Romans – A Treatise
Chapter Eight
THE ACCUSERS SILENCED
Scripture Reading: verses 31-35, 37
WHAT SHALL WE THEN SAY TO THESE THINGS? IF GOD BE FOR US, WHO CAN BE AGAINST US? 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? WHO SHALL LAY ANYTHING TO THE CHARGE OF GOD’S ELECT? IT IS GOD THAT JUSTIFIETH. WHO IS HE THAT CONDEMNETH? IT IS CHRIST THAT DIED, YEA RATHER, THAT IS RISEN AGAIN, WHO IS EVEN AT THE RIGHT HAND OF GOD, WHO ALSO MAKETH INTERCESSION FOR US. WHO SHALL SEPARATE US FROM THE LOVE OF CHRIST? SHALL TRIBULATION, OR DISTRESS, OR PERSECUTION, OR FAMINE, OR NAKEDNESS, OR PERIL, OR SWORD? NAY, IN ALL THESE THINGS WE ARE MORE THAN CONQUERORS, THROUGH HIM THAT LOVED US.
These are the unanswered challenges of the great apostle, thrown in the face of every opposing force surrounding the pardoned sinner. We may go through them one after another, and their consideration thrills the Christian soul with the thought of the complete triumph of the Lord Jesus Christ when He rose from the tomb, having obtained eternal redemption for those who truly believe on His Name, obey His Gospel and are born again. We pray the full tide of truth revealed in Romans 8 might cascade into the consciousness of every Christian. Not a force in heaven, earth, or hell can successfully bring anything against those who put their unwavering and undivided faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. His victory is our victory; we are identified with Him in death; we are identified with Him in resurrection power. In this chapter the completeness of our Lord’s triumph sweeps aside the entire tide of time and presents us glorified with Him; for whom He justified, them He also glorified.
Now we come to the abundant detail of this mighty triumph. The first is, “What shall we then say to these things? If God be for us, who can be against us?” Oh how we need to realize the significance of the great truth that God is for us. Let us remember this is the One against whom we were rebellious. At one time we were enemies by wicked works against the God who created us. We shut up our hearts against Him and refused to allow Him to have anything to do with our lives. All we like sheep had gone astray, we had turned every one to his own way. There was not a single individual on the face of the earth that sought after God; they had all turned aside. We were indeed hell-bound rebels, cherishing the pursuit of our own will above everything else. Perhaps the basic reason so few accept the Lord Jesus Christ in these days is that this truth regarding man’s total depravity is not presented as it should be. Throughout these first seven chapters of Romans, as he stands in this great universal courtroom, the apostle has been depicting the sinner’s hopelessness away from God. He diagnoses man’s sinful disease from the crown of his head to the sole of his foot; nothing but wounds, bruises, and putrifying sores. In his entire spiritual being, not a single heartbeat would respond either to the righteousness or goodness of God.
But God, who is rich in mercy, for His great love wherewith He loved us, even when we were dead in sins, hath quickened us together with Christ, (by grace ye are saved).
This is the glad music of heaven’s eternal song filtering down through the dark shadows of earth’s spiritual night to reach us in all our need, bringing us to the God who loved us in spite of all we had done against Him.
Since God has been so superabundantly gracious toward us, since He has explored every avenue of endeavor to bring us into His presence in righteousness and peace, and since He has accomplished this by the death and resurrection of His own beloved Son, then the apostle rightly asks, “What shall we say to these things?” It is as though this brilliant attorney is overreaching himself, carried forward by the excellent power of his own legal argument. Before the magnificence of the grace of God he says, “What shall we say?” From the very depths of his heart he intimates, “If God be for us, who can be against us?” Since God has so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life, and since this necessitated that the Son of Man, the darling of God’s bosom, should be lifted up on a cruel cross and die the death of the guilty, then, since the God who has done all this is for us, what does it matter what others might say or do?
It is as though Paul ranged the entire galaxy of the hosts of the infernal regions, the devil and all his fallen angels upon the ramparts of heaven, and declared them to be impotent before the God who loved us. “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 supreme unspeakable gift of heaven was given when “the Father sent the Son to be the Saviour of the world.” All the multitude of blessings, the peace, the joy, the care, the providential goodness of our God, are merely incidentals after such a magnificent gift. It is as though the Spirit of God reassures our hearts that since God has given the darling of His bosom to be our Savior, to die on the Cross, and since, under His judgment, He allowed that One to go down into the depths of anguish and despair to bear our sins, then, after all that nothing will He withhold from them that walk uprightly. From the eternal depths of heaven, His goodness comes forth in flood tide through the open channel of the Cross of Calvary.
