:14-25), exasperate His love to the point of withholding it from us? That makes no sense at all.

We may struggle with this is when the circumstances of life turn against us. To Paul’s original readers, that would include tribulation, distress, persecution, etc. When things go “bad” in our lives, we begin to question God’s love. But as Paul points out from Israel’s experience, with quotes from Psalm 44:22, suffering is not unique to Christians. God’s people have struggled with it throughout their history. As Christians, though, we see a purpose in our suffering as “being delivered over to death for Jesus’ sake, so that the life of Jesus also may be manifested in our mortal flesh” (2 Cor 4:11).

Lord, I confess to sometimes questioning Your love in difficult times of my life.