Nothing Can Pull You Away

Paul had just written that the whole world was groaning, like a mother just before her baby comes. Then he stopped.

"Tertius," he said, "write this part carefully."

Tertius held the pen. They sat in a house in Corinth, and the letter was going across the sea to the believers in Rome, people Paul had mostly never met. They lived in the emperor's own city, and their neighbours already called them strange. Harder days were coming.

"What can we say to all this?" Paul began. "If God is for us, who can be against us?"

(In a tug-of-war, if God is holding your end of the rope, it hardly matters who grabs the other end.)

"God did not hold back his own Son," Paul went on. "He gave him up for us all. Will he not also give us everything else?"

Then Paul pictured a courtroom. Someone jumps up and points a finger. "Guilty!"

"Who can accuse the people God has chosen?" Paul said. "God himself has said they are right with him. Christ Jesus died for them, and was raised to life, and is at God's right hand, speaking up for them."

Paul's voice got louder. "What can pull us away from the love of Christ? Trouble? Hard times? Being hurt for following Jesus? Hunger? Having no clothes? Danger? The sword?"

Paul was not guessing. He had been thrown in prison, chased out of one town after another, and gone hungry and thirsty and cold with no coat. (Once, after a shipwreck, he spent a night and a day floating in the open sea. That is a lot of paddling.)

Paul quoted an old song: "For your sake we face death all day long. We are counted like sheep waiting to be killed."

"No!" he said. "In all these things we win, and more than win, through the one who loved us. I am sure that nothing can separate us from God's love. Not death and not life. Not angels and not demons. Not what is happening now and not anything still coming. Nothing high above the sky and nothing deep below the ground. Nothing in all creation can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord."

There was more letter still to come, and these words would wait inside it until the day it crossed the sea to Rome.

About seven years later a great fire burned much of Rome, and the emperor Nero blamed the Christians. Some of the very people who had heard this letter read aloud were killed for following Jesus. Paul himself had already been brought to Rome in chains, and Christians have always said he was killed there too.

A letter cannot hold anybody. Paul's words could not pull one friend out of Nero's hands. All Paul could do was tell them who was holding on.

The letter was copied and carried from city to city, read aloud in houses and in prisons long after Paul died, and the one who held them never let go. He had already gone where they were going. He was led like a sheep to be killed, and he died, and he came back up out of death. Now he sits at God's right hand, speaking up for every one of his people, and the accuser's finger has nowhere left to point.

The friends in Rome who died for him never slipped out of his hands. Jesus is holding them still.