More than conquerors

What then shall we say to these things? If God is for us, who can be against us? (Romans 8.31, ESV)

Last week we asked, What is the glory of God?
I suggested it has three elements: God’s power, his transcendence, and his reputation
The glory of God is his presence in the world; it’s our experience of God

This week’s big question leads on from that one: What’s glorious about suffering?
I started to answer that question last week
I said, the glory of God is revealed in believers as hope – hope in the face of suffering
But I think on the basis of this week’s reading we can go further

Paul tells us we are more than conquerors through him who loved us
Do we really all believe that? And what exactly does Paul think we have conquered?
We’ll have to follow Paul’s argument in this passage step by step to answer those questions

1 We start from what Paul has just been saying about our experience of prayer – We do not know how to pray as we should – We often feel confused and inadequate when we come before our God in prayer; we are embarrassed to be open before God. All we can do is groan wordlessly.
At this point, the Spirit comes to help us. The Spirit acts as our intermediary: the Spirit puts our groanings into words and communicates them to the Father

2 It’s not just us: the whole world feels lost and confused – The whole creation groans and suffers the pains of childbirth together until now – All of Creation has that same longing to be heard and put right by God.

3 Our experience of life in the world is chaotic, even terrifying, but the Spirit is there, drawing everything together towards a final harmony where God’s will is perfectly accomplished – We know that God causes all things to work together for good to those who love God

3 What should our response be to this? We should be reassured, knowing that God who gave his only Son for us has spared nothing to save us. – He who did not spare His own Son, but delivered Him over for us all, how will He not also with Him freely give us all things? – The resurrection is proof of God’s plan and his power to save, and the risen Christ is the one who prays for us now

4 This would all be just words unless we could prove it from our own experience. – Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Will tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? – The acid test is how believers respond to persecution – persecution being the enemy’s most powerful weapon, the greatest challenge to our faith

5 The passage ends on a note of triumph: not a final declaration of victory, but a declaration of faith, that the love of God is always with us, and that love conquers everything: In all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us.

This whole argument turns on a single verse Paul quotes from Psalm 44 (verse 22), between points 4 and 5 of this argument:
For Your sake we are being put to death all day long;
We were considered as sheep to be slaughtered.

As usual in Paul, it’s not just a matter of remembering that one verse
Paul wants us to think of the whole Psalm (he knew them by heart, he assumes we do too)

The speaker of the psalm remembers how God drove out the inhabitants of Canaan so the Israelites could enter the land
(That’s usually what the Old Testament is talking about when conquest or victory are mentioned)

The psalmist remembers how Yahweh fought for Israel at that time:
It was not by their sword that they took the land, their arm did not give them victory, but Your right hand, Your arm, and Your goodwill, for You favoured them. (v. 4)

He calls on the Lord to fight for Israel now, in the present day:
You are my king, O God; decree victories for Jacob! (v 5)

But he feels troubled, because clearly God is not fighting on Israel’s side any more:
You have rejected and disgraced us; You do not go with our armies. You make us retreat before our foe; our enemies plunder us at will (vv 10-12)

You might think the speaker would see this as punishment for the people’s faithlessness – but you would be wrong
The psalmist claims the people have been faithful, it’s God who has let them down:
All this has come upon us, yet we have not forgotten You, or been false to Your covenant. Our hearts have not gone astray, nor have our feet swerved from Your path (vv 18-19)

That thought leads up to the climactic verse, the verse Paul quotes:
It is for Your sake that we are slain all day long, that we are regarded as sheep to be slaughtered. (v 23)

The usual resolution of psalms like this is that the speaker is suddenly reminded that God is always there – so the psalm ends on a note of gratitude, or at least hope
But Psalm 44 isn’t like that
The speaker is still complaining as the psalm ends, accusing God of letting his people down, betraying their faithfulness, and risking his glorious reputation in the world:
Arise and help us, redeem us, as befits Your faithfulness. (v 27)

So you could say that what Paul does, when he picks up this psalm and quotes it, is to give it the conclusion it should have had in the first place
The conclusion for Psalm 44 that Paul writes in Romans 8 urges us to recognise the divine presence in the midst of apparent disaster: to see that we are more than conquerors, no matter what happens, because the love of Christ is a light the darkness cannot put out

We suffer for Christ, in the same way that Christ first suffered for us
Our own life experience embodies the same pattern of suffering, followed by victory

The suffering of Jesus led to his glorification
The salvation we hope to share in is to be resurrected with Christ, and to share in his glory

But it’s not just a future hope – the glory didn’t come after the suffering
The glory of God was revealed IN the suffering, when Jesus was raised up on the cross

God’s people don’t suffer because God is making them suffer
They suffer because the new world they are living in is so much at odds with the old world, which is passing away and fighting tooth and nail to deny God’s purposes

Remember what I said last week – God’s glory is his reputation in the world
The glory revealed in the suffering Christ proclaims God’s glory to the world
The glory revealed in the suffering of believers proclaims God’s victory to the world
Because other people see that God’s people go on praising him, even at the point of death
And even when life just seems difficult, or pointless

That is the answer to our questions
That is what is glorious about suffering
That is how we are more than conquerors, through Christ who loved us

If you can see that, if you believe it, what difference will it make, to the way you live today, and tomorrow?

Image by velka @ publicdomainpictures.net

What is the glory of God?

The creation itself also will be set free from its slavery to corruption into the freedom of the glory of the children of God
(Romans 8.21, NASB)

Today I thought we might answer one of the big questions of our faith: what is the glory of God?
I want to end up by getting us to think about what the glory of God means to us
– Which means, what is our own experience of the glory of God?
– I think our reading says, our experience of God’s glory is related to our experience of suffering

Suffering was something we talked about last week
We were reminded that suffering in a biblical context normally refers to persecution
So it is suffering that arises from preaching or living out the gospel in a hostile society

It’s in that sort of context we find God’s presence and experience God’s comfort
And this week I’ll add to that the idea it’s also where encounter God’s glory

I think our sense of God’s glory arises from three things:
– God’s power
– God’s transcendence
– God’s reputation

1 God’s glory reflects God’s power: God is immeasurably greater than us
It’s not just a difference of degree: God is qualitatively different, not just quantitatively different
We are made in his image, but what he is, is fundamentally different to what we are

Biblical history is the story of how God has revealed his power, in creating the world, choosing a people for himself, fighting their battles (he is the Lord of hosts), preparing them to receive a Saviour who is God himself
Nothing in the world has the power to frustrate God’s plan

2 God’s glory is reflected in his transcendence
The limits that apply to us do not apply to God
We are created, he is not; the limits that apply in the created world do not apply to the Creator

But that does not mean that created beings like us do not have any sense of God
He has implanted in us the ability to experience something of what he is like

God’s transcendence cannot be explained or described in prose
The Bible uses poetry to describe it: Be exalted above the heavens, O God;Let Your glory be above all the earth (Psa 57.5)

Sometimes God’s glory takes a visible form
Hebrew has a word for that, though it isn’t found in the Bible, only in later literature

The word is Shekinah, and it refers to things like the the pillar of fire and cloud in the wilderness
The glory that drives the priests out of the temple when it is dedicated
And again when Solomon dedicates his temple in Jerusalem
Maybe sometimes we experience God’s glory in worship

3 God’s glory is a matter of reputation – this follows on from point 2
God reveals his glory in all his dealings with Israel: You are My Servant, Israel,In Whom I will show My glory (Isa 49.3)

There are two reasons God brings his people out of Egypt and establishes them in the Land
One is to keep the promise he made to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob
The other is to proclaim his greatness and his superiority to all other gods to the world’s people and their rulers: The Egyptians shall know that I am the Lord, when I stretch out My hand on Egypt and bring out the sons of Israel from their midst (Exo 7.5)

Why are there ten plagues? Why doesn’t God just strike Pharaoh with a lightning bolt?
God tells Moses say to Pharaoh, I have allowed you to remain, in order to show you My power and in order to proclaim My name through all the earth (Exo 9.16)

God gives Israel the Law for the same reason: all other nations will hear Israel’s Law and say,
‘Surely this great nation is a wise and understanding people.’ For what great nation is there that has a god so near to it as is the Lord our God whenever we call on Him? Or what great nation is there that has statutes and judgments as righteous as this whole law which I am setting before you today? (Deu 4.6-8)

It doesn’t matter if God’s people keep his Law or not
If they keep the laws, he will bless them; if they break the laws, he will punish them
Either way, the world sees the power and wisdom of God; they see his glory

That is all just background – how do we experience God’s glory? How can it be revealed?
It seems from today’s reading from Romans that we should expect to see God’s glory revealed in a new way – revealed according to a pattern established by the resurrection

Remember how Jesus challenges his disciples to say who they think he really is
Peter is the first to confess that Jesus is the Christ, the Messiah
According to Mark’s gospel, Peter can’t accept what Jesus says next: that the Son of Man must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders and the chief priests and the scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again (Mark 8.31)

But it’s only those who accept this is true, who take up their own cross and suffer for the gospel, who will be welcomed when the Son of Man comes in the glory of His Father with the holy angels (Mark 8..38)

That brings us to this morning’s reading, from Romans 8
The point Paul makes in this reading is that every follower of Christ has been chosen to suffer

It’s a point so obvious, Paul doesn’t even debate it
He accepts it as inevitable that, where the gospel is proclaimed, persecution will come

There is nothing glorious about persecution – hardships, danger, thirst, hunger, suspicion, betrayal, people hurling insults, throwing stones, arrest, imprisonment, beatings, fear, torture, even death

But somewhere in the experience of persecution is the sense of being brought closer to Christ
When Jesus knew his last day had come, he said, The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified
Paul asks us to believe that when we suffer for the gospel, our lives are being shaped to the pattern of Jesus’ life; we are glorified, and the Father is glorified in us

It’s unlikely we’ll face the kind of persecution the apostles faced
But we do suffer a lot from a kind of self-inflicted persecution
– a fear of what others think about Christians
– a painful sense of embarrassment when we’re called on to speak about what we believe

I feel as if I can’t answer my own question: What is the glory of God?
We can’t fully know the glory of God in this world
The glory of God is transcendent, it’s infinite and unknowable

All I can point to is the things we can experience, and something we can reveal to others
The glory of God is revealed in us as hope
It’s a powerful hope – the world can’t overwhelm it or put it out
It’s a transcendent hope – it shines through everything

It’s a hope that lives and grows in the face of suffering
It’s a hope that builds God’s reputation, because it’s a hope that everyone can see and recognise
Our hope is the gospel, and God reveals his glory in those who live it out

Image from NASA, earthobservatory.nasa.gov

God’s comfort is like white water rafting

He who rescued us from so deadly a peril will continue to rescue us; on him we have set our hope that he will rescue us again (2Corinthians 1.10)

Let’s do a word association exercise
What comes into your mind when I say the word comfort?
– Fabric conditioner (Softness is a thing called ‘Comfort’)
– Sitting in a posh car, or your favourite armchair
– Giving a hug to a child who is in crying, or a friend at a funeral

The questions I want to ask are, when Christians talk about ‘comfort’ or ‘consolation’ do we mean more than other people do?
And, is God’s comfort or consolation a purely personal blessing, just for me, or does it have a bigger dimension?

I think both of those questions are answered in this reading from 2Corinthians
Though as always it’s backed up by lots of other passages in both Testaments

This is Paul’s second letter to the church in Corinth (or is it?), and he begins the way he always does
He offers the Corinthians words of blessing and encouragement

It’s not easy to bless everyone all the time, or always to find something encouraging to say
It wasn’t easy for Paul at that moment, given the state of his relationship with the Corinthian church

Let’s summarise Paul’s argument in these few verses:
2Co 1.3-5 God blesses us with his consolation when we suffer, so that we are able to bless and console other people in the same way, in his name. We learn this pattern of blessing and consolation from Jesus

2Co 1.6-7 Paul makes a personal application: he tells the people he is writing to that he and they are all involved in this pattern of redemptive suffering and consolation. Their suffering is redemptive because it is for the sake of the gospel, and therefore it brings consolation

2Co 1.8-11 Paul gets very personal, with a confession of just how much physical and spiritual suffering he has endured in the recent past. Yet what he feels he has learned from this is to place even more faith in God, who has used him to reveal his blessings to the people who have prayed for him (who were actually part of what happened to him, and contributed to his sense of betrayal)

What was this deep experience of suffering Paul went through?
There’s a big change of tone between the end of 1Cor, and the opening of 2Cor
N T Wright says it’s like people revisiting a house the morning after a cheerful, boisterous family gathering, and discovering the atmosphere sombre, leaden and gloomy. Something has gone terribly wrong. (N T Wright, the Resurrection of the Son of God)

N T Wright theorises that Paul came back to visit Corinth again, and found a lot of things going on that made him unhappy
He wrote the church a letter which hasn’t survived – a ‘painful letter’ – which upset them

Added to this, new teachers had moved into the city
They had undermined his teachings, pushed teachings of their own (which Paul violently disagreed with), slandered his reputation

Somewhere in all this, to make things worse, Paul was imprisoned in Ephesus
He experienced great suffering in there – he was possibly under sentence of death

That’s probably what lies behind these words:
We do not want you to be unaware, brothers and sisters, of the affliction we experienced in Asia; for we were so utterly, unbearably crushed that we despaired of life itself.

But at the lowest point of his personal suffering, Paul received consolation from God
He felt again the comfort of the gospel: he experienced resurrection

Paul shares with the church his feeling that his life was saved through their prayers of the church
So from now on, even though they’ve quarrelled, they are part of one another’s life and death

So, was the comfort Paul experienced in that time in prison just a human comfort, or did it come from God?
Was it just for his own benefit, or was it something he was meant to share?

To help us answer those questions I want to quote to you two passages: one from the Old Testament, one from the New
The first is from Isaiah. These are words from God, meant for his people in Babylon:

Isaiah 40:1–2 (ESV) —
Comfort, comfort my people, says your God.
Speak tenderly to Jerusalem,
and cry to her that her warfare is ended,
that her iniquity is pardoned,
that she has received from the Lord’s hand double for all her sins.

The second one is from Luke. It tells what happened when Mary and Joseph brought Jesus to be dedicated in the temple:

Now there was a man in Jerusalem, whose name was Simeon, and this man was righteous and devout, waiting for the consolation of Israel, and the Holy Spirit was upon him. And it had been revealed to him by the Holy Spirit that he would not see death before he had seen the Lord’s Christ. And he came in the Spirit into the temple, and when the parents brought in the child Jesus, to do for him according to the custom of the Law, he took him up in his arms and blessed God.
(Luke 2.25-28)

I think these passages answer both of our questions:
– The comfort or consolation people are looking for comes from God himself
– God’s comfort or consolation is for Israel, meaning for all God’s people

And there’s the answer to a third question, that I didn’t ask
– The comfort or consolation we might experience from God is not just for that moment
– It points to God’s plan to comfort, or console, or reconcile the whole world
– Therefore, our mission as a church is to proclaim God’s comfort, by sharing it

2Cor shows that Paul had experienced the consolation that Simeon had been waiting for
He didn’t find it in the temple – he experienced it for the first time on the road to Damascus
Then again and again in all the conflicts and hardships of his ministry around the Mediterranean

Paul’s comfort isn’t a comfy seat, a soft pillow, a fluffy jumper, a shoulder to cry on
It’s sharing the good news of the resurrection, experiencing the joy of passing through suffering, and emerging from suffering still able to go on sharing the gospel

God’s comfort isn’t like a warm bath – it’s more like white water rafting
It’s looking back, and seeing what you’ve gone through, and knowing who it was who brought you through it
Feeling that relief, and that exhilaration – and then showing other people how they can share it

Mustn’t grumble

They will see His face, and His name will be on their foreheads. And there will no longer be any night; and they will not have need of the light of a lamp nor the light of the sun, because the Lord God will illumine them; and they will reign forever and ever. Revelation 22.4-5, NASB

Every good story has a beginning, a middle and an end
The Bible begins and ends with light
But a lot of what comes in between is darkness

Where does the darkness come from? That’s a very good question.
But sometimes you’ll discover the answer if you just look in a mirror

The darkest moment in the Bible is on the night of the Last Supper
It’s when Judas leaves the side of Jesus, and goes out into the darkness to betray him
Judas went out. And it was night. (John 13.30)
The real darkness isn’t the darkness of the night, it’s the darkness in Judas’s heart

At that moment we should remember the words from John’s prologue
The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overwhelm it (John 1.5)

Fear of the darkness seems to be instinctive; even young children fear the dark
It’s not a fear of darkness itself; it’s the fear of what may be hiding in the shadows

The Bible begins and ends with light, as I’ve pointed out already
The Bible begins with the Book of Genesis, and Genesis begins with the creation of light
The Bible ends with the Book of Revelation, and Revelation ends with the vision of a city of light – the new Jerusalem

God creates by bringing order out of chaos and darkness
The separation of light and darkness symbolises the order God is bringing

God gives the command, Let there be light, and he declares that the light is good
God defines the daytime as the time of light, and night as the time of darkness

It’s not a moral judgement
The light is good, it pleases God, because he created it
Darkness is not evil – it is only the absence of light

Darkness only becomes something to fear when human beings use it to hide their sin
When humanity sins, we turn our backs on the light
Disorder returns and the darkness creeps back

The final vision of the Book of Revelation is a perfect city where there is no darkness:
They will see His face, and His name will be on their foreheads. There will no longer be any night; and they will not have need of the light of a lamp nor the light of the sun, because the Lord God will illumine them; and they will reign forever and ever.

The light in the city is the presence of God
The light doesn’t come from something God has created, like the sun, as it does in this present world
It comes from God himself

There’s also a light that shines within the people God has chosen to live in the city
It’s the light of divine wisdom – the Lord God will illumine them

Wisdom is a spiritual gift given to believers, that enables us to discern the will of God
[God] gives the wise their wisdom
And knowledge to those who know.
He reveals deep and hidden things,
Knows what is in the darkness,
And light dwells with Him. (Dan 2.21-22)
They’re not just clever – they are wise in the same way that God is wise

In this city, no one needs a physical light to know which way to walk
They don’t need any external help to know who they are, how to live or what to believe

To repeat what I said at the start, the Bible begins and ends in light
In between there’s a lot of darkness

But we don’t have to wait till we die to see this amazing light
We don’t have to wait till after we die to walk the streets of the heavenly city — it’s where we’re living now, even if we don’t quite see it yet

Jesus has already come for us – Jesus who said, I am the Light of the world; he who follows Me will not walk in the darkness, but will have the Light of life. (John 8.12)
Jesus is the light of this world, not just the world to come

If we’re still in darkness, maybe it’s because we don’t really believe that
The risen Jesus is not real enough to us; we don’t have enough faith

Sometimes maybe we create our own darkness
Because we refuse to let in the light – we keep our eyes shut

If light is wisdom, darkness is pride and folly
We are appointed as a royal priesthood to serve in God’s temple of light and wisdom
But sometimes, by our own decision, we serve in our own temple, which is a temple of pride and folly

Where do we see pride and folly in ourselves?
I think most of all, in the habit of grumbling

We’re not the first or the only ones to do it
The Israelites grumble their way through the whole Book of Exodus
Often at those moments when God has done something especially amazing for them

Grumbling is corrosive, it’s hateful
I always feel worse when I grumble – grumbling produces a darkness in us

Grumbling is divisive, it destroys community
When we’re complaining about someTHING, we’re inevitably complaining about someONE

It seems to me, listening to the news, and even just talking to other people, there’s been a fresh outbreak of grumbling since the lockdown restrictions were easer

A bit like the Israelites after Moses brought them out of Egypt, we’re looking round and complaining – complaining above all about other people:
— People in the street, people in the shops, people in the parks
— People younger or older than us, people in some way different from us
— People writing in the papers, or speaking on TV, or on social media
— People making decisions, people in authority

Certain assumptions come through whenever we’re complaining
The assumption that we know better, that we are entitled to more than we’re getting, that we are better than whoever we’re complaining about

That way of thinking has no place in the heavenly city, the city of light
It shows that we lack wisdom; it reveals our own inner darkness
Grumbling doesn’t make the darkness go away – it only intensifies the darkness

That’s why Paul talks so much about community, and gives so many warnings against those sins that undermine community: jealousy, angry tempers, disputes, slanders, gossip, arrogance (2Co 12.20)
These are all forms of grumbling, and signs of spiritual darkness
The more people indulge in these behaviours, the darker things get for everyone

I always think people who put those fish stickers on their cars are very brave
They must know, from that moment onwards, people will judge every Christian by the way they drive that car – that’s accountability
You can’t afford to be bad-tempered, or aggressive, or inconsiderate, when you’ve got that sticker on your car

God, who said, “Light shall shine out of darkness,” is the One who has shone in our hearts to give the Light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ. (2Co 4.6)

Paul is clearly looking back to the Transfiguration here, a vision of the exalted Christ before his death that was shared by only his three closest disciples
But things are different in the post-resurrection world, and everyone who looks at us, listens to us, or watches what we do should see that light
Everyone who looks us in the eye and sees the expression on our face should see that light
There’s a spirit of divine light and wisdom that lives in us, by the grace of God – let’s not deny it by our own earthly selfishness