Lesson 19: God’s Everlasting Love – 8:31-39
 31 What then shall we say to these things? If God is for us, who can be against us?
32 He who did not spare His own Son but gave Him up for us all, how will He not also with Him graciously give us all things?
33 Who shall bring any charge against God’s elect? It is God who justifies.
34 Who is to condemn? Christ Jesus is the one who died—more than that, who was raised—who is at the right hand of God, who indeed is interceding for us.
35 Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or danger, or sword?
36 As it is written, “For your sake we are being killed all the day long; we are regarded as sheep to be slaughtered.”
37 No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through Him who loved us.
38 For I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers,
39 nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.

We wrap up this chapter – one of the most incredible chapters in all the Bible – with this lesson. What we learned in the first seven chapters is our relationship to the Law and sin. The Law brings condemnation and death but the Spirit gives us life and freedom. We learned God does not want us to follow the Law today and that He has set us free from it so we are free to follow Him by faith.

Then in this chapter we have learned how our release from the Law was accomplished, and we now live in the Spirit, have a wonderful hope for the future where we will be glorified in Him, and have been given an inheritance with Jesus.

Our verses today begin with how we should respond to all these wonderful promises God has made. The answer is that we respond with a certainty of hope and faith because we now believe the promises He has made and all the things He has said He will accomplish.


Who can stop God from making all these promises come true? No one! Not any condition or any person! Remember, this is a promise given to us who have chosen to believe in Jesus and therefore have been given eternal life. Eternal life cannot be eternal if anyone can destroy it.

We are again reminded in Verse 36 that we suffer here in this life. But no suffering can ever change God’s eternal plan for us.

My pastor made the statement recently, as he was teaching from Daniel 3, that these three men could have chosen to give in to the pressure of the king and all the people around them and bow down to the statue the king had made. They could have pretended they had dropped something and just leaned down to pick it up, and avoided the ordeal of the furnace where they had no certainty that God would deliver them from death. As the king gave them their last chance to comply, they surely felt the heat of the furnace. But, as they said to the king, they knew God could deliver them, and that He would deliver them from his hand. They were not certain they would live through the furnace experience. But they chose the furnace over compromising their testimony, and God met them in the furnace. They would never have experienced this personal meeting with God if they had not chosen to experience the furnace.

We cannot experience God’s presence in the fire if we always demand He save us from the fire before it happens. We must be willing to experience the furnace of suffering if we are to experience the God who is able to save us in the furnace. Suffering should never be a cause of doubt or an anxious heart – He wants us to rejoice in suffering (Romans 5:3, 2 Corinthians 12:10, Colossians 1:11, Hebrews 10:34, James 1:2, and 1 Peter 4:13).

*How do you pray when you meet trials or hard times or difficulties?