A Gospel for Every Century

Nothing on Paul's List Got Better

The letter arrived in Rome sometime around AD 57, carried, most likely, by the woman Paul commends by name at the end of it, and it was read aloud, because that is how letters worked and because most of the people it was written to couldn't have read it themselves. Near the end of the letter Paul sends greetings to those who are of the household of Narcissus, and to the household of Aristobulus, which is a Roman way of naming the people who belonged to two wealthy men. Some of them would have been in the room while the scroll was read. And somewhere in the middle of the reading, this sentence came at them:

Yet in all these things we are more than conquerors through Him who loved us. (Romans 8:37)

Whatever else the reading changed, it did not change the terms they lived under. The same house, the same work, the same owner, and the same law that said their bodies were not their own. Whatever Paul meant by conquerors, he meant something a slave could hear without being mocked by it.

Who Was in the Room When It Was Read

We have inherited a reading of that verse that assumes improvement. More than conquerors means the deal closes, the scan comes back clear, the door finally opens. It is an easy reading to absorb, and nearly everyone holding it was handed it by someone who loved them and meant it kindly.

But it comes apart in the room it was written for. Read it aloud to a man who will be hauling water before dawn for an owner he didn't choose, and either the sentence means something other than better circumstances, or Paul has written cruelty into the middle of his best chapter.

The Seven Things Paul Named

He doesn't leave the terms open. He lists them one verse earlier.

Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? (Romans 8:35)

Then he quotes Psalm 44 about sheep headed for slaughter, which isn't a line anyone reaches for when things are turning around.

Here is what that list settles. Paul promises no relief from a single item on it. Famine is not turned to harvest, the sword is not confiscated, and no threshold of faith removes either from the schedule. He does not say we are spared these things, or that we rise above them. He says in them, and the preposition is carrying the whole argument. Some of these do lift in time, and Paul would be the last to complain. What he will not do is make the victory wait on it.

But Didn't Jesus Promise Abundant Life?

This is where the other reading makes its strongest case, and it deserves its strongest verse.

I have come that they may have life, and that they may have it more abundantly. (John 10:10)

Taken by itself, that sounds like a guarantee of fullness, and fullness is easy to picture in material terms. But John put the sentence where he put it. The scene just before it is a man born blind being interrogated by the synagogue leadership and then thrown out of it for saying Jesus healed him. His parents had seen it coming and refused to answer. His day had two halves. He could see for the first time in his life, and he had been put out of the only community he had. Circumstances improved and collapsed within hours of each other, which is what makes him the right man to hear it. Jesus goes and finds him outside, and the shepherd discourse begins right there, with no break in the conversation. So the abundant life is announced over a man holding a healing in one hand and an expulsion in the other, by a Shepherd who says in the next breath that He will lay down His own life for the sheep. If the healing had been the abundant life, there was no reason left to say the sentence. The verse is not describing a life with more in it. It is describing a life with Him in it.

The Load Test

An engineer doesn't learn what a beam can carry by watching it hold up a roof on a calm day. Calm days tell you almost nothing, because on a calm day nearly anything holds. You find the real number by loading it until the steel tells you the truth. The load is not the enemy of the test. The load is the test.

A message works the same way. If a gospel is only ever preached where circumstances can plausibly improve, it hasn't been tested.

So load it. Could this exact message, unchanged and unqualified, be preached to a household slave in Rome, to a serf who will die on the ground he was born on, to a mother in 1918 burying two children in one week, to a prisoner on the night before his execution, and to a comfortable American with a retirement account and good insurance? Not five versions of it, softened at the edges for each room. One message, with Christ still sufficient in all five.

A great deal of what gets sold as good news can't survive that. It needs mobility, options, medicine, and time. Take them away and it has nothing left to say to the person in front of it except that he must have done something wrong.

What the Test Leaves Standing

Strip it to what holds and you aren't left with less than what was promised. You are left with the part that nothing in this life can reach. Christ has joined Himself to you. You are righteous in Him because He is righteous, not because the quarter went well. You are accepted, you are not abandoned, death has been handled at the root, and there is no arrangement on this earth, no owner, no empire, no diagnosis, with the standing to revoke any of it.

That is worth saying plainly, because grace gets misheard in both directions. The man still gets up and hauls the water, and knowing whose he is does not shorten the walk to the well. It may well steady him on it. What it will not do is let the walk decide what he is worth.

The Scroll Is Still Being Read

Picture the room again. A man who owns nothing, whose body is not legally his, hears seven of the worst things that can happen to a person read out in a single breath, and then hears that not one of them has the reach to cut him off from the love of God in Christ.

He does not walk out of that house free. He walks out holding something no one in it has the authority to take.