'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 us from the love of God.'--ROMANS viii. 38, 39.
These rapturous words are the climax of the Apostle's long
demonstration that the Gospel is the revelation of 'the righteousness
of God from faith to faith,' and is thereby 'the power of God unto
salvation.' What a contrast there is between the beginning and the
end of his argument! It started with sombre, sad words about man's
sinfulness and aversion from the knowledge of God. It closes with
this sunny outburst of triumph; like some stream rising among black
and barren cliffs, or melancholy moorlands, and foaming through
narrow rifts in gloomy ravines, it reaches at last fertile lands, and
flows calm, the sunlight dancing on its broad surface, till it loses
itself at last in the unfathomable ocean of the love of God.
We are told that the Biblical view of human nature is too dark. Well,
the important question is not whether it is dark, but whether it is
true. But, apart from that, the doctrine of Scripture about man's
moral condition is not dark, if you will take the whole of it
together. Certainly, a part of it is very dark. The picture, for
instance, of what men are, painted at the beginning of this Epistle,
is shadowed like a canvas of Rembrandt's. The Bible is 'Nature's
sternest painter but her best.' But to get the whole doctrine of
Scripture on the subject, we have to take its confidence as to what
men may become, as well as its portrait of what they are--and then
who will say that the anthropology of Scripture is gloomy? To me it
seems that the unrelieved blackness of the view which, because it
admits no fall, can imagine no rise, which sees in all man's sins and
sorrows no token of the dominion of an alien power, and has,
therefore, no reason to believe that they can be separated from
humanity, is the true 'Gospel of despair,' and that the system which
looks steadily at all the misery and all the wickedness, and calmly
proposes to cast it all out, is really the only doctrine of human
nature which throws any gleam of light on the darkness. Christianity
begins indeed with, 'There is none that doeth good, no, not one,' but
it ends with this victorious pæan of our text.
And what a majestic close it is to the great words that have gone
before, fitly crowning even their lofty height! One might well shrink
from presuming to take such words as a text, with any idea of
exhausting or of enhancing them. My object is very much more humble.
I simply wish to bring out the remarkable order, in which Paul here
marshals, in his passionate, rhetorical amplification, all the
enemies that can be supposed to seek to wrench us away from the love
of God; and triumphs over them all. We shall best measure the
fullness of the words by simply taking these clauses as they stand in
the text.
I. The love of God is unaffected by the extremest changes of our
condition.
The Apostle begins his fervid catalogue of vanquished foes by a pair
of opposites which might seem to cover the whole ground--'neither
death nor life.' What more can be said? Surely, these two include
everything. From one point of view they do. But yet, as we shall see,
there is more to be said. And the special reason for beginning with
this pair of possible enemies is probably to be found by remembering
that they are a pair, that between them they do cover the whole
ground and represent the _extremes_ of change which can befall
us. The one stands at the one pole, the other at the other. If these
two stations, so far from each other, are equally near to God's love,
then no intermediate point can be far from it. If the most violent
change which we can experience does not in the least matter to the
grasp which the love of God has on us, or to the grasp which we may
have on it, then no less violent a change can be of any consequence.
It is the same thought in a somewhat modified form, as we find in
another word of Paul's, 'Whether we live, we live unto the Lord; and
whether we die, we die unto the Lord.' Our subordination to Him is
the same, and our consecration should be the same, in all varieties
of condition, even in that greatest of all variations. His love to us
makes no account of that mightiest of changes. How should it be
affected by slighter ones?
The distance of a star is measured by the apparent change in its
position, as seen from different points of the earth's surface or
orbit. But this great Light stands steadfast in our heaven, nor moves
a hair's-breadth, nor pours a feebler ray on us, whether we look up
to it from the midsummer day of busy life, or from the midwinter of
death. These opposites are parted by a distance to which the millions
of miles of the world's path among the stars are but a point, and yet
the love of God streams down on them alike.
Of course, the confidence in immortality is implied in this thought.
Death does not, in the slightest degree, affect the essential
vitality of the soul; so it does not, in the slightest degree, affect
the outflow of God's love to that soul. It is a change of condition
and circumstance, and no more. He does not lose us in the dust of
death. The withered leaves on the pathway are trampled into mud, and
indistinguishable to human eyes; but He sees them even as when they
hung green and sunlit on the mystic tree of life.
How beautifully this thought contrasts with the saddest aspect of the
power of death in our human experience! He is Death the Separator,
who unclasps our hands from the closest, dearest grasp, and divides
asunder joints and marrow, and parts soul and body, and withdraws us
from all our habitude and associations and occupations, and loosens
every bond of society and concord, and hales us away into a lonely
land. But there is one bond which his 'abhorred shears' cannot cut.
Their edge is turned on _it_. One Hand holds us in a grasp which
the fleshless fingers of Death in vain strive to loosen. The
separator becomes the uniter; he rends us apart from the world that
He may 'bring us to God.' The love filtered by drops on us in life is
poured upon us in a flood in death; 'for I am persuaded, that neither
death nor life shall be able to separate us from the love of God.'
II. The love of God is undiverted from us by any other order of
beings.
'Nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers,' says Paul. Here we pass
from conditions affecting ourselves to living beings beyond
ourselves. Now, it is important for understanding the precise thought
of the Apostle to observe that this expression, when used without any
qualifying adjective, seems uniformly to mean good angels, the
hierarchy of blessed spirits before the throne. So that there is no
reference to 'spiritual wickedness in high places' striving to draw
men away from God. The supposition which the Apostle makes is,
indeed, an impossible one, that these ministering spirits, who are
sent forth to minister to them who shall be heirs of salvation,
should so forget their mission and contradict their nature as to seek
to bar us out from the love which it is their chiefest joy to bring
to us. He knows it to be an impossible supposition, and its very
impossibility gives energy to his conclusion, just as when in the
same fashion he makes the other equally impossible supposition about
an angel from heaven preaching another gospel than that which he had
preached to them.
So we may turn the general thought of this second category of
impotent efforts in two different ways, and suggest, first, that it
implies the utter powerlessness of any third party in regard to the
relations between our souls and God.
We alone have to do with Him alone. The awful fact of individuality,
that solemn mystery of our personal being, has its most blessed or
its most dread manifestation in our relation to God. There no other
Being has any power. Counsel and stimulus, suggestion or temptation,
instruction or lies, which may tend to lead us nearer to Him or away
from Him, they may indeed give us; but after they have done their
best or their worst, all depends on the personal act of our own
innermost being. Man or angel can affect that, but from without. The
old mystics called prayer 'the flight of the lonely soul to the only
God.' It is the name for all religion. These two, God and the soul,
have to 'transact,' as our Puritan forefathers used to say, as if
there were no other beings in the universe but only they two. Angels
and principalities and powers may stand beholding with sympathetic
joy; they may minister blessing and guardianship in many ways; but
the decisive act of union between God and the soul they can neither
effect nor prevent.
And as for them, so for men around us; the limits of their power to
harm us are soon set. They may shut us out from human love by
calumnies, and dig deep gulfs of alienation between us and dear ones;
they may hurt and annoy us in a thousand ways with slanderous
tongues, and arrows dipped in poisonous hatred, but one thing they
cannot do. They may build a wall around us, and imprison us from many
a joy and many a fair prospect, but they cannot put a roof on it to
keep out the sweet influences from above, or hinder us from looking
up to the heavens. Nobody can come between us and God but ourselves.
Or, we may turn this general thought in another direction, and say,
These blessed spirits around the throne do not absorb and intercept
His love. They gather about its steps in their 'solemn troops and
sweet societies'; but close as are their ranks, and innumerable as is
their multitude, they do not prevent that love from passing beyond
them to us on the outskirts of the crowd. The planet nearest the sun
is drenched and saturated with fiery brightness, but the rays from
the centre of life pass on to each of the sister spheres in its turn,
and travel away outwards to where the remotest of them all rolls in
its far-off orbit, unknown for millenniums to dwellers closer to the
sun, but through all the ages visited by warmth and light according
to its needs. Like that poor, sickly woman who could lay her wasted
fingers on the hem of Christ's garment, notwithstanding the thronging
multitude, we can reach our hands through all the crowd, or rather He
reaches His strong hand to us and heals and blesses us. All the
guests are fed full at that great table. One's gain is not another's
loss. The multitudes sit on the green grass, and the last man of
the last fifty gets as much as the first. 'They did all eat, and were
filled'; and more remains than fed them all. So all beings are
'nourished from the King's country,' and none jostle others out of
their share. This healing fountain is not exhausted of its curative
power by the early comers. 'I will give unto this last, even as unto
thee.' 'Nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, shall be able to
separate us from the love of God.'