Sounds Good, But Is It The Truth? (6)

 

Continuing from our previous post, reflecting on Romans 8:28:

 

Do we define what is good, or does God define it? What is the “good” that Paul is speaking of in Romans 8:28?

 

Let’s note that all things work together for good to those who love God. We are to love God with all that we have and all that we are. We are to love God with all of our heart, soul, mind, and strength (Mark 12:29 – 31), and to love our neighbor as ourselves. In the previous post I included references to Biblical love, a love with definition, a love with a certain form of expression, a love that can be identified – to love God means that we keep His commandments, it means that we lay our lives down for Him and others, it means that we judge what is true and what is false, what is good and what is evil.

 

Let’s also note that all things work together for good for those who are called according to God’s purpose. We no longer belong to ourselves, we belong to God in Jesus Christ. Our lives are not to be about our agendas, for we are called to surrender our agendas, along with ourselves, to Jesus Christ. Here, my friends, is one of our great challenges; we live in a church, at least in the West, which considers itself as the center of the universe – we have had a reverse Copernican revolution, we have gone from thinking the sun is the center of the solar system to thinking that we are the center – our wants, our needs, our desires, our agendas, our pleasures, our definition of good is what matters – we have pushed the Cross of Christ out of the way, we have locked it up in a basement storage room and installed multiple locks on the door…and we dare not bring the Cross out lest it cause us discomfort. O we might take it out for lip service during Holy Week and dress it up so that it is unrecognizable, but then we’ll put it back where we think it belongs so as not to offend anyone, so as not to interfere with our own personal “good.”

 

To quote Romans 8:28 out of context, to use the word “good” as a nebulous fuzzy image without Biblical definition, is to suck the glory of the verse and the passage out of it (humanly speaking) and to deprive us of it glorious message, a message that we can rely on, indeed, a message that we can stake our lives upon.

 

For the “good” of which Romans 8:28 speaks is none other than that we should be “conformed to the image of His Son, so that He would be the firstborn among many brethren” (Rom. 8:29). Indeed, the greater context of 8:28 is our sonship, in Christ, in the Father and our destiny in that sonship – a destiny in which we bear the likeness of our Elder Brother, the Firstborn Son, crying out, “Abba! Father!” (8:15), a destiny in which we share in the sufferings Christ, in which we are coheirs with Christ, in which a glorious unveiling awaits us in which the creation will be set free from its downward spiral of decay and in which it will be set free “into the freedom of the glory of the children of God.”

 

The trajectory of our destiny in Christ is that nothing will separate us from the love of God, a love which has clarity and definition and articulation, as Paul writes, “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?” (8:32). Within our destiny and calling in Christ, nothing will separate us from the love of God (8:38 – 39).

 

When we define “good” we have nothing to build our lives upon, nothing upon which to trust, nothing upon which to hope, nothing with which we can encourage and comfort our brothers and sisters; but when we realize that God’s “good” is our transformation into the likeness and image of Jesus Christ, when we see God’s ultimate purpose and intention in our lives – individually and as His People – then we can live “looking unto Jesus, the Author and Finisher of our faith” (Hebrews 12:2), then we can “keep seeking the things above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God” (Col. 3:1 – 4), knowing that “When Christ, who is our life, is revealed, then you also will be revealed with Him in glory.”

 

Does the context of Romans 8:28 matter?

 

What do you think?