Into the Heart of Romans, page 20
V. 33 Who shall lay any thing to the charge of God’s elect? It is God that justifieth. Who will bring any charge against those whom God has chosen? It is God who justifies. Who can bring any accusation against those that God has chosen? When God grants saving justice Who will bring any charge against God’s elect? It is God who justifies.
V. 34 Who is he that condemneth? It is Christ that died, yea rather, that is risen again, who is even at the right hand of God, who also maketh intercession for us. Who then is the one who condemns? No one. Christ Jesus who died – more than that, who was raised to life – is at the right hand of God and is also interceding for us. who can condemn? Are we not sure that it is Christ Jesus, who died – yes and more, who was raised from the dead and is at God’s right hand – and who is adding his plea for us? Who is to condemn? It is Christ Jesus, who died, yes, who was raised, who is at the right hand of God, who indeed intercedes for us.
So to the majestic rhetorical question and answer in verse 31b and 32: ei ho theos hyper hēmōn, tis kath’ hēmōn? If God is for us, who can be against us? A lot depends on the identity of the ‘us’; you can’t just pluck it out of the air and make it apply to anyone randomly, like the saying wrongly attributed to Voltaire, Dieu pardonnera, c’est son métier – ‘God will pardon, that’s his job’ – hoping to shrug one’s shoulders and leave it at that. No: the ‘us’ here is obviously the people described in the previous verses, those who in their suffering and hope, and their agonized, wordless prayer, are being ‘conformed to the image of the son’; those who are en Christō Iēsou and hence know that there is ‘no condemnation’. We must again state the obvious: just because God is ‘for us’, that doesn’t mean we will never sin, or get speeding fines, or be turned down in job applications, or fall seriously ill, or have people misunderstand or misrepresent us. The rest of the passage makes that clear. The question ‘who can be against us?’ doesn’t mean that nobody will ever oppose us, that nobody will ever stand firmly in our way, but that, when they do, we can know that, because God is for us, any such opposition will in the long run be negligible, however painful and frustrating it may be at the time.
The implicit answer to Paul’s rhetorical question is, nobody, of course! And he backs this up with verse 32. He here calls to mind, and weaves into the text, an allusion to Genesis 22, where Abraham prepares to offer Isaac as a sacrifice. Abraham did not spare his only son; and now, remarkably enough, this can be said of God himself as well. So Paul, firmly basing himself on this astonishing act of divine self-giving love, assures his hearers, not that there won’t be any opposition, but that ‘all things’ will be given to us. He isn’t saying there won’t be problems. He is holding out a stupendous promise that will far outshine any and all challenges.
By alluding to Genesis here, Paul introduces the first of three biblical allusions – from Torah, Prophets and Writings, in this case Genesis, Isaiah and the Psalms. Referring to all three sections of scripture in this way was a rabbinic rhetorical tactic, using a kind of three-legged scriptural stool to make the argument triply secure. Paul only does this at special moments. He uses it in the ultimate climax of Romans, 15.7–13; and in the climax of Galatians in 4.21–31.
What he is doing here is not mere proof-texting. Nor is it just decoration, introducing vaguely remembered canonical phraseology like a politician today dredging up half a line from Shakespeare to give a speech the appearance of intellectual respectability. It’s a way of saying, as Paul’s whole gospel is saying, that with this gospel we are living kata tas graphas, in accordance with the scriptures, not by random detached verses but within the flow of the mighty river of scripture, with its narrative, life and promise coming together in glorious dramatic fulfilment. So here we have Genesis 22; then, in verses 33 and 34, we have Isaiah 50, one of the Servant-songs, making explicit the Servant-shape of the earlier argument; and then in verse 36 we have Psalm 44, one of the classic ‘suffering’ psalms to which, again, Paul has already alluded. We need to examine these one by one.
The account in Genesis 22 of God commanding Abraham to sacrifice Isaac is, I think, one of the darkest moments in all scripture. The theme is frequently drawn on in Paul’s Jewish world. Abraham obediently binds Isaac and places him on the altar; God intervenes at the last moment, with a ram as the sacrificial alternative. God then declares that because Abraham did not spare his beloved son (the LXX is almost identical to Paul’s wording here, making it effectively certain that he intends the allusion), he would bless him enormously, with his seed inheriting the world and possessing the lands of their enemies. This scene was known to some later Jewish writers as ‘the binding (Aqedah) of Isaac’, and one explanation for the regular Jewish exploration of the theme is that it may have functioned as a post-Christian attempt to say, ‘We have a sacrifice as good as yours.’ But in the developing Jewish tradition, some rabbis linked the Aqedah together with other key moments: the creation of the world, the night of Passover, and the Day of Atonement. Well, Romans is about new creation, the ultimate Passover, and God’s provision of atonement. We shouldn’t be surprised that Genesis 22 comes in to complete the set.
Of course, for Paul, the near-sacrifice of Isaac wasn’t atoning in the way some later Jewish teachers expounded it. But we recall that, at the climax of Romans 4, the earlier Abraham-chapter, Paul parallels Jesus and Isaac, with Isaac’s birth set alongside Jesus’ resurrection, both constituting God-given life out of death. He refers there to Jesus as having been ‘handed over’ to death, the same verb as here, paradidōmi. And in the same chapter, he mentions, almost casually, that the promise to Abraham was that he would ‘inherit the world’ (4.13), the promise which was dramatically restated in Genesis 22.15–18, amplifying the various earlier statements.1 So my sense is that Paul here sees Genesis 22 as an oblique forward pointer to the fulfilment of the Abrahamic covenant in the death and resurrection of God’s beloved son, not least in order to tie together the exposition of God’s covenant faithfulness in chapters 1—4 with the exposition of the consequent security of God’s covenant family in chapters 5—8.
The second half of verse 32 then makes more sense than we might have initially realized. A traditional western reading might have expected Paul to say that God, having not spared his own son but having given him up for us all, would then save us from our sins and bring us to heaven. But Paul instead speaks of God giving us all things with him (that is, with his son). As he said in verse 17, we are fellow heirs with the Messiah; and the focal point is then on the inheritance, which is the entire world, rescued and renewed. The promise we just mentioned, about Abraham inheriting the world, means that the promised land was itself a forward-looking signpost, as the messianic psalms indicate. Thus for instance, in Psalm 2, the promises to Abraham are focused sharply on the Messiah. He will be given the nations as his inheritance, and the uttermost parts of the world as his possession. Paul draws on that, as we have seen, in 8.17–27: the messianic inheritance, now to be shared with all the Messiah’s people, is the whole creation, set free from its slavery to corruption. So when he says here that God ‘will . . . freely give all things to us’ this is quite specific. As in 1 Corinthians 3.21–3, ‘all things are yours’, because ‘you belong to the Messiah and the Messiah belongs to God’. And in the typically paradoxical 2 Corinthians 6.10, the apostles ‘have nothing yet possess everything’. What was darkly hinted at in Genesis has now come into the full light of the Messiah’s new creation. The Messiah’s people inherit the world, not in the way a Roman emperor would have imagined, through violent conquest, but in the healing, fruitful way promised in Isaiah and the Psalms and spelled out by Jesus himself in the Sermon on the Mount and elsewhere.
It is to Isaiah that Paul next goes, in verses 33 and 34. Verse 33 draws easily on Paul’s earlier exposition of justification, concluding in 8.1–11 and referred to a moment ago in verse 30: those he called, he justified, that is, he declared them to be in the right. But if God has done that, then any charge raised against his people can be set aside (again, of course, without any implication that they are free to misbehave): who will bring a charge? The implied answer is, nobody, of course, because God is the justifier, declaring his people already to be in the right. We see here how rich Paul’s justification-theology actually is: justification for him is not simply dealing with sin, but enabling his people to stand unafraid before the Pontius Pilates of the world. Paul quotes Isaiah 50: if Jesus is the ultimate Servant of the Lord, then his people are the Servant-people and can claim the Servant-promises. Isaiah’s Servant faced accusation and violence and ultimately death. Go back to those passages when you face those things, says Paul, and claim the promises as your own.
Verse 34, still following Isaiah 50, is more complex again. It opens a sudden window on Paul’s overall view of the risen and ascended Jesus and his continuing ministry on our behalf. Who is going to condemn? Condemning, of course, is one stage on beyond laying a charge, as in verse 33. Here, the charge has been laid and apparently proved, and sentence (condemnation) is about to be passed, as in the judgment scene in 2.1–16. But no: verse 1 of the present chapter declared that there was ‘no condemnation’ for the Messiah’s people. Yes, God’s final judgment will be just, without respect of persons. But those who belong to the Messiah already know the verdict, and they know that it has gone in their favour, because God raised Jesus from the dead, declaring that his death really had dealt with sins and that in him new creation had now been launched. In that light, all possible secondary condemnations for those ‘in him’ can be set aside as irrelevant.
So: who is going to condemn? As with the story in John 8.1–11 of Jesus and the men taken in hypocrisy (it’s normally called ‘the woman taken in adultery’ but you see the point), Jesus asks the woman, ‘Has nobody condemned you?’ ‘Nobody,’ she replies in bemused astonishment. Jesus has stood in the way – and it’s no accident that John 8 ends with people picking up stones to throw at Jesus instead. So, we ask again: who is to condemn? When we think about Jesus, we glimpse, with Paul in this passage, a theology of messianically achieved atonement that is larger, including more elements, than we normally imagine. The reason there is ‘no condemnation’ is, to be sure, because Jesus in his death has been the place where, and the means by which, sin has been condemned in the flesh. That’s what Paul says in 8.3. But for Paul, as in Hebrews, ‘atonement’ isn’t simply a matter of Jesus’ death. In the Levitical sacrificial cult, as retrieved in Jesus’ own day, the killing of the animal was not the central point. The central point was that the blood of the animal, released in death, was the God-given cleansing agent to rinse the Temple and its furniture clean from all traces of death and anything that goes with it, especially of course sin itself. And that is done so that the divine glory, the living presence of the living creator, may continue to abide with his people. So here, very similarly to Hebrews, and at this moment of climax for the whole letter so far, Paul sees not only Jesus’ death but also his resurrection, his ascension and his continuing work of intercession as the fuller picture of atonement. The much earlier reference to Jesus’ sacrificial blood in Romans 3.24–6 is not far away from his thought at this point. Jesus is the great high priest, providing with his shed blood the ultimate purification that enables God to dwell with his people. Jesus is himself the great sacrifice, the sin-offering, the guarantee of our union with God through his spirit. Jesus is the ultimate priestly intercessor.
This then gives us a rich and complex basis for complete assurance, especially when we feel ourselves under threat, and needing it most. This is assurance, not only for final salvation, but for every step of the way towards that goal. Yes, we are assured that the Messiah died for us. But we are also assured, and we are to tell ourselves this story again and again in case it slips out of view, that he ‘much more’ was raised from the dead. That ‘much more’ indicates that the cross only means what it means if Jesus was bodily raised. If he wasn’t, as Paul says in 1 Corinthians 15.17, we are still in our sins. The defeat of death is the sign of the defeat of sin. The resurrection therefore carries its own kind of assurance. As in Romans 6, the Messiah and his baptized people stand already on resurrection ground. Having died to sin, we are not stuck in a theological no-man’s land. We await final bodily resurrection, but we are already ‘in the Messiah’. His resurrection is part of the truth about who we already are. That is why we already have the ‘glory’, even though it displays itself in paradoxical fashion.
And that is why, as here, the resurrection provides its own specific answer to the rhetorical question, ‘Who is there to condemn?’ The Messiah’s people are to reply, with full confidence: ‘What do you mean, condemnation? He has been raised from the dead, and we have already been raised from the dead in him.’ But to make this even stronger, Paul moves on further, past the resurrection itself, to the present ongoing ministry of the ascended Jesus in the heavenly places. ‘Who is going to condemn us?’ asks the rhetorical question, and Jesus’ people reply, ‘How can there be any condemnation, when Messiah Jesus is standing at the father’s right hand, interceding for us?’
I suspect that many Christians today give merely lip service to the fact of Jesus’ ascension. Some may interpret it vaguely to mean that Jesus, having come from heaven, has gone back there again, and that we will follow him. I hope it’s clear by now how inadequate and misleading this view would be. For others, the whole business of ascension remains a puzzle, because we know that Jesus wasn’t a primitive spaceman heading off to some other place within our cosmos. But we do not have (because we have never been taught) a clear biblical metaphysic within which to understand the overlap of heaven and earth, and hence to envisage this part of the purpose of the ascension, namely that Jesus is there to intercede for us before the father.
To be clear: the point of the heaven/earth overlap is that, in the biblical world of ancient Israel and the Jewish world of Jesus and Paul, ‘heaven’ is not a long way away. Heaven and earth are meant to work together. It is only human idolatry and rebellion, colluding with the dark anti-creational powers, that have made it appear otherwise. So heaven is not detached from earth, as in some philosophies which many in the modern world have unthinkingly adopted or assumed. Heaven, as I’ve often said colloquially, is the CEO’s office; it is the place from which ‘earth’ is run. That is Jesus’ task right now, as he claimed in Matthew 28.18. There is already a wise obedient human being at the helm of the universe. That is what creation had always needed. We rejoice that it is already true in Jesus. The whole creation is on tiptoe waiting for it to become fully true in us as well. In the meantime, we anticipate that time in the lament and puzzled prayer of 8.26–7.
When Paul adds that Jesus is now at the father’s right hand, this is one of several early Christian retrievals of that favourite early text, Psalm 110.1 (‘YHWH said to my Lord, “Sit at my right hand until I make your enemies your footstool”’). According to Mark 14.62, Jesus himself combined this text with Daniel 7, where in the great apocalyptic denouement the ‘one like a son of man’ is raised up, brought to sit at the right hand of the Ancient of Days. Daniel’s picture envisages the final triumph of God’s right-hand man against all the dark forces, the monsters from the deep. This is the fulfilment both of God’s purpose for humanity – Daniel 7 is like a nightmare version of Genesis 1, with the human figure put in charge of the wild animals – and of God’s purpose for the Messiah, and of God’s purpose, if we can put it like this, for himself, for his own second self. Ever since creation, including the creation of humans in God’s image, the divine purpose was always that the creator would come to dwell, to be at home, within his own world.
Paul has already spoken of Jesus as the true human, the last Adam, in chapter 5. There he insists (though it’s dense and allusive) that, with the exaltation of Jesus, the victory of the kingdom has been won, a victory now to be shared with all Jesus’ redeemed brothers and sisters. Once again, there comes into view the great arc of thought from chapter 5 to chapter 8; this is how the whole section works. Paul sets out the same theme, from a different point of view, in 1 Corinthians 15. This is hardly surprising, since that whole chapter, the full-dress exposition of resurrection, has to do with the first Adam and the last Adam. Paul weaves the theme, also, into his heaven- and-earth picture in Ephesians chapter 1.
Here, then, Jesus is God’s right-hand man in heaven. He is there, in charge. Who shall condemn? asks the rhetorical question. No-one, Paul expects his hearers to reply – because Jesus, the Messiah, is the man at God’s right hand. Jesus is the truly human being, doing what God always intended humans to do, that is, ruling the world as God’s obedient agent and image-bearer. Those who know Jesus to be their older brother, as in verse 29, can and should rejoice at this. Our brother, the leading member of the new family, is there at God’s right hand.
More particularly, to our delight and relief, he is interceding on our behalf. This is a wonderful encouragement, precisely at the moments when, whether in large matters or small, we find ourselves apparently under condemnation. (Again, this is not to say we will never get things horribly wrong, and need to be rebuked and restored to the right way.) Paul’s question, ‘Who is going to condemn?’ is answered implicitly, No-one – because there is Jesus, standing at the father’s right hand, saying ‘Father, have mercy on this, my younger sister, my younger brother.’ (In Psalm 110 and Daniel 7, and elsewhere in the New Testament, he is sitting at God’s right hand. But, as in Stephen’s vision in Acts 7.55–6, he is here standing to intercede.)
