should be? Paul confronts this situation and says—NO! There is in all this nothing that can separate you from God’s love.
As another potential cause of separation from God we may look, as we are directed by St. Paul, at things to come, and death; that is all the uncertainty of life and its one final grand certainty—which is death. We quickly get out of our depth, when we look about us, at the vast scale of world events. We also get out of our depth when we look forward at the immense ranges of the hazy and uncharted future. We do not know what sickness, what distress of mind, body, or estate may be just around the corner. To people of St. Paul’s world, at least, it was a disquieting prospect. For most of them, the life of the afterworld (if they believed in such a world at all) was a very vague and shadowy existence; it was hardly worth calling life at all. It really did cut a person off from everything that was worth having, from the love of God and from every other love.
It is a remarkable experience to read through the sepulchral inscriptions that have been preserved from St. Paul’s day. Through the broken letters comes many a glimpse at real life, at broken hearts, of the sorrow of those who have no hope. Listen:
“Chrysogonius lies here . . . saying to each passerby drink, for you see the end.” And so reads many another. We sometimes speak of the economic insecurity of our own time. People were more insecure in the Empire of St. Paul’s time, and all this harried day to day insecurity of life combined to threaten a person’s peace and enjoyment of God’s love. Think of what the future had in store for Paul. After writing he was intending to go to Jerusalem. Then he would proceed triumphantly to Rome, the capital of the Empire; then on to Spain in an unbroken chain of missionary activity. He got as far as Jerusalem; then the mob; then years of dreary imprisonment, and finally his arrival in Rome, not in triumph but in chains, with death not far away. He knew what the chances were. But this situation too, he confronts with his NO! There is in all this grim unknown nothing that can separate us from the love of God.
Peace, perfect peace, the future all unknown? Jesus we know and he is on the throne. (E.H. Bickersteth)
Is that perhaps just a pious hope? After all, it is easy enough to brag about the future—things to come. What about things present? A fanatic will boast in regard to death but “life is more solemn still than death” (G. Matheson). What about that?
Certainly, there are things in life which seem able to separate us from God’s love. I will not talk about our moods of despondency and depression, when it is hard to believe in God’s love. After all, these are fits of feelings and the wise person will not pay much attention to them. And there is something more serious than these things. Just as the menace of the future is summed up in death, so the menace of the present is summed up in sin. The most dreadful thing about sin is that it does separate us from God. It is always a divisive thing, it is always separating people from each other. It destroys friendships, it breaks up homes, it creates wars. But most serious of all, it cuts off human beings from God, and anyone who thinks seriously about God knows that. If you wrong another person, your sin creates a barrier between you and that person. The barrier can be broken down, but it is real. Similarly, if you wrong the holy and righteous God, and who can avoid doing that, you raise a barrier between yourself and God. Studdert-Kennedy has a poem which he wrote in the person of a man who had lived a loose life, and in particular had had a sinful relationship with a woman. The man cries out—“I cannot get to Jesus for the glory of her hair.” That is what sin does, it prevents us from getting to Jesus. But here is Paul again, confronting the supreme disorder of human life, and saying NO! There is, in all this, nothing that separates us from God’s love. Now what is Paul talking about? What does he mean by God’s love?
GOD’S LOVE
Let us first dismiss some false ideas. It is not some general providence he is talking about, not a sort of insurance policy. People have a longing for some such thing as that. I remember an insurance company even at school (until it became bankrupt) which insured against the cane! The idea is very natural to us. But Paul is not using it. What are the words he has just quoted? “For your sake we are being killed all the day long, we were reckoned as sheep for slaughter.”
Nor is he speaking of a general evolutionary process in history, which assumes that after all, things are getting better and better, and we have only to live long enough to see a perfect world. Paul would have had to live a long time to see a world without war, and so shall we. The love with which he speaks is more immediate and more intimate than that.
Yet we must beware of confusing God’s love, of which Paul does speak, with our feeling about it, of which he does not speak. He never says, “you will live in a continual glow of religious emotion.” That would not have been true and it would not have been a good thing. He means something that is true, whether we know it or not. The evil things of which we have been talking about can separate us, and often do separate us from the consciousness of God’s love. The great thing is that they do not separate us from God’s love itself.
And that love Paul very carefully defines. It is the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord. That is, it is God’s saving love, the love of the Cross, the love which does in fact redeem from sin and death. It is from this love that nothing can separate us, for the very good reason that it is a love which is bestowed upon us, just as we are, living in a world of sin and death. It is where sin abounded that Christ came down and died. In his daring metaphor, Paul says, “he who knows no sin, God made sin for us.” Sin and death cannot separate us from the love, whose very purpose is to destroy sin and death.
The saving love of God in Christ would not be what it is, if it had no enemies to triumph over, no obstacles to overcome. Paul means that amidst all the swirling cross currents in life, in the seas that are too strong for us and seem to sweep us off our feet, there is a rock, and that rock is Christ, and there is our sure resting point, there is the power which prevents us from ever being dashed away from this love of a redeeming God. In the face of the uncertain future and the certainty and power of death, is the one who loved us and gave himself for us. When we are gripped by doubts and worried by our moods, we are to look through the wisps of mist that blow up from the surface of our life to the green hill where the inflexible Man of Sorrows died for us. When we feel our own sin rising up between ourselves and God, we are to know that it is the work of Christ to break down that wall, and to bring us rebels back to the Father.
IS THIS TRUE FOR US?
How do we known and what does it mean? Yes, it is true for anyone who by God’s grace accepts it. Let no one mistake it; the powers of evil are real, death is real, sin is real. Because of these things we, of ourselves, cannot draw near to God, and if we do not receive the victory at God’s hand, it is so much the worse for us.
It does not mean a bed of ease for anyone. It does not mean that we are lifted out of the world to some Empyrean where God dwells. It means that God is with us. It does not mean that we can make ‘a separate peace.’ That is not Christian peace. That is the peace of human beings who are being killed all the day long. We are referring to the peace of the Cross, where sin is defeated, and death is defied by the suffering servant and to which God’s answer is the glorious life of Resurrection. And a broken and contrite heart God never despises, and from such a heart his saving love in Christ can never be removed.6
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6. Editor’s Note: It might be wondered on the basis of several other sermons in these two volumes, how the content of this sermon comports with the affirmation that Christians can indeed fall away, and commit apostasy. One key to understanding what is being asserted here is that CKB is talking about things strictly from the Godward side of the equation—God does not withdraw his redeeming love, regardless of whether the individual is aware of it or not, regardless of whether sin or something else has separated that person from God, or from awareness of God. Notice the last sentence in the sermon which speaks not of someone in active rebellion against God, but a person with a contrite heart, i.e. someone who has not committed apostasy. In other words, this passage, as CKB says, is not about an “eternal security” insurance policy.
“GOD