either believe or disbelieve. It cannot be proved true, any more than it can be proved false. Neither St. Paul nor I nor an angel from heaven could convince you that God’s love is like that if God did not move you to believe it. To the majority of people, I suppose, it is simply not true, it strikes no answering note of reality in their hearts. But to those who do know it, it is still the mightiest undoubtable conviction that it was to St. Paul.
On May 2nd of this year (1943) I was preaching in Batley, and my host told me this story, every detail of which he knew was true. It had happened recently. A young man with a good deal of energy and initiative began to build up a business, a factory, for himself. It prospered. The man was married. They had a little girl. No one could have been happier. One day he had an accident in the machinery and was terribly maimed. The business could not be run without him. It was sold and there was no further source of income. While he was in the hospital, his little girl was taken ill and died. His wife, broken by the strain of all these things, died as well. After two long years, he limped out of the hospital, a cripple for life. There was for him, no home, no wife, no child, no business, and potentially no money. Shortly afterwards he went to the Methodist Quarterly Meeting (not the most inspiring of meetings as a rule), and there when the business was over, he rose to say that the love of God was more real to him than ever, the one sure thing on which he could rely.
Again I say, there is no arguing with or about a certainty like that. Either that man was simply deluded or he was in touch with the greatest thing in the world. We cannot argue, but we may try to understand and so to think as to make that confidence seem more real to ordinary flesh and blood human beings like ourselves. First of all let us look at this string of potentially evil things.
POTENTIALLY EVIL THINGS
These are things that might potentially separate a person from the love of God, and which a person can allow so to separate him. Some of the things Paul mentions do not worry us very much—the powers, of the height and of the depth. Here Paul is talking in the language the people of his time need, the language of astrology. It is very hard for us to imagine what that meant in the world Paul lived in. Gilbert Murray says “Astrology fell upon the Hellenistic mind as a new disease falls upon some remote island people.” Human lives were in the grip of various possible powers other than themselves. It would govern all a person’s life, if this particular star was, at his birth, “in the height” (i.e., at its zenith) or “in the depth” (i.e., at the nadir). Now it would not do at once to say that all that sort of thing is out of date. It is very real on the mission field and any missionary will tell you of the relief that comes to a primitive mind that the good Lord Jesus is master of all powers and influences that combine to plot human ruin. And I think that the reviving popularity of astrology in our own country, attested so plentifully in the cheap press, is a thing to be taken quite seriously. But there is something here for us who are not superstitious or depraved in this way.
I said, “human lives were in the grip of inescapable powers not themselves.” Have you never felt that way? Not because you thought some horrid goblin would pounce on you, of course not. But in the last few years have you not read your newspaper, pondered over the map of Europe, and felt that the world was in the grip of a demonic monster and that things were going too fast and with too much momentum for a mere human being to stand up to them? The currents of life and history are very strong, and our boat is very small. Shall we not be swept well beyond the haven where we 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
