CRITICAL NOTES
Romans 8:28. All things.—Without exception—all things visible and invisible, our troubles, even our sins.
MAIN HOMILETICS OF THE PARAGRAPH.— Romans 8:28
Consoling knowledge.—St. Paul was keenly alive to suffering. He sympathised with a suffering creation. And yet, as he stands amid suffering and desolation, a divine joy lights his countenance. Confidence sustains his soul. Whence this joy and confidence? The answer is found in the text. Amid the pains and perplexities of life we must trust in the unfailing wisdom and goodness of God. We must keep alive the consoling knowledge “that all things,” etc.
I. What is man’s highest good?—What is the highest good, not for man as a physical being, as a mere resident of earth, but for man in the greatness of his nature, in the importance of his destiny? The highest good for man is to love God, to be conformed to the image of God’s Son, to be beloved of God. The degree of man’s perfection is the measure of his loving God. The highest good is not material, but spiritual; the highest good is being developed both in the time-life and in the eternal existence.
II. The dispensations of God promote the highest good.—Man must work longer and more carefully in erecting a structure which is to endure than in making one which is soon to be taken down. The highest good has reference to the future, and the work to be done in the present must have reference to that future. The mystery of death-bed repentances must be left; the greatest lives on earth have been trained in rough schools and have tasted long experiences. God will harmonise the short Christian life of the dying thief on earth and the rough, long pathway of an apostle. Most have many experiences in the Christian course. Crosses and losses are not unknown. But true to their work, and work only for our good, are the cross providences of God. The temple of the human soul is to be built up to a glorious perfection, and the builders are the trials, sufferings, and afflictions with which God’s children are visited. Winter’s storm as well as summer’s sunshine tempers the oak; the snow that means death to the unwary traveller fertilises the land; the hurricane that shatters the building scatters the noxious vapours; the ocean that entombs brave men and fair women sends its bracing ozone on to the land. Thus all things, fair and foul, smooth and rough, prosperous and adverse, joyous and painful, are working to the greater perfection of those that truly love God.
III. The twofold guarantee.—This is found in the words “to them that love God, to them who are the called according to His purpose.” Our love to God is the outcome of His love to us. The human love is responsive to the divine love. True love to God will bring to light the good that may be concealed by the repulsive drapery of adversity. True love from God will evoke good out of seeming evil. The love of God broods over a groaning universe, and will turn the groans into hymns of praise. And surely the love of God specially watches over the beloved. God’s love can pierce the prison wall, and give glad songs to the prisoners for the truth’s sake. God’s love can visit the chamber of suffering, and smooth the pillow for the aching head and give heaven’s light in nature’s darkness. Love called, and love obeyed. Love called the human soul to divine heights. Shall love, backed by wisdom and power, leave the beloved to be destroyed by the strokes of adversity? Shall unchangeable love call, and then forsake? The purpose of divine love is that the beloved walk in the realm of perfect love; and this purpose cannot fail. Heaven and earth may fail, but divine purpose must stand. This knowledge is consoling. This confidence is sweet. “We know,” and by the sustaining power of that knowledge Paul showed himself the world’s great hero. Not-knowledge may be the boasted creed of some. Paul’s knowledge has in it divine consolations. We know, and we walk calmly and peacefully through the unknowable. We know that all things are working together for our good, and we work joyfully towards the infinite good and repose on the infinite love.
Romans 8:28. The discipline of sufferings.—Sufferings are either the result of our own folly or such as could not have been foreseen by us.
Why does God allow latter to happen? These answers have been suggested: God ignores man’s affairs (Hinduism); God only cares for a few men (Eclecticism); God is not quite almighty (Dualism). None of these can be Christian’s answer. His answer is to be gathered from this passage.
Bible nowhere says that our comfort or our pleasure is God’s chief care; but it does teach that our good is. (Be careful not to confuse these things.) God wishes our happiness, our holiness—not comfort or pleasure.
The good of pain, privation, suffering, bereavement. They correct evil, prevent evil, develop character (merchant, soldier), produce sympathy, promote brotherliness, promote enterprise (severe climates have energetic people), prepare for eternity. Example: David is at his best amid adversities, at his worst amid comforts.
A reservation in the statement “to them that love God.” Notice: No sorrow leaves us where it found us; it drives us from God, or brings us nearer to Him. Examples: The remorse of Judas; the remorse of Peter.
Resolution: To look on every trouble as a test and turning-point.—Dr. Springett.
Romans 8:28. All things working for good.—St. Paul believes that there is a purpose, that there is an end, towards which events are tending. It looks at first sight like a faith rather than the conclusion of an argument. Reason alone might arrive at an opposite conclusion. How can we see a providential guidance, a divine plan of any kind, in the bloody game which chiefly makes up what we call history? How in those failures of great causes, in the enervation and degradation of civilised peoples, which make philosophers like Rousseau look back with fondness to the age of barbaric simplicity? It is true enough that the purpose of God in human history is traversed, that it is obscured, by causes to which the apostles of human despair may point very effectively; and yet here, as ever, we Christians dare to say that we walk by faith where sight fails us, as elsewhere, and we see enough to resist so depressing a conclusion as that before us—to know that the course of events is not thus fatal, thus desperate. We believe in a future; we believe that all moves forward, through whatever failures, through whatever entanglements, to a predestined end, and that each race, each generation, each particular class in each society, does its part, whether we can accurately estimate that part or not, towards promoting that end.
“All things work together for good.” For what kind of good? The glory of the Master and Ruler of all? No doubt they do. As nothing exists without His permission, so the very forces of evil itself will have, against their own bias and bent, to do His will and secure His triumph. He would not be God if it could be otherwise. But this is not what the apostle here says, nor does he go so far as to say that all things actually work together for the good of all human beings; for clearly our experience tells us that they do not. Who would say that his wealth was for the good of the debauchee, that his power is good for the selfish despot? It may be true enough that in the original design all things, all circumstances, were strictly designed to work together for the good of all; but man must be something else to what he generally is if he is in this sense to inherit all things, if nothing that happens is to harm him, if he is to find in all around him sources of blessedness and strength. “All things work … that love God.” Not God’s glory merely, but the good of those that love Him, is the object of His providence. Surely the child is not guilty of outrageous pride when it turns to its mother with an instinctive confidence that she will nourish and protect it; and it is the childlike that is one of the highest moral instincts in us, which leads us to believe that “like as a father … that we are but dust.” Our Lord was careful to assure His followers that in the world they would have tribulation, and to proclaim the blessedness that would attend temporal failures. What is the “good” of which the apostle speaks? It is real, absolute—it is eternal good. It is the good of the soul rather than the body, the good of the eternal world rather than the present world. Why is it that all things are said to “work … that love God”? Because such love, and it only, can transform all circumstances into blessings. No life is made up of such commonplaces that each cannot be made, by this love, to sparkle with the highest moral interest. No misfortunes are so great that they cannot be built into the steps of the staircase by which souls mount to heaven. The soul which loves the imperishable can never be doomed to a real disappointment. Social or political trouble may teach us unselfishness. Religious controversy or the advance of unbelief may teach us earnestness. Probably they touch some of us far less nearly than the joys and sorrows of our private lives.
Much may be done in an hour which will last for ever. “If a thousand years are as one day before the eternal God, so surely one day may be a very eternity to the soul of man. Spiritual revolutions within the soul, the deepest changes for good or for evil, have no appreciable relation to time. Intensity, not duration, is the measure of their importance.” God grant us to pray with all our hearts that, as He has prepared for them that love Him such good things as pass our understanding, so He will pour into our hearts such love towards Himself that we, loving Him above all things, may obtain His promises, which exceed all that we can desire, through Jesus Christ our Lord!—Canon Liddon.
SUGGESTIVE COMMENTS ON Romans 8:28
All things for the best.—The first point to be spoken of is the excellent privilege of God’s children, that all things shall work together for the best; both good and evil shall turn to their happiness. The reason stands thus: All things shall work together for the best to them that love God. Therefore all afflictions, crosses, and vexations whatsoever that betide such persons shall work together for their good; and for this cause all God’s servants must learn patiently to bear and cheerfully to undergo poverty or riches, honour or dishonour, in this world. The first sin of all, which hath gone over whole mankind and is spread abroad in every one of us, this by God’s mercy and our repentance proves to all believers a transcendent good, for the fall and sin of the first Adam caused the birth and death of the Second Adam, Christ Jesus, who, notwithstanding He was God, took upon Him the nature of man, and hath made us by His coming far more happy than if we had never fallen. Neither would God have suffered Adam to have fallen but for His own further glory in the manifestation of His justice and mercy and for the greater felicity of His servants in Christ their mediator. And it is good we should have something within us to make us weary of the world, else when we have run out our race we be unwilling to depart hence. Now our bondage to this natural corruption serves exceedingly to make us mourn for our sinful disposition and hunger after our God, to be joined with Him, as we see in St. Paul’s example (Romans 7:24), where, finding the rebellion of his nature and the strife that was in him, the flesh lusting against the spirit and the spirit against the flesh, he cries out, saying, “O wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me from this body of death?” and seeketh to God in Christ for mercy straight. For the evils of body, such as sickness and diseases of all sorts, which daily attend our houses of clay, God by means hereof acquaints His children with their frail condition, and shows them what a little time they have to provide for eternity, thereby driving them to search their evidences and to make all straight betwixt Him and them. Outward weaknesses are oft a means to restrain men from inward evils. God usually sanctifies the pains and griefs of His servants to make them better. The time of sickness is a time of purging from that defilement we gathered in our health. We should not be cast down so much for any bodily distemper as for sin that procures and envenoms the same. That is a good sickness which tends to the health of the soul. Now the causes why all things do work together for the best to them that love God are these—viz., It is God’s decree, manner of working, and blessed covenant. It is the foundation of the covenant of Christ Jesus. The second cause why all works together for the best to believers is the manner of God working in things, which is by contraries. He bringeth light out of darkness, glory out of shame, and life out of death. We fell by pride to hell and destruction, and must be restored by humiliation to life and salvation. Christ humbled Himself, being God, to become man for us, and by His death restored us to life. When our sins had brought us to greatest extremities, even then were we nearest to eternal happiness. There is nothing in the world that to God’s servants is absolutely evil, because nothing is so ill but some good may be raised out of it; not as it is an evil, but as it is governed and mastered by a supreme cause. Sin is of all evils the greatest, and yet sinful actions may produce gracious effects through God’s ordering and guiding the same. A child of God is truly happy in the midst of all misery.—Sibbes.
God’s sovereignty and man’s freewill declared.—The “calling” here and elsewhere spoken of by the apostle is the working in men of “the everlasting purpose of God, whereby (before the foundations of the world were laid) He hath constantly decreed by His counsel secret to us, to deliver from curse and damnation those whom He hath chosen in Christ out of mankind, and to bring them by Christ to everlasting salvation” (Art. XVII. of the Church of England). To specify the various ways in which this calling has been understood would far exceed the limits of a general commentary. It may suffice to say that on the one hand Scripture bears constant testimony to the fact that all believers are chosen and called by God, their whole spiritual life in its origin, progress, and completion being from Him; while on the other hand its testimony is no less precise that He willeth all to be saved, and that none shall perish except by wilful rejection of the truth. So that on the one side God’s sovereignty, on the other man’s freewill, is plainly declared to us. To receive, believe, and act on both these is our duty and our wisdom. They belong, as truths, no less to natural than to revealed religion, and every one who believes in a God must acknowledge both. But all attempts to bridge over the gulf between the two are futile in the present imperfect condition of man. The very reasonings used for this purpose are clothed in language framed on the analogies of this lower world, and wholly inadequate to describe God regarded as He is in Himself. Hence arise confusion, misapprehension of God, and unbelief. I have therefore simply, in this commentary, endeavoured to enter into the full meaning of the sacred text whenever one or other of these great truths is brought forward, not explaining either of them away on account of possible difficulties arising from the recognition of the other, but recognising as fully the elective and predestinating decree of God where it is treated of, as I have done in other places the freewill of man. If there be an inconsistency in this course, it is at least one in which the nature of things, the conditions of human thought, and Scripture itself, participate, and from which no commentator that I have seen, however anxious to avoid it by extreme views one way or the other, has been able to escape.—Alford.
ILLUSTRATIONS TO CHAPTER 8
Romans 8:28. Blessings in disguise.—In every burden of sorrow there is a blessing sent from God which we ought not to thrust away. In one of the battles of the Crimea a cannon-ball struck inside a fort, gashing the earth, and sadly marring the garden beauty of the place. But from the ugly chasm there burst forth a spring of water, which flowed on thereafter a living fountain. So the strokes of sorrow gash our hearts, leaving ofttimes wounds and scars, but they open for us fountains of rich blessing and of new life. Our pain and sorrow, endured with sweet trust and submission, leave us with life purified and enriched, and more of Christ in us. In every burden that God lays upon us there is always a blessing for us, if only we will take it.
“Then Sorrow whispered gently: Take
This burden up. Be not afraid;
An hour is short. Thou scarce wilt wake
To consciousness that I have laid
My hand upon thee, when the hour
Shall all have passed; and gladder then
For the brief pain’s uplifting power,
Thou shalt but pity griefless men.”
Romans 8:28. The happiness of suffering.—Dr. Richard Rothe, the eminent German theologian, once said, “There are people who, after experiencing in their youth the happiness of joy, come in their old age to enjoy the happiness of suffering.” To superficial thinkers this remark may seem perplexing. But sufficient study of it will reveal a profound meaning in it. Certainly to the Christian there is a happiness which is the outgrowth of suffering as of nothing else, and it is a very real and precious sort of happiness.—N. F. Boakes.
Romans 8:28. Persuasions and persuasion.—There are many “persuasions” amongst men—there is but one that is of value in the sight of God. A “persuasion” amongst men, when the word is used in a religious sense, means, What denomination in the Church do you belong to?—are you a Baptist, or a Congregationalist, or a Churchman? And a man may belong to any of these, or of the many other denominations or persuasions, and yet not be connected with the great and the right persuasion after all. In terrible agony a soldier lay dying in one of the American hospitals. A visitor asked him, “What Church are you of?” “Of the Church of Christ,” he replied. “I mean, of what persuasion are you?” “Persuasion?” said the dying man, as his eyes looked heavenward, beaming with love to the Saviour; “I am persuaded that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate me from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.” Church membership may exist without Christ membership: the first may be without any life or peace; in the latter there are both.
Romans 8:28. The great dome of God’s providence.—In the baptistery of the cathedral at Pisa is a wonderful dome. Spacious, symmetrical, composed of the choicest marble, it is a delight to stand beneath and gaze upon its beauties. Thus I stood one sunny April day, when suddenly the air became instinct with melody. The great dome seemed full of harmony. The waves of music vibrated to and fro, loudly beating against the walls, swelling into full chords like the roll of a grand organ, and then dying away into soft, long-drawn, far-receding echoes, melting in the distance into silence. It was only my guide, who, lingering behind me a moment, had softly murmured a triple chord. But beneath that magic roof every sound resolved into a symphony. No discord can reach the summit of that dome and live. Every noise made in the building—the slamming of the seats, the tramping of feet, all the murmur and bustle of the crowd—is caught up, softened, harmonised, blended, and echoed back in music. So it seems to me that over our life hangs the great dome of God’s providence. Standing as we do beneath it, no act in the divine administration towards us, no affliction, no grief, no loss which our heavenly Father sends, however hard to bear it may be, but will come back at last softened and blended into harmony, with the overarching dome of His wisdom, mercy, and power, till to our corrected sense it shall be the sweetest music of heaven.—J. D. Steele.