GOD'S GREAT NEWS for MAN'S GREAT PROBLEM - Romans 1-8
God is Good
Ask a rabbi a question, and you'll probably hear a story. Ask Jesus a question, and you're apt to hear a parable. Here is a classic Jewish folktale entitled God is Good.
Two men set out on a journey together. They took a donkey to carry their luggage, a torch to light their way at night, and a rooster who was a friend of the donkey. The rooster sat on the donkey's head as they walked. One of the men was deeply spiritual; the second was a skeptic. On the journey they frequently spoke about the Lord. "In all things, God is good," said the first companion. "We will see if your opinion bears out on the trip," said the second.
Shortly before dusk the two men arrived in a small village where they sought lodging for the night. Despite all their knocking and inquiring, no one offered them a bed. They left the village and travelled a mile or more before they set up camp. "I thought you said God is good," the skeptic said sarcastically. "God has decided this is the best place for us to sleep tonight," replied the spiritual man.
They made their beds beneath a large tree, just a few paces off the main road from the village. They tied the donkey to a tree about 30 yards away. Just as they were lighting the torch for the night, they heard a deep roaring. A lion had killed the donkey and carried it off to eat. Quickly the two men climbed the large tree to escape the danger. "You still say God is good?" the skeptic asked angrily. "If the lion hadn't eaten the donkey, perhaps he would right now be eating you and me. God is good," his friend concluded.
Moments later a crow from the rooster sent them higher into the tree. From their lofty perch they watched a wildcat carrying away the rooster in his teeth. Before the skeptic could complain, the spiritual man declared, "The rooster's crow warned us and saved us. God is good." A few minutes later, a strong wind arose and blew out their torch, the only comfort to the men in the dark night. Again the skeptic taunted his friend, "It appears that the goodness of God is working overtime this evening." This time the believer was quiet.
The next morning, the two men walked back into the village for food. They soon discovered that a large band of outlaws had ravaged the town in the night, robbing the entire village of all provisions.
With this news, the man of faith turned to the skeptic and said, "Finally, it has become clear. Had we been given a room in the village last night, we would have been robbed along with all the villagers. If the wind had not blown out our torch, the bandits who traveled along the road would have discovered us and robbed us too. It is clear, that in all things, God is good."
It is a true principle: God works all things together for good to those who love Him and are called according to His purpose. This is the first principle. Paul expounds it and extends it in Rom. 8:28-30.
The Sovereign Love of God: the Father
We have turned to Paul's expansive vision of God's love for the believer in Rom. 8:26-39. In vs. 26, 27, Paul spoke His final words about the deeply personal love of God expressed for us through the indwelling Spirit. The Spirit helps our weakness by groaning with us, by perfectly empathizing with our pain, and then perfectly translating our pain to our caring Father through a divine communing too deep for human words. The ministry of the indwelling Spirit in our deepest hurts, groans and longings is a ministry too perfect and profound for words. In fact, Paul recognizes the inadequacy of words in describing how marvelously the Spirit helps our weakness. After describing its echoes in vs. 26, 27, there are no more words to write of the love of God expressed through the Spirit. That love is a love too deep for words.
But if that love is too deeply personal for words, the sovereign love of the Father for believers is almost too large for words. Moving from the intensely personal to the universal and eternal, Paul now considers the sovereign love of the Father that transcends time and circumstance. This Father's love mysteriously weaves all our circumstances together into a tapestry of beauty that derives meaning out of all the circumstances of our lives, even the most difficult and deplorable. This Father's love is a love with a purpose, a timeless plan where He set His love on us and has already laid out the steps we will take with Him. It is a transcendent love, an eternal love, a love too large to be measured. It is that sovereign love of the Father that we study in Rom. 8:28-30.
The Enigma of Evil
Paul proclaims confidently the first principle of vs. 28, "And we know that God causes all things to work together for good to those who love God, to those who are called according to His purpose." This has stuck in the craw of anyone who is serious about their faith. How can Paul say this?
This week I was praying for the folks in our church, family-by-family, person-by-person, name-by-name. As I prayed, each family had burdens and worries that I prayed about. So many families had pain surrounding jobs that we were quite sure God led us into, but the job has become a quagmire. Did God lead us into these jobs to curse us, to make things harder than we could bear, to send us on a wild goose chase after a paycheck that doesn't meets our needs anyway? What about when you marry a man or woman and they are a profound disappointment to you? What about the way sickness or harsh circumstances seem to thwart the very ministry you thought God had called you to, making your life so much smaller than you had hoped? Did God lead you awry, seeking to destroy your life? The evil one is there to sow these seeds of doubt, making God out to be a miser whose best gifts seem to be reserved for someone else ... anyone else but you or me. There are times in our lives when Rom. 8:28 seems to taunt us, rather than encourage our faith.
But Rom. 8:28 speaks directly to the spiritual dilemma of the 20th century. This dilemma, and one man's classic modern response, is quoted in the "Verbatim" column of this week's TIME. Norman Mailer said, "If God is all good, then he is not all powerful. If God is all powerful, then he is not all good. I am a disbeliever in the omnipotence of God because of the Holocaust. But for 35 years or so, I have been believing that he is doing the best he can." I'm so glad that Norman Mailer has judged God with such "mercy" and "justice," if not wisdom and humility.
Elie Wiesel, the Jewish writer who survived the Holocaust and has devoted his life to preserving the memory of all who suffered, has stumbled in his faith in a similar way. In his Memoirs, he recounted his own struggle through a conversation he had with the famous Rebbe Schneerson. The Rebbe had read some of Elie's work and asked Elie one night to explain why he was angry with God. Elie replied, "Because I loved Him too much." The Rebbe disagreed: "To love God is to accept that you do not understand Him." Elie then asked whether one could love God without having faith. The Rebbe said faith had to precede all the rest. Then Elie asked the crucial question: "Rebbe, how can you believe in God after Auschwitz?" The Rebbe looked at Elie in silence for a long moment, his hands resting on the table. Then he replied, in a soft, barely audible voice, "How can you not believe in God after Auschwitz?" That is the conundrum: which is the greater abyss, the observable Aushwitz or the unthinkable world without God?
This is the spiritual problem of 20th century America. TIME magazine every year or so explores the nature of evil, and every time, more questions than answers are generated. Always the spectre of the Holocaust and the slain millions in this century cause the thinking man or woman to wonder where God's goodness has prevailed in our time. But this problem has plagued humanity since the debate of Job and his three friends. I think the greater spiritual crisis of the 20th century is our secular and arrogant response to the Holocaust and the enigma of evil in our day. We have sat in judgment over God, like Elie Wiesel and Norman Mailer. We have declared our high-tech intellect to be the only higher intelligence in the universe. We think our century is all there is, and our achievements the glory of the ages. But we fail to even begin to perceive the mind of God and the greater glory marked out in God's plan for all who love Him and are called according to His purpose.
There is another Jewish folktale that illustrates this beautifully. Once there were two young brothers who had spent their entire lives in the city. They had never seen a farmer's field or pasture. One day they decided to take a trip into the countryside. As they walked along, they spied a farmer plowing, and were puzzled by what he was doing. One brother asked, "What is this man doing? He marches back and forth all day, scarring the earth with long ditches. Why should anyone ruin such a fine meadow like that?"
On the return leg of their hike, they passed by the same field. This time the farmer was walking among the furrows, sowing grains of wheat as he went. The same brother was appalled, saying, "Now what's he doing? He's crazy! He's throwing perfectly good grains of wheat into these ditches! The country is no place for me. These people act as if they have no sense. I'm going back to the city." Away he went toward his home.
But the other brother stayed in the country, and after a few weeks he saw wonderful changes taking shape in the farmer's field. Fresh green shoots began to sprout among the furrows in the field, covering it with a lushness that delighted him. He fired off a note to his brother to return to the country to see the miraculous growth. His brother returned, and was likewise amazed at the beauty of the field. Together they watched the green shoots grow into a golden field of tall wheat. They now began to understand the reason for the farmer's work.
When the wheat became ripe, the farmer came with his scythe and began to cut it down. The brother who had returned from the city couldn't believe it, saying, "What's this imbecile doing now? All summer long he worked so hard to grow this beautiful wheat, and now he's destroying it with his own hands! He is a madman after all! I've had it! I'm going back to the city." So away he went, never to return.
But the other brother had more patience. He waited in the country and watched the farmer collect the wheat and take it to his granary. He saw how cleverly he separated the chaff, and how carefully he stored the rest. And he was filled with awe when he realized that by sowing a bag of seed, the farmer had harvested a whole field of grain. Only then did he truly understand that the farmer had reason for everything he did.
"This is how it is with God's works too," he concluded. "We mortals see only the beginnings of His plan. We cannot understand the full purpose and end of His creation. So we must have faith in His wisdom." (Condensed from The Book of Virtues, pg. 774, 5).
Our great spiritual crisis in this century is not seen in the evil that has taken place, but in our response to it. We have exchanged faith for scientific observation, and humility for unshackled arrogance. We need to return to the enigma of evil and let it return us to the first principle: that no matter what, God is good.
I was struck this week by reading the last recorded words of Martin Luther. This is what he said: "Nobody can understand Virgil in his Bucolics and Georgics unless he has first been a shepherd or a farmer for five years. Nobody understands Cicero in his letters unless he has been engaged in public affairs of some consequence for twenty years. Let nobody suppose that he has tasted of the Holy Scriptures sufficiently unless he has ruled over the churches with the prophets for a hundred years. Therefore there is something wonderful, first, about John the Baptist; second, about Christ; third, about the apostles. ... We are beggars. That is true." What a contrast between the final humility of that great man and the arrogance of our 20th century thinkers.
We must look hard at reality and find our good God before it, in it, and after it. John W. Wenham in a book entitled The Enigma of Evil, concluded this: "We must look at reality -- look at it hard -- till at last we realize that there is no way out; till we realize that we are children, that we are fools, that we are at heart conceited, stiff-necked rebels, who will get everything wrong, unless we are prepared to give up telling God what he should be like and what he should do; till we realize that we can know only what God is pleased to tell us. We must listen and try to understand." We must listen and try to understand what God tells us in Rom. 8:28.
What We Know: Our First Principle - 8:28
Paul says, "And we know that God causes all things to work together for good to those who love God to those who are called according to His purpose." What strikes me about this verse is that the words most often overlooked in the verse are the most important. Paul so easily could have written, "And I think that God causes all things to work together for good ..." or "I have been taught that God causes all things to work together for good ..." or "I hope that God causes all things to work together for good ..." But Paul begins this statement with a word of absolute confidence: "AND WE KNOW that God causes all things to work together for good to those who love God to those who are called according to His purpose." Those first three words are the most important in the verse.
They are important because Paul says this is where we start, our first principle. The first thing we know, our basic assumption in our lives, is that God causes all things to work together for good to those who love Him and are called according to His purposes. We start with that fact as due north on our moral compass, the point we keep coming back to and setting our course by. Every circumstance relates backward or forward to this point of reference. We begin to understand reality and life from this point forward. We know this is true, regardless of how the winds of circumstance blow today. We know this is true, regardless of whether our dreams are fulfilled or unfulfilled. We know this is true, regardless of whether we are successful or unsuccessful, sick or well. This is the truth.
Paul grew up with this truth woven into his Jewish heart and soul. Colin Brown says, "In Rom. 8:28 Paul seizes on a maxim which is embedded into late Jewish tradition ( ... 'Let a man always accustom himself to say: All that the Almighty does, he does for good' ... 'That too is for good.')" Thus, Paul is here reiterating for his Roman brothers a doctrine of how God works all things together for good, but Paul adds two very valuable stipulations as conditions under which this principle holds: it holds for the ones loving God and for the ones being called according to His purpose. Thus, as is classic with Paul, he takes a primarily Jewish idea and clarifies/sharpens it with greater force in the Christian doctrine." Who knows, Paul might have heard the very folktale we began our study with, about the spiritual man and the skeptic. And by the Spirit, Paul learned the conditions under which this truth prevails.
Before we explore these two extensions Paul adds to the accepted Jewish maxim, consider what Paul does NOT say here. He does NOT say that "all things are good." No indeed, in a world full of suffering and pain and rejection and untimely death and destruction, there is no way he would say that all things are good. Instead, a good and wonderful God works all things, good or bad, together for good for "the ones loving God, the ones being called according to His purpose."
So, God works all things together for good to "the ones loving God." In this case, "loving" is a present active participle. It is present, ongoing, continuative; it is active, a committed obedience to His commandments. Finally, it is not just "loving ones," but specifically the "ones loving God." The focal point of that love is crucial: God Himself. Paul is not referring to those who are "loving" in a general sense. Here, "God works all things together for good to the ones loving God."
So that is the grammar of Paul's first stipulation ... but what does it practically mean? To get at Paul's meaning here, consider the story of Joseph at the end of Genesis. Joseph was the glory boy of Jacob's household. He wore and flaunted the coat of many colors, the gift of a father to his favorite son. So, his brothers threw him in a pit, then sold him as a slave to Egypt. There he was falsely accused of rape, imprisoned, and miraculously rescued by God and installed as the second in command of all Egypt because the Lord was with him. God put Joseph in that place to equip Pharaoh and Egypt to supply food to the world during a seven year famine foretold by Joseph. Years later during the terrible famine, Joseph again meets his brothers, and here is how Joseph distills the whole tale of their treachery, in Gen. 50:20: "And as for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good in order to bring about this present result, to preserve many people alive."
Joseph wisely interpreted the events of his entire life by seeing God first, and then his circumstances. Joseph's eyes were filled with who God was as a preserver of life, not just his own life, but the lives of many. Then, Joseph saw the evil of fallen men at work, the very same evil that is visited on us virtually every day, either through the sins we have inherited from our forefathers or in a myriad of other dysfunctional relationships tarnished by sin. But while that evil is at work warring against us, we have a choice: to see God first, and consider our circumstances in His light. When we behold God, and know Him in His perfect, sovereign love for His adopted children, we realize that all our circumstances are being woven together by God for a good end, both for us and for others. When some great evil befalls you as a result of living in this fallen world, such as a painful disease, a terrible loss by death, a gnawing failure, a deep depression, a dry season, or whatever, ask the Lord to fill your eyes with God first, that you may see the circumstances in His light and in the light of His overall plan and purpose for you.
The Sovereign Purpose of God: To Make Us Christlike - 8:29, 30
God's purpose and plan for the individual believer is outlined in vs. 29, 30: "For those whom He foreknew, He also predestined to become conformed to the image of His Son, that He might be the first-born among many brethren; and whom He predestined, these He also called; and whom He called, these He also justified; and whom He justified, these He also glorified."
The first thing to note about these verses is very simple: the sovereign God of the universe has a timeless, specific plan for each believer's life!! In this day and age when companies no longer care about employees, where it feels like we have to look out for #1 to get ahead, we discover that our lives have been marked out from before the beginning to follow the plan and purpose of God. Nothing that happens is an accident. No trial or difficulty has not been planned and purposed. Our lives are not random, nor guided by some mysterious fate ... they are lovingly planned and purposed by our attentive Father!
This plan and purpose of God is unfolded in five successive verbs. Each verb is in the aorist tense, implying that each action has already taken place as a completed event in the economy of God. This is not what God might do; it is God's completed work. His purpose begins with the first verb "He foreknew," meaning "to know before, to take note of, to fix the regard upon." This is undoubtedly built out of the OT conception of "know" in terms of the intimate relationship between a man and a woman, i.e. Adam "knew" Eve. Hort believes this is "the recognition of them as children, a recognition formed in the eternal counsels of God." Taking all this together, I define this first step of God's purpose this way: "God set His love on them, to be adopted as sons by Him." This is when God chose before time to adopt you as a beloved son in His family. That was His sovereign choice as the adopting Father: you had nothing to do with it!! He foreknew us as sons.
Not only did our Father foreknow us as sons, but "He also predestined [us] to become conformed to the image of His Son." This is the next step in God's unfolding plan and purpose. The verb here "predestined" means "to predestine, to mark out with a boundary beforehand." Just as a new house is first marked out by stakes and twine to define where the foundation is laid, so our character and life is marked out with a predetermined boundary line. God already knows what our character is to look like, having perfected that character in His first-born Son. His purpose is to conform us to Christ's character by teaching us to let the Spirit live out in us the life of Jesus Christ. We were marked out and set apart as vessels of Christ's life. God has adopted us to become just like our older brother.
This is exactly what Paul means when he adds, "that He should be first-born among many brethren." Christ's life is the prototype; He and His character were the model, the boundary defining godly character, and God's purpose is to replicate that character by the Spirit within all believers who follow Christ. To replicate Christ's character, but in millions of different flavors of personality and background. In this way, there would be a consistent family relationship defined by a common holiness and character, and Christ would indeed be the first-born among many. Nothing could more squarely underscore the priority and the supremacy of Christ in God's plan and purpose: Christ is the model, and God has adopted us to mold us according to the model of Christ, that Christ be seen in and through us.
Verse 30 begins by saying, "and whom He predestined, these He also called." The verb "called" here means "the stage in which God's purpose is first made known to the individual, in the call to be a Christian heard and, in this case, obeyed." Thus, I am going to define this as the "call to be like Christ, the call to be a Christian, which demands a response of faith." God called each believer into relationship with Him as an adopted son, for the express purpose of entering into the character of the first-born Son through belief in Him. This is like receiving a phone call from God, asking you to consider allowing Him to proceed forward with His plan to adopt you into His family. Practically speaking, this "call" comes through the preaching, teaching and sharing of God's great news.
We can feel Paul's crescendo growing. There is a passion underlying the revelation of God's great plan, and it is like a crescendo of glory, starting small in the dim mists of the beginning, dawning brightly in our lives when we respond to the call of God and become believers, and it is crescendoing into the future to the coming day when we will be glorified with Him! As the crescendo builds, Paul says "and whom He called, these He also justified." When the call of God is responded to by faith, then God declares the person righteous with His righteousness infused into them by faith through the Spirit. This is the process whereby God makes us righteous by faith, the key part of His plan revealed at the cross in Rom. 3:21-26.
With a grand finale, Paul concludes: "and whom He declared righteous, these He also glorified." This is the final step in God's plan and purpose for the redeemed man: making him a full bearer of the shining glory of God, given a perfect resurrection body in which to house the shining glory of the light of God for all eternity in the new heavens and the new earth. This is the term which we explained in great detail in vs. 18-25. The glory of God shines now in and through the cracks and fissures in our earthenware bodies: then it will shine with perfect brilliance, without taint or shadow.
To illustrate this process, consider how a Roman father decided to adopt a son into his family. First, the adopting Father makes an independent decision apart from the son that He will adopt the son (foreknew). His purpose in doing this is to bring the adopted son into his family, that he might be conformed to the character, quality and destiny of that family (predestined). He then issues a formal invitation to the son, asking him if he wants to be adopted (called). The son then responds to the call, and if the response is positive and the son wants to be adopted, the Father then goes through the legal procedure whereby the son is adopted legally (justified). Finally, the adoption is consummated when the adopting Father presents the adopted son before all His family and friends as His own son, bearing His own name, one of His own inner family circle (glorification). The reason I like to cast these verses in light of this image is that Paul has relied heavily upon the imagery of Roman adoption in vs. 15-25, and it serves to highlight the pursuing love of the adopting Father who so wants to adopt the son, and has a purpose and plan for that son.
Let's step back and consider what this means. This grand strategy is PLANNED, INITIATED, EXECUTED, AND WILL CERTAINLY BE COMPLETED, BY GOD HIMSELF. The only hint here of human involvement is in response to the call. Once that response is made, the believer steps into God's plan and purpose begun in time past, continuing in the present process of sanctification as the firstfruits of glory, and completed in the future. This plan was begun before time when God set His love on us to adopt us, He then predestined to conform us to the character and image of His Son, He called us, we responded, and He declared us righteous, and now we are waiting for our glorification. So, we know right where we are in the overall plan and purpose of God for our lives, a plan and purpose which will certainly be completed!!! Like the old spiritual, This train is bound for glory ... this train. We are ticket holders on that train, and our tickets read PAID in red letters written by our Savior's blood!!
What glory in the plan and purpose of God! Even more glorious, God most clearly reveals His purpose in the lives of the weak and feeble among us. Consider a startling fact of the 19th century: the woman whose spiritual vision was most keen was blind from six weeks of age. Fanny Crosby was blinded by a man claiming to be a doctor, but she saw the plan and purpose of God more clearly than any other person of her era. I will quote again her autobiography as she wrote about God's sovereign plan for her life: "Although it may have been a blunder on the physician's part, it was no mistake of God's. I verily believe it was His intention that I should live my days in physical darkness, so as to be better prepared to sing His praises and incite others to do so." What insight to the perfect plan of God!
Likewise, Joni Eareckson Tada at age 17 would never have chosen a life ministry borne on the clipped wings of paralysis. But she has seen the greater glory in it. In one of her recent "Profiles," Joni was described this way: "Joni has been on the battle front of the euthanasia debate, in this country where Jack Kevorkian's assisted suicides are regularly in the news, and in parts of Europe, where it is gaining wide acceptance. The message that death may be preferable to life with limitations is antithetical to Joni's message that life is worth living, through the hope of salvation." Think of it: a trained medical doctor with no physical limitations of his own preaches death, while a woman constrained for over twenty years to a wheelchair preaches a life of purpose and hope through salvation. The wise have not perceived the mind and wisdom of God, but He has chosen to reveal it to the weak. Such is the glory of the plan and purpose of God!
Conclusion: Our Loving Father, the Great Weaver
Rom. 8:28-30 are the deepest of the deep things of God. This is His sovereign love song for us, composed before the dawning of the first sun, and we will sing its finale with the choir of heaven when there needs be no sun. These are the first principles, and the final truths. May we humbly embrace the truth of Rom. 8:28 as our reference point, our first principle, beholding first the face of God and interpreting our circumstances and pain in the light of His face of loyal love.
There are many truths in this passage, but my prayer for every single one of us is that we come to know the main message of these verses: that WE ARE LOVED BY GOD. I pray virtually every night for my children to know they are loved by God. Paul felt a similar fatherly concern for us, wanting us to know beyond all doubt of our Father's sovereign love for us. Oh may we know we are loved by Him!!
Let's conclude with a poem from The Book of Virtues (pg. 802), The Loom of Time:
Man's life is laid in the loom of time
To a pattern he does not see,
While the weavers work and the shuttles fly
Till the dawn of eternity.Some shuttles are filled with silver threads
And some with thread of gold,
While often but the darker hues
Are all that they may hold.But the weaver watches with skillful eye
Each shuttle fly to and fro,
And sees the pattern so deftly wrought
As the loom moves sure and slow.God surely planned the pattern:
Each thread, the dark and fair,
Is chosen by His master skill
And placed in the web with care.He only knows its beauty,
And guides the shuttles which hold
The threads so unattractive,
As well as the threads of gold.Not till each loom is silent,
And the shuttles cease to fly,
Shall God reveal the pattern
And explain the reason whyThe dark threads were as needful
In the weaver's skillful hand
As the threads of gold and silver
For the pattern which He planned.
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