Monday, February 21
Who will separate us from the love of Christ?
—Romans 8:35
I have a t-shirt with a Far Side cartoon on it. The picture is of God in front of a computer. On the monitor you can see a hapless man walking along the street, completely unaware of the grand piano hanging precariously above his head. God is at the keyboard, poised to hit the “smite” button. It’s a terrible image of God, and yet I know the feeling. There have definitely been times when I felt like God had hit the smite button.
It’s easy to feel God’s love when everything is going well. We have been so conditioned to think that bad things in our lives are a sign of God’s displeasure and that fortunate circumstances are a sign of God’s favor that the joys and sorrows of normal life can take our spiritual connection up and down with them.
But Paul gives us a different picture. He lists a whole host of things that could possibly make us think that God has turned against us: hardship, distress, persecution, famine, nakedness, peril, the sword. But the resounding answer of the passage is that all of those things are powerless to separate us from the love of God. Not even death can do it, he says.
Despite the way it feels sometimes, God is not poised to hit the smite button. The one who came to earth to live as we live and to die as we die is not punishing us with misfortune. The God Paul is telling us about is the God who is walking with us, and whose love sticks to us like glue no matter how bad it gets.
Other people can’t take God’s love from us, and we can’t go to any height or depth that God’s love can’t reach. Not even dark spiritual forces can wrest it away from us. God loves us, now and forever. Period. That might not change my outward circumstances, but it sure does help my heart.
Thank you God for your steadfast love that endures forever. Amen.
These Signposts originally appeared on explorefaith in 2006.
