Honoring the Holy SpiritHis true work in Romans 8, from new life to eternal glory

Forgotten and misrepresented

The Holy Spirit gave the believer life. He lives in him, makes him holy and keeps him, and one day He will raise his body from the dead. Yet within the church He is the member of the Trinity most often forgotten, and the one most often misrepresented. Many believers give Him little thought. Many others credit Him with words He did not speak, deeds He did not do and experiences He did not produce.

Those who love God feel the dishonor done to Him as their own. The psalmist wrote, “Zeal for Your house has consumed me, and the reproaches of those who reproach You have fallen on me” (Psalm 69:9). The New Testament applies both halves to Christ: when zeal for His Father’s house drove Him to clear the merchants from the temple, His disciples remembered the first (John 2:17), and Paul applies the second to Him (Romans 15:3). A believer should feel the dishonor done to the Holy Spirit as Christ felt the dishonor done to His Father.

Scripture names the wrongs that can be done to the Spirit, and what it says of them shows how seriously God guards the honor of His Spirit:

Today the Holy Spirit is dishonored chiefly in two ways: by misrepresentation, which credits Him with what He does not do and denies what He does, and by neglect.

Satan’s work credited to the Spirit

In Matthew 12 a demon-possessed man who was blind and mute was brought to Jesus, and Jesus healed him, so that he spoke and saw. The crowds began to ask whether this could be the Son of David. The Pharisees could not deny the miracle, so they explained it away: “This man casts out demons only by Beelzebul the ruler of the demons” (Matthew 12:24). Jesus answered that He did it “by the Spirit of God” (Matthew 12:28), and then He warned them:

³¹Therefore I say to you, any sin and blasphemy shall be forgiven people, but blasphemy against the Spirit shall not be forgiven. ³²Whoever speaks a word against the Son of Man, it shall be forgiven him; but whoever speaks against the Holy Spirit, it shall not be forgiven him, either in this age or in the age to come.

Matthew 12:31-32 · NASB95

The leaders of Israel saw the power of the Holy Spirit at work in Christ and credited it to Satan, and Jesus’ warning shows how grave it is to call the work of the Spirit the work of Satan. What goes on today is the reverse, and it dishonors the same Spirit: the work of Satan is credited to Him. Satan is alive and at work in deception, false miracles and bad theology, and in visions, dreams and revelations that are lies. Satan works through teachers who preach for money and influence, and they give their deceptions credibility by attaching them to the Holy Spirit.

Where the movement went wrong

Much of what is credited to the Spirit today comes from the charismatic movement, taken here in its wide sense to include the Pentecostalism it grew out of, and Pentecostalism did not exist in 1900. It began with a handful of people in Topeka, Kansas, in 1901 and spread from Los Angeles in 1906. From 1960 its teaching spread into the older denominations as the charismatic renewal, and independent charismatic churches have multiplied since. A century after Topeka the whole movement was estimated at about half a billion people, and it has been called the third force in Christianity, beside Roman Catholicism and Protestantism.

Open attacks on other doctrines have been answered. When open theism denied that God knows in advance the choices His creatures will make, evangelicals rose up to answer it; when the New Perspective on Paul challenged the doctrine of justification, they produced a library in its defense; and the church has said much about the errors of Rome. About the charismatic movement’s errors concerning the Holy Spirit it has said far less. Those errors mostly come dressed as experiences, so few recognize them as attacks at all, and whoever names them is accused of being divisive and unloving.

The movement began with an error about the Holy Spirit. It taught that the baptism of the Spirit is an experience that follows salvation, which the believer must seek and will recognize when he speaks in tongues and is lifted to a higher level of spiritual power. From there the center of interest moved from the gospel to that experience, and from the Bible to feeling. Feeling came to decide what is true, and the Bible came to be read by intuition, so that readers found in it whatever they wanted it to say. In much of the movement worship was recast as the inducing of emotional highs; people grew bored with the Bible and with preaching, and preaching faded. Sound doctrine was set aside, because what was practiced could not survive being tested by it.

Much of the movement also denies the Spirit’s true work: it treats the new birth as a work the sinner shares with Him, it takes little interest in His inner work of making believers holy, and much of it teaches that the salvation He secures can be lost. How little it cares about holiness shows in its best-known figures, many of whom have been marked again and again by scandal, sexual sin and greed.

A spirit Scripture does not know

Anyone who formed a doctrine of the Holy Spirit from Christian television alone would conclude that the Spirit is a kind of force: a force that knocks people to the floor at the wave of a man’s hand and leaves them lying there, stunned, and makes them mumble incoherent sounds, roll their eyes back and sway to the music. Some credit Him with still more: uncontrollable laughter, convulsions, trances that last for hours, staggering as if drunk and barking like a dog, and some healers slap or punch the sick in the name of His power.

If the falls, the laughter and the trances were the Spirit’s work, they would be most common where Christ and His Word are honored, because that is where the Spirit moves. They are found instead where Christ is dishonored and the Scripture He wrote is twisted, and they lend credibility to bad theology and false teachers. Most of them have human causes: the power of suggestion, the pressure of group expectation and the skill of manipulation, and deception of that kind serves Satan whether or not a spirit is present. Where spirits are at work, they are demons, not the Holy Spirit.

Others claim that He speaks through them as He spoke through the apostles. A rapidly expanding movement called the New Apostolic Reformation teaches that in 2001 the church entered a second apostolic age, in which the Spirit restored the offices of apostle and prophet with the authority and power the first apostles had. Its leaders announce what they say God has revealed to them about American states and political parties, and they confront demons by driving stakes into the ground, county by county. Yet an apostle had to be an eyewitness of the risen Christ, chosen by Him (Acts 1:21-26; 1 Corinthians 9:1), and Paul says Christ appeared to him last of all (1 Corinthians 15:8), so no one after him can hold the office. Nor is there new revelation for a prophet to bring: the faith was “once for all handed down to the saints” (Jude 3).

Often His power is put up for sale, with healing and blessing promised in return for money. Scripture says the gift of God cannot be bought. When Simon the magician saw the Spirit given through the apostles’ hands, he offered them money for the same authority, and Peter answered, “May your silver perish with you, because you thought you could obtain the gift of God with money!” (Acts 8:20).

A god of their own making

While Moses was on the mountain receiving the law, the people below grew tired of waiting and told Aaron to make them a god. Aaron collected their gold and made a molten calf, and they said, “This is your god, O Israel, who brought you up from the land of Egypt” (Exodus 32:4). When Moses came down, he found the people dancing around it (Exodus 32:19), and when he confronted Aaron, Aaron spoke as if the calf had made itself: “I threw it into the fire, and out came this calf” (Exodus 32:24). The calf misrepresented the nature of God and His work, the worship around it turned ungodly and immoral, and “about three thousand men of the people fell that day” (Exodus 32:28).

Israel gave its god a form to look at, and the wider church has given the Holy Spirit one too. A bestselling book told of a four-year-old boy’s claimed visit to heaven during surgery and described the Holy Spirit as blue, shooting power down to the earth, and it sold millions of copies. No one should picture the Holy Spirit in any form. When the LORD spoke to Israel at Horeb, they saw no form, so that they would not make an image (Deuteronomy 4:15-16). The dove at the Jordan and the tongues of fire at Pentecost were signs, not likenesses of the Spirit to be copied.

No one has the right to make God in his own image or to his own specifications. Yet that is what much of the charismatic movement has done with the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit it describes is unrecognizable beside what Scripture teaches about the third person of the Trinity. The movement threw human experience into the fire, and out came a spirit of its own making: a golden calf, an idol around which its people dance, dishonoring the One they claim to celebrate.

Worse, in much of the movement the spirit serves the believer. It is presented as a metaphysical force that answers to the believer’s words, wishes and demands, the power behind his desire for health, wealth and mystical experience. The idea came into the movement through the teachers of positive confession, who drew it from the mind-science cults such as Christian Science, and in it the believer commands and the spirit obeys.

Many of its preachers claim to command the Holy Spirit too. One of the best-known faith healers has taught people never to say to the Lord, “If it be Your will,” and he has said, “The activity of the Holy Spirit is dependent on my words. He will not move until I say it.” He has claimed an anointing that came on him at the graves of two women evangelists, and he has waved his coat at crowds so that people fell in rows. Preachers like him speak as if they could summon the Spirit to a theater at half past seven on a Wednesday. In their scheme the preacher is sovereign, and the Spirit waits on him.

The Holy Spirit is not a force waiting to be set in motion. He is sovereign God, no less sovereign than the Father and the Son. Believers do not activate the Holy Spirit; He activates the work of God in them. They are to obey Him, submit to Him, walk by Him and be filled with Him. To use His name to lend a preacher credibility and to make him famous and rich is to take the name of the Lord in vain, and God has said what becomes of the one who does it:

⁷You shall not take the name of the LORD your God in vain, for the LORD will not leave him unpunished who takes His name in vain.

Exodus 20:7 · NASB95

Set beside Scripture, the claims made for Him fall apart:

Forgotten by those who reject the errors

Many who reject the errors of the charismatic movement have neglected the Holy Spirit too.

Even the renewed interest in Reformed theology in recent decades, for all its care to get the gospel right, has not brought a matching care for the Spirit’s work of making believers holy.

Where the Spirit is forgotten, pragmatism takes His place, and churches try to accomplish by human methods what only He can do. Paul asked the Galatians, “Having begun by the Spirit, are you now being perfected by the flesh?” (Galatians 3:3). Nothing done in the body of Christ has any lasting effect unless the Spirit does it.

Believers are to answer the errors of the charismatic movement, for the sake of the Spirit’s honor and of those the errors deceive, and they must not treat Him lightly themselves, whether by error or by neglect.

He, not it

The Holy Spirit is a person, and He is God, the third person of the Trinity. Scripture never speaks of Him as an impersonal force or an influence or an energy flowing out from God, and to call Him “it” is inaccurate. The King James Version writes “the Spirit itself” twice in Romans 8 only because the Greek word for spirit is neuter in gender. Grammatical gender says nothing about who He is. Jesus called Him “another Helper” (John 14:16). The first Helper was Jesus Himself, so the One sent to take His place with the disciples is a person, as He is. Scripture shows the Spirit knowing, loving and choosing, and acting as only a person acts:

He knows

“the thoughts of God no one knows except the Spirit of God” (1 Corinthians 2:11).

He loves

Paul appealed to the Romans “by the love of the Spirit” (Romans 15:30).

He chooses

He distributes His gifts “to each one individually just as He wills” (1 Corinthians 12:11).

He teaches

“He will teach you all things, and bring to your remembrance all that I said to you” (John 14:26).

He guides

“He will guide you into all the truth” (John 16:13).

He leads

“All who are being led by the Spirit of God, these are sons of God” (Romans 8:14).

He prays

He intercedes for the saints with groanings too deep for words (Romans 8:26-27).

He forbids

Paul and his companions were “forbidden by the Holy Spirit to speak the word in Asia” (Acts 16:6).

Modalism, the old heresy that God is a single person who appears now as the Father, now as the Son and now as the Spirit, is still taught by some well-known preachers. At Jesus’ own baptism all three were present at once: the Son came up out of the water, the Spirit descended on Him, and the Father spoke from heaven (Matthew 3:16-17), and that one scene answers modalism.

He can also be treated as only a person can be. He can be lied to and put to the test, as He was by Ananias and Sapphira (Acts 5:3; Acts 5:9), and He can be grieved (Isaiah 63:10; Ephesians 4:30), insulted (Hebrews 10:29) and blasphemed (Matthew 12:31). An impersonal power cannot be grieved, and an influence cannot be lied to. He thinks, feels, decides and acts: the Holy Spirit is a person.

Equal with the Father and the Son

The deity of the Holy Spirit is as clear as the fact that He is a person. When Ananias kept back part of the price of his land and pretended to give it all, Peter asked him why Satan had filled his heart “to lie to the Holy Spirit”, and a moment later said, “You have not lied to men but to God” (Acts 5:3-4). To lie to the Holy Spirit is to lie to God, because the Holy Spirit is God.

Jesus commanded that disciples be baptized “in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit” (Matthew 28:19): one name, and three equal persons.

Scripture ascribes to Him what belongs to God alone:

Eternal

Christ offered Himself “through the eternal Spirit” (Hebrews 9:14).

All-knowing

“The Spirit searches all things, even the depths of God” (1 Corinthians 2:10).

All-powerful

He creates (Job 33:4; Psalm 104:30), and by His power the Son became a man (Luke 1:35).

Present everywhere

“Where can I go from Your Spirit? Or where can I flee from Your presence?” (Psalm 139:7).

Giver of life

“The letter kills, but the Spirit gives life” (2 Corinthians 3:6).

Scripture gives Him the titles of deity as well. Paul calls Him Lord: “Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty” (2 Corinthians 3:17). He is the Spirit of the Father and equally the Spirit of the Son, and Romans 8:9 gives both titles in one sentence. As a man’s own spirit knows the man, only the Spirit of God knows the thoughts of God (1 Corinthians 2:11), and only God can know God that way. Other titles name His own nature:

The Holy Spirit is fully God, equal with the Father and the Son.

God at work in power

The Old Testament word for Spirit is רוּחַ (ruach), and the New Testament word is πνεῦμα (pneuma). Both mean wind or breath, air in motion. The emphasis of the words is not on immateriality but on power and life, and where ruach refers to the Spirit of God, it speaks of God’s power at work to accomplish His purposes. That power is not an energy God sends out from Himself; it is God the Spirit Himself at work. Micah wrote, “I am filled with power—with the Spirit of the LORD” (Micah 3:8). In the New Testament the King James Version usually calls Him the Holy Ghost, and that name now hides the sense of power and life. In 1611 a ghost was simply a spirit, but today the word suggests the faint image of a dead person who haunts the living.

In believers the Spirit’s power works inside, and for the most part invisibly. Before salvation every person is dead in sin, blind to the truth of God and corrupt to the core. The Spirit gives life to the spiritually dead. He then goes to work against the corruption that remains, and one day He will make the believer perfect, body and soul, and fit for eternal glory.

Where the Spirit’s power is at work, believers are united with one another and gifted and empowered for worship, service and obedience to Scripture. His work does not leave people babbling or out of control. It leaves them in their right minds and their worship in order, for “God is not a God of confusion but of peace” (1 Corinthians 14:33), and it keeps them faithful to the Word He wrote.

His work before Pentecost

The Spirit’s work begins with creation. When the earth was formless and void, “the Spirit of God was moving over the surface of the waters” (Genesis 1:2), and the creation took shape.

Throughout the Old Testament He did the work that salvation has always required. He strove with sinners to bring them to conviction: “My Spirit shall not strive with man forever” (Genesis 6:3). No one in Old Testament times could repent, believe or be made holy apart from Him, because since the fall every person has been born spiritually dead, and only the Spirit gives life.

In addition, He came upon certain people for special service. He filled Bezalel with the skill to build the tabernacle (Exodus 31:1-3), came upon judges to deliver Israel (Judges 3:10), and came upon Samson “mightily”, so that he tore a lion apart with his bare hands (Judges 14:6). He came upon kings, priests and prophets with power to rule and to speak for God, and He lifted the prophet Ezekiel up and carried him away (Ezekiel 3:12-14). When Samuel anointed David, “the Spirit of the LORD came mightily upon David from that day forward”, and “the Spirit of the LORD departed from Saul” (1 Samuel 16:13-14).

Years later, when David pleaded for forgiveness after his sin with Bathsheba, he prayed, “do not take Your Holy Spirit from me” (Psalm 51:11). The verse is often read as proof that the Spirit can leave a saved man. But David was not afraid of losing his salvation, for in the next verse he asked, “Restore to me the joy of Your salvation” (Psalm 51:12); what he had lost was his joy. Read against what happened to Saul, his prayer asks God not to take from him the Spirit’s anointing for his rule. Before Pentecost the Spirit’s anointing for an office could be withdrawn, as it was from Saul; His saving work could not.

The Spirit is also the author of Scripture. “No prophecy was ever made by an act of human will, but men moved by the Holy Spirit spoke from God” (2 Peter 1:21). In his last words David said, “The Spirit of the LORD spoke by me, and His word was on my tongue” (2 Samuel 23:2), and Peter said of the psalms about Judas, “the Scripture had to be fulfilled, which the Holy Spirit foretold by the mouth of David” (Acts 1:16). The writers wrote in their own words and style, yet the Spirit overruled their ignorance, their prejudices and their preferences, so that what they wrote is exactly what He wanted said. All Scripture is inspired by God (2 Timothy 3:16), and what Scripture says, the Holy Spirit says.

Prayed to and worshiped as God

Believers sometimes ask whether they may pray to the Holy Spirit, or whether prayer belongs to the Father alone. The usual pattern of prayer in the New Testament is to the Father, through the Son, in the Spirit (Ephesians 2:18; Jude 20). That pattern follows the order in which the three persons work, and it does not forbid addressing One who is fully God. Scripture itself goes outside that pattern: as he was stoned, Stephen prayed to the Son, “Lord Jesus, receive my spirit!” (Acts 7:59). What may be said to the Son may be said to the Spirit, for both are fully God. Prayer and worship may therefore be offered to the Spirit as to the Father and the Son, to any one of the three persons or to all three.

When John fell down to worship at the feet of the angel who had shown him the visions, the angel stopped him: “Worship God” (Revelation 22:8-9). Worship belongs to God alone, and the God to be worshiped is the triune God. Every command to worship God is a command to worship the Holy Spirit, who is fully God.

Some object that the Spirit points away from Himself to Christ, and so should not be worshiped Himself. He does point to Christ, as Jesus said He would (John 16:14), and all He wrote points to Christ, as the risen Jesus showed two of His disciples on the road to Emmaus (Luke 24:27). The Father, too, points away from Himself to the Son: “This is My beloved Son, with whom I am well-pleased; listen to Him!” (Matthew 17:5), and no one concludes from it that the Father is not to be worshiped. Pointing to Christ does not lessen the Spirit’s deity either, or turn worship away from Him. He shows believers Christ in order to make them like Christ (2 Corinthians 3:18). That work is a reason to worship the Spirit, not a reason to leave Him out.

In 1657 the Puritan John Owen published a treatise on the believer’s communion with each person of the Trinity in turn: with the Father in love, with the Son in grace, and with the Spirit in consolation. Consolation is the comfort the Spirit gives as the Comforter, the older translations’ name for the Helper Jesus promised (John 14:16). One of the verses Owen built on is the blessing that closes Second Corinthians, which joins grace to the Son, love to the Father and fellowship to the Spirit: “The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit, be with you all” (2 Corinthians 13:14). The three persons share in every work of God, yet each does certain works in His own way.

Owen went through what believers receive from the Spirit, from the witness that they belong to God to the seal for the day of redemption, and then wrote of the thanks and worship those gifts call for:

Worship of the Holy Spirit can only be as true and as full as a believer’s knowledge of who He is and what He does. Most believers know a good deal about the attributes and works of the Father and about the person and work of the Son. Far fewer could say what the Spirit is doing in them. The perfect pattern of that work is the life of Christ.

The Spirit with Christ from His conception

The best way to understand the ministry of the Holy Spirit in a believer is to see His ministry in the life of Jesus Christ. The Spirit was Christ’s inseparable companion. Every activity of the Lord’s life, from His conception through His death and resurrection to His ascension, took place in the full presence and by the full power of the Holy Spirit.

Christ is the believer’s example: the one who says he abides in Him “ought himself to walk in the same manner as He walked” (1 John 2:6). Christ lived as He did through the ministry of the Spirit, and the believer, who has the same Spirit within, can follow the same pattern.

In the incarnation the Son “emptied Himself, taking the form of a bond-servant” (Philippians 2:7). He did not cease to be God, but He set aside the independent use of His divine attributes, submitted Himself wholly to the Father’s plan and did the Father’s will in the power of the Spirit.

Christ’s human life began by the Spirit. When Gabriel told Mary that she would bear the Son of the Most High, she asked, “How can this be, since I am a virgin?” The angel answered, “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; and for that reason the holy Child shall be called the Son of God” (Luke 1:34-35). The first two clauses of the angel’s answer say the same thing in two ways: the coming of the Holy Spirit is the coming of the power of the Most High. By the Spirit’s creative act the eternal Son became a man in her womb, holy from His conception.

Between Jesus’ infancy and His baptism at about thirty (Luke 3:23), Scripture records one event: the visit to the temple at twelve, when the teachers were amazed at His understanding (Luke 2:46-47). Luke describes the rest of those years in two sentences: “The Child continued to grow and become strong, increasing in wisdom; and the grace of God was upon Him” (Luke 2:40), and “Jesus kept increasing in wisdom and stature, and in favor with God and men” (Luke 2:52). Isaiah had foretold that the Spirit of wisdom and understanding would rest on the Messiah: “The Spirit of the LORD will rest on Him, the spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of counsel and strength, the spirit of knowledge and the fear of the LORD” (Isaiah 11:2). In His divine nature the eternal Son could not grow in wisdom; what grew was His human nature, in wisdom, in stature and in favor, with the Spirit resting on Him.

Driven into the wilderness, sent out in power

The Spirit had been with Jesus from His conception, yet at His baptism the Spirit came upon Him in a new way:

¹⁰Immediately coming up out of the water, He saw the heavens opening, and the Spirit like a dove descending upon Him; ¹¹and a voice came out of the heavens: “You are My beloved Son, in You I am well-pleased.”

Mark 1:10-11 · NASB95

Luke adds that the Spirit came “in bodily form like a dove” (Luke 3:22), a visible sign given for that moment. The descent of the Spirit was Jesus’ anointing for His ministry, the anointing Isaiah had foretold: “The Spirit of the Lord GOD is upon me, because the LORD has anointed me to bring good news to the afflicted” (Isaiah 61:1).

Then “immediately the Spirit impelled Him to go out into the wilderness” (Mark 1:12), where for forty days He was tempted by Satan. Through those days He was “full of the Holy Spirit” and “led around by the Spirit” (Luke 4:1), and He answered each temptation from Scripture, the word the Spirit had written (Matthew 4:4; Matthew 4:7; Matthew 4:10). At the end of it Jesus dismissed Satan (Matthew 4:10-11).

Luke opens his account of Jesus’ public ministry in the same Spirit: “Jesus returned to Galilee in the power of the Spirit” (Luke 4:14). At Nazareth He read Isaiah’s words about His anointing and said, “Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing” (Luke 4:21). His words came through the Spirit: “He whom God has sent speaks the words of God; for He gives the Spirit without measure” (John 3:34). In the Spirit’s power He healed disease, cast out demons “by the Spirit of God” (Matthew 12:28), calmed storms and raised the dead. God had said of His Servant, “I have put My Spirit upon Him” (Isaiah 42:1), and Matthew applies those words to Jesus’ healing ministry (Matthew 12:18). Peter, who had seen it all for three years, summed it up for Cornelius: “You know of Jesus of Nazareth, how God anointed Him with the Holy Spirit and with power, and how He went about doing good and healing all who were oppressed by the devil, for God was with Him” (Acts 10:38).

To the cross and out of the grave

Even in His death Christ acted through the Spirit. Hebrews asks:

¹⁴how much more will the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered Himself without blemish to God, cleanse your conscience from dead works to serve the living God?

Hebrews 9:14 · NASB95

The self-offering Hebrews describes included the whole of His suffering, and it was by the power of the Holy Spirit that He went through it: through the garden, where He prayed, “not My will, but Yours be done” (Luke 22:42); through the cross, where He asked, “Father, forgive them; for they do not know what they are doing” (Luke 23:34); and on until He could say, “It is finished!” (John 19:30). Then He committed His own spirit into His Father’s hands (Luke 23:46).

The Spirit had His part in the resurrection too. Christ “was declared the Son of God with power by the resurrection from the dead, according to the Spirit of holiness” (Romans 1:4), and Paul’s summary of the mystery of godliness says that He “was revealed in the flesh, was vindicated in the Spirit” (1 Timothy 3:16).

Nor did the Spirit’s work in Him end at the empty tomb. For forty days the risen Lord appeared to His apostles, speaking of the kingdom of God, and He was taken up to heaven “after He had by the Holy Spirit given orders to the apostles whom He had chosen” (Acts 1:2). Before He left, He had promised to send that same Spirit to His disciples.

“It is to your advantage that I go away”

On His last night with the disciples, Jesus said:

⁷But I tell you the truth, it is to your advantage that I go away; for if I do not go away, the Helper will not come to you; but if I go, I will send Him to you.

John 16:7 · NASB95

For three years Jesus had been everything to them. When many others turned away, Peter had said, “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have words of eternal life” (John 6:68).

Yet having the Holy Spirit within them would be better even than having Jesus beside them. Jesus had told them, “you know Him because He abides with you and will be in you” (John 14:17). The Spirit had always been present among God’s people, giving life, convicting of sin and leading, and for three years the disciples had watched His power at work in Jesus, on whom He rested. From Pentecost on, He would live within every believer. In the body Jesus could be in only one place at a time, and with them for only a few years; the Spirit would live in each of them wherever they went, and Jesus promised that the Helper would be with them forever (John 14:16).

About six months before that last night, at the Feast of Booths, Jesus had promised the indwelling Spirit: “He who believes in Me, as the Scripture said, ‘From his innermost being will flow rivers of living water.’” John explains, “But this He spoke of the Spirit, whom those who believed in Him were to receive; for the Spirit was not yet given, because Jesus was not yet glorified” (John 7:38-39). After His resurrection He told them, “you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit not many days from now” (Acts 1:5), and “you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you” (Acts 1:8).

On the day of Pentecost “there came from heaven a noise like a violent rushing wind”, tongues as of fire rested on each of them, and “they were all filled with the Holy Spirit” (Acts 2:2-4). Since that day every believer has received the Spirit:

¹³For by one Spirit we were all baptized into one body, whether Jews or Greeks, whether slaves or free, and we were all made to drink of one Spirit.

1 Corinthians 12:13 · NASB95

The baptism of the Spirit is therefore not a second experience to be sought after salvation. It is the work by which Christ, at the moment a sinner believes, places him by the Spirit into His body, once and for all, and every believer has received it. Acts records times when the Spirit came after belief, as in Samaria, where He was given through the apostles’ hands (Acts 8:14-17). Those were moments in the church’s founding, when the Spirit’s coming to a new people was shown publicly under the apostles, and the men at Ephesus had not yet believed in Jesus at all (Acts 19:4-5). The letters, written to the church that resulted, teach that every believer has been baptized by the Spirit (1 Corinthians 12:13).

As He worked in Christ, He works in you

The Spirit’s ministry in Christ has its counterpart in the life of a believer. Christ was holy from His conception, while every other child is born a sinner (Psalm 51:5), so in the believer the Spirit works against the sin that remains. Yet the pattern is the same:

The Holy Spirit’s work in a believer is to conform him to the image of Christ, and Romans 8 sets out that work step by step.

The Spirit’s own chapter

Romans is a letter about the gospel, and its order shows where Romans 8 stands. The opening chapters leave the whole human race guilty before God and under His judgment. From Romans 3:21 to the end of chapter 5 comes the salvation God provided in the death and resurrection of Christ, received by grace through faith. Chapters 6 and 7 begin to set out the benefits of the gospel, stated mostly as what the believer no longer is: no longer a slave to sin and no longer under the law. Chapter 8 states the benefits positively, and its subject is the work of the Holy Spirit.

The chapter opens by declaring that there is no condemnation for those who are in Christ, and it closes by declaring that nothing in all creation can separate them from the love of God. Everything between is a sustained proof of the believer’s safety, and the Holy Spirit is the One who makes it so. The Father planned salvation and chose His people; the Son paid for it on the cross; the Spirit applies it, bringing it into the lives of those the Father chose. Read in order, the chapter shows Him at work in six ways, and then draws its conclusion:

1. 8:1-3He sets believers free from sin and deathThe Spirit of life frees the sinner from the power of sin, which leads to death.→
2. 8:4He fulfills the law in believersWhat the law required is now done in those who walk by the Spirit.→
3. 8:5-11He changes believers’ natureA new mind, His own presence, and a body to be raised.→
4. 8:12-13He empowers believers against sinBy the Spirit believers put to death the deeds of the body.→
5. 8:14-16He confirms believers’ adoptionHe leads the sons of God, gives them the cry “Abba! Father!” and testifies that they are His.→
6. 8:17-30He secures believers’ gloryHe is the first fruits of the harvest to come, and He intercedes until it comes.→
7. 8:31-39Nothing can separate usPaul’s answer to every person and every power that might take salvation away.→

No condemnation

¹Therefore there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.

Romans 8:1 · NASB95

The word “therefore” reaches back over everything Paul has said about the gospel since Romans 1:16. Verse 1 is the summation of it all, and its good news: a sinner, utterly corrupt, can stand before an infinitely holy God and not be condemned, now or ever.

The good news cannot be understood without the bad. Scripture says that every person born into the world is “by nature” one of the “children of wrath” (Ephesians 2:3), a Hebrew way of saying that he has inherited a nature under sentence. Apart from Christ, every person is under the power of sin: “both Jews and Greeks are all under sin” (Romans 3:9). Every unbeliever lives under “the prince of the power of the air, of the spirit that is now working in the sons of disobedience” (Ephesians 2:2); Jesus told some who opposed Him, “You are of your father the devil” (John 8:44).

What remains for such a person is judgment: “the wrath of God abides on him” (John 3:36). When the Lord Jesus is revealed from heaven, those who do not know God “will pay the penalty of eternal destruction, away from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of His power” (2 Thessalonians 1:9). That condemnation is just. Like the thief on the cross, every sinner could say, “we indeed are suffering justly” (Luke 23:41).

The law cannot rescue anyone from that condition. “Whatever the Law says, it speaks to those who are under the Law, so that every mouth may be closed and all the world may become accountable to God; because by the works of the Law no flesh will be justified in His sight; for through the Law comes the knowledge of sin” (Romans 3:19-20). The law is holy (Romans 7:12), but it can only close the mouth of anyone who claims to be good, show him his sin and pronounce his condemnation. It cannot change his condition or lift his sentence.

Into that darkness Romans 8:1 brings light. The word Paul uses for condemnation, κατάκριμα (katakrima), means the sentence together with the penalty that carries it out, and Paul’s “no” is emphatic: for those in Christ no penalty remains. God still disciplines them, but He does it “so that we will not be condemned along with the world” (1 Corinthians 11:32). In spite of every broken law, and in spite of a corruption that would make condemnation just, they have been placed beyond its reach.

To be in Christ is to be joined to Him. “Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus have been baptized into His death? Therefore we have been buried with Him through baptism into death, so that as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life” (Romans 6:3-4). Paul is not speaking there of water baptism but of being immersed into Christ: believers died in Him and rose in Him. Because they died in Him, the penalty their sins deserved has already been carried out, and no condemnation is left for them.

The Spirit of life

Verse 2 gives the reason there is no condemnation: “For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set you free from the law of sin and of death” (Romans 8:2). “Law” here is not the written code but a principle, a dominating power. The power of the Spirit of life has set the believer free from the power of sin, which leads to death. This is the first work of the Spirit in Romans 8: He frees from death by giving life.

The Spirit’s gift of life is regeneration, the new birth. Jesus told Nicodemus, “unless one is born of water and the Spirit he cannot enter into the kingdom of God” (John 3:5), and “The wind blows where it wishes and you hear the sound of it, but do not know where it comes from and where it is going; so is everyone who is born of the Spirit” (John 3:8). Paul describes every person before salvation, and how salvation came:

³For we also once were foolish ourselves, disobedient, deceived, enslaved to various lusts and pleasures, spending our life in malice and envy, hateful, hating one another. ⁴But when the kindness of God our Savior and His love for mankind appeared, ⁵He saved us, not on the basis of deeds which we have done in righteousness, but according to His mercy, by the washing of regeneration and renewing by the Holy Spirit

Titus 3:3-5 · NASB95

Every step that brings a sinner to that new life is His work. He convicts the sinner: “He, when He comes, will convict the world concerning sin and righteousness and judgment” (John 16:8). He uses the gospel, the word He Himself wrote, as the means of the new birth: God “brought us forth by the word of truth” (James 1:18). Then He opens the sinner’s mind, so that he hears the truth, comes alive, repents and believes. The union with Christ is His work too: He takes the sinner out of the realm of sin and death and places him into Christ, and the faith that joins him to Christ is a gift: “to you it has been granted for Christ’s sake, not only to believe in Him” (Philippians 1:29).

Against the teaching, common in the charismatic world, that the sinner takes the decisive step in his own new birth, Scripture says that those who receive Christ “were born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God” (John 1:13).

What the law could not do

³For what the Law could not do, weak as it was through the flesh, God did: sending His own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and as an offering for sin, He condemned sin in the flesh,

Romans 8:3 · NASB95

The law was weak, not in itself, but because fallen human nature, which Paul calls the flesh, cannot keep it. It set a perfect standard and could not make a man who would meet it. The Son came in the likeness of sinful flesh: a real human nature and body, but without sin, and it was in the Son’s death that God condemned sin.

The law condemns the sinner, and it condemns every one. What the law cannot do is condemn sin itself: sentence it and carry out the sentence, so that sin loses its power over the sinner. The cross did that. There Jesus paid in full the penalty God Himself had set for sin, and all the sins of all who will ever believe were laid on Him and paid for. So sin is no longer the believer’s master and can no longer demand his execution.

What God did at the cross is substitution: “He made Him who knew no sin to be sin on our behalf, so that we might become the righteousness of God in Him” (2 Corinthians 5:21). Martin Luther described that exchange. Faith, he said, unites the soul with Christ as a bride with her bridegroom. Everything Christ has becomes the property of the believing soul, and everything the soul has becomes Christ’s. Christ possesses all blessing and eternal life, and these become the soul’s. The soul has only its sins, and these become Christ’s. “It is then that a blessed exchange commences,” and the believer is clothed with the righteousness of his Bridegroom.

Because God’s justice has been satisfied in Christ, the Spirit can give life to those for whom Christ died.

The law fulfilled in us

⁴so that the requirement of the Law might be fulfilled in us, who do not walk according to the flesh but according to the Spirit.

Romans 8:4 · NASB95

The requirement of the law was met first in Christ: He kept the law, and He died the sinner’s death and took his punishment. Now the requirement is fulfilled “in us” as well. Justification is a legal declaration, a change of status: that is imputed righteousness, credited to the believer’s account. Sanctification is a change in the believer himself: that is imparted righteousness, worked into his life. Verse 4 holds both: the requirement met for the believer in Christ is his justification, and the requirement worked out in him by the Spirit is his sanctification. The two must never be confused, and neither comes without the other.

Before the new birth no one could please God or keep His law (Romans 3:10-12). Now “if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creature” (2 Corinthians 5:17), and the Spirit of God lives in him. The last words of verse 4 describe what follows: believers “do not walk according to the flesh but according to the Spirit”. In Scripture, to walk is the usual expression for daily conduct, a person’s direction: “We are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand so that we would walk in them” (Ephesians 2:10). That is a fact, not a command or a request. A Christian is different, and no one whose life looks like an unbeliever’s, apart from showing up at church once in a while, should claim to be a Christian.

When the pardoned sinner leaves the court of God’s justice, he is not finished with the law. God’s moral will, which the law writes out, reflects His own righteous nature, and it has meant three different things to man. In Eden obedience to what pleased God was Adam’s joy and his fellowship with Him. After the fall the law condemned the sinner, whose sin had separated him from God (Isaiah 59:2). To one made new by the Spirit the same commands become what he longs to do, because they mark out his fellowship and his joy with God. Every saint the Spirit has renewed, before Christ and after, can say with the psalmist, “O how I love Your law! It is my meditation all the day” (Psalm 119:97).

Obedience to the law can never be the ground of justification, but it is the fruit of justification and the evidence of sanctification. Augustine put it in a sentence: “Grace was given that the law might be fulfilled.” Assurance is bound up with obedience: “By this we know that we have come to know Him, if we keep His commandments” (1 John 2:3).

Holiness, not happiness

Christ paid the penalty of the law for the believer, so that the believer could keep the law by the power of the Spirit within him (Romans 8:4). Salvation deals with the power of sin as well as its penalty, and a true penitent comes to Christ wanting both: to be rescued from eternal hell, and to be delivered from his sin.

A preacher who promises in Jesus’ name that God wants everyone happy, and that Jesus will cure illness, mend marriages, settle finances and end loneliness, will fill a stadium, because many think of the ultimate joy as personal satisfaction: to be well, to marry the right person, to have the house, to get the promotion. The crowd will sing every song, hoping Jesus will give them what makes them happy.

People who are truly saved want above all to be holy. Those whom Jesus called blessed mourn and “hunger and thirst for righteousness” (Matthew 5:4-6), and Scripture calls believers to pursue “the sanctification without which no one will see the Lord” (Hebrews 12:14). No one truly comes to Christ until the Spirit has made him see his sin and want to be rid of it.

Only two kinds of people

⁵For those who are according to the flesh set their minds on the things of the flesh, but those who are according to the Spirit, the things of the Spirit. ⁶For the mind set on the flesh is death, but the mind set on the Spirit is life and peace, ⁷because the mind set on the flesh is hostile toward God; for it does not subject itself to the law of God, for it is not even able to do so, ⁸and those who are in the flesh cannot please God.

Romans 8:5-8 · NASB95

In salvation, God does not divide people by race, culture, education, sex, money or social standing. In Christ “there is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free man, there is neither male nor female” (Galatians 3:28). God recognizes one division only: those who live according to the flesh and those who live according to the Spirit, the unregenerate and the regenerate, the spiritually dead and the living.

Paul piles up the marks of the flesh: death, hostility toward God, an inability to submit to His law or to please Him. The verb behind “set their minds,” φρονέω (phroneo), does not refer to the intellect alone. It describes the bent of a person’s thinking, the set of a life. The unbeliever is dominated by a mindset controlled by the flesh, and the flesh is not merely his body. It is his fallen humanness, the sinful nature from which both his thinking and his deeds come, and no education can fix it.

Paul uses three expressions. “According to” the flesh or the Spirit describes what a person is by nature; the mind set on one or the other (verses 5 to 7) describes how he thinks; and the walk (verse 4) describes how he lives. Nature determines thinking, and thinking determines how a person lives, so the bent of his mind shows what he is: “The bent of the thoughts, affections, and pursuits,” the Princeton theologian Charles Hodge wrote, “is the only decisive test of character.”

A mind set on the Spirit

The mind set on the Spirit, Paul says, is life and peace (Romans 8:6). Those whose minds are set on the Spirit can even please God, which no one in the flesh can do (Romans 8:8). The things of the Spirit are the things precious to Him, the things that honor Christ and the Father and are revealed in Scripture. A person who was dead to God comes to love the Scripture and hunger for it. Such a person wants to know God and love Him more, and he wants to hear His Word, understand it and obey it.

How far can a man please God? Enoch “walked with God three hundred years after he became the father of Methuselah” (Genesis 5:22), and then “he was not, for God took him” (Genesis 5:24). Hebrews adds that “he obtained the witness that before his being taken up he was pleasing to God” (Hebrews 11:5). Believers who find the Christian life hard after some years can look to Enoch, who walked with God for three hundred years, in a world so corrupt that within a few generations God judged it by the flood.

A mind set on the Spirit does not make the believer perfect. The flesh is still there, waging war against him (Romans 7:18-23). The believer is not in the flesh, his mind is not set on it and he does not live by it, but the war goes on. The flesh’s power has been severely blunted by the presence of the Spirit. The One who wrote the Scripture now lives in the believer, not only to instruct him but to give him the power to obey.

No Christian without the Spirit

⁹However, you are not in the flesh but in the Spirit, if indeed the Spirit of God dwells in you. But if anyone does not have the Spirit of Christ, he does not belong to Him.

Romans 8:9 · NASB95

Verse 9 sums up verses 1 to 8, and it makes all of it depend on one fact: the Spirit of God lives in the believer. Scripture tells each believer that “your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit who is in you” (1 Corinthians 6:19).

There is no such thing as a believer without the Holy Spirit. No one could be anything but a corrupt sinner apart from the Spirit’s work, and He does not give life and then leave. He lives in every believer, permanently, and because He lives in the believer, He changes how the believer thinks, what he loves, what he does and how he speaks, working against his fallenness.

Life for your mortal body

Verse 10 does not promise that the believer will escape death. “If Christ is in you, though the body is dead because of sin, yet the spirit is alive because of righteousness” (Romans 8:10). There is a principle of death in the believer’s body, and the body will not be freed from it in this life. But the inner person, covered by the righteousness of Christ, already has eternal life.

John MacArthur once spent time with a dear friend whom cancer had eaten away until almost nothing was left, and MacArthur prayed that the Lord would take his friend home that week. In such a body it is plain to see what Paul means by “the body is dead because of sin” (Romans 8:10). Yet for the believer “to die is gain” (Philippians 1:21). The first birth was a birth into sin, and death is a birth into holy perfection, among “the spirits of the righteous made perfect” (Hebrews 12:23). The believer’s spirit goes at once to be with the Lord, “absent from the body and to be at home with the Lord” (2 Corinthians 5:8), “to depart and be with Christ, for that is very much better” (Philippians 1:23). There is no purgatory and no sleep of the soul. Then comes the promise:

¹¹But if the Spirit of Him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, He who raised Christ Jesus from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through His Spirit who dwells in you.

Romans 8:11 · NASB95

Paul says it again and again: the Spirit dwells in you. The believer could not live one moment pleasing God, or overcome his corruption, without the Spirit’s power, and the Spirit who gave life to his spirit will give life to his body.

The believer’s spirit, at home with the Lord, will wait for its body until Christ comes for His church, the Savior “who will transform the body of our humble state into conformity with the body of His glory” (Philippians 3:21). It will be a body like the one in which He rose, came among His disciples though the doors were shut (John 20:19), and ascended. The power that will do it is the Spirit who dwells in the believer. It will not matter what has become of the body in the grave, for the Spirit who gave life at creation (Job 33:4) will give it again. He knows every believer perfectly, as he is now and as he will be when he is made perfect, and He will re-create him, as He will every saint.

Put to death the deeds of the body

¹²So then, brethren, we are under obligation, not to the flesh, to live according to the flesh— ¹³for if you are living according to the flesh, you must die; but if by the Spirit you are putting to death the deeds of the body, you will live.

Romans 8:12-13 · NASB95

With all that the Spirit is doing, it might seem that the believer can simply relax and let Him do His work. A whole movement taught exactly that. The higher-life teaching spread through the Keswick Convention in England from 1875, and its slogan was “Let go and let God.” That idea of passive surrender is not in the New Testament. Every great truth of salvation has its human side: salvation is God’s work, but not apart from faith; sanctification is the Spirit’s work, but not apart from obedience; the believer is kept to glory, but not apart from the perseverance the Spirit works in him.

Paul says believers are “under obligation”, literally debtors, but not to the flesh, which never did anything for them. The flesh’s dominion has been broken, so no excuse is left for living by it.

What believers are called to do is put to death the deeds of the body, the sin that remains in them. Unlike Christ, who had no sin in Him, they have sin within them to kill. The language of verse 13 is the language of killing, not of passive surrender. Paul gives the same command in Colossians: “Therefore consider the members of your earthly body as dead to immorality, impurity, passion, evil desire, and greed” (Colossians 3:5). The verb rendered “consider … as dead,” νεκρόω (nekroo), means to put to death.

The Spirit works mightily in the believer, and the believer’s responsibility is to use every power he has, in the Spirit’s strength, to kill the sin that remains: “walk by the Spirit, and you will not carry out the desire of the flesh” (Galatians 5:16). Those who kill sin by the Spirit are the ones verse 13 says “will live”. Those who go on living according to the flesh show that they never had the Spirit (Romans 8:9), and eternal death is their end, not the believer’s.

Saved to be made holy

John, who marveled that believers are called children of God, says that they will be like Christ when He appears, and that “everyone who has this hope fixed on Him purifies himself, just as He is pure” (1 John 3:3). A believer purifies himself only by the Spirit’s power, and those who by the Spirit put to death the deeds of the body are the ones He leads as sons of God (Romans 8:13-14): holiness is the family likeness. The particular work of the Holy Spirit in believers is to make them holy. The Father is holy (John 17:11), the Son is holy (Luke 1:35), and the Spirit is the Spirit of holiness (Romans 1:4); all three persons are holy, and the Spirit reproduces that holiness in believers. So anyone who claims a special anointing from the Holy Spirit should show evident holiness, for the Holy Spirit does not make people worldly, carnal, boastful, smooth-talking or answerable to no one.

The Spirit’s work of making believers holy is done in the soul and the heart, not in outward displays of power, and it shows in the life.

Holiness lies at the heart of God’s purpose in redemption. God made man in His own image (Genesis 1:26-27) to reflect His glory, express His character and put Him on display. Man fell, and the image was marred; all fall short of the glory of God (Romans 3:23).

God’s plan was to restore the marred image by re-creating sinners, not by reforming their outward conduct. “He has granted to us His precious and magnificent promises, so that by them you may become partakers of the divine nature, having escaped the corruption that is in the world by lust” (2 Peter 1:4). To partake of the divine nature is to share God’s moral likeness, not His deity, and that new nature is given in the new birth.

In Jesus God was put on display as never before: “We saw His glory, glory as of the only begotten from the Father, full of grace and truth” (John 1:14). Jesus also shows what human nature looks like when it fully reflects God: He was without sin (1 Peter 2:22) and always did “the things that are pleasing to Him” (John 8:29). The goal of the Spirit’s work is a humanity like Christ. Scripture states that goal in two ways, as likeness to God and as likeness to Christ. God told Israel, “You shall be holy, for I the LORD your God am holy” (Leviticus 19:2), and Jesus told His disciples, “you are to be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect” (Matthew 5:48); the apostles call believers to follow in Christ’s steps (1 Peter 2:21; 1 John 2:6). These are one goal, because Christ is “the exact representation of His nature” (Hebrews 1:3), so God’s likeness in a human life looks exactly like Christ.

Until that goal is reached, the Spirit makes believers holy by degrees. Leviticus shows how it happens: “You shall keep My statutes and practice them; I am the LORD who sanctifies you” (Leviticus 20:8). The LORD sanctifies, and within the Trinity that work is the Spirit’s: He is its efficient cause, and His Word, believed and obeyed, is the instrument He uses. When John MacArthur was asked to write a small book on the most important verse for Christians in the New Testament, he chose this one:

¹⁸But we all, with unveiled face, beholding as in a mirror the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from glory to glory, just as from the Lord, the Spirit.

2 Corinthians 3:18 · NASB95

The mirror is the Scripture: in it believers behold the glory of the Lord, and as they look, the Spirit changes them into the likeness they see.

Sanctification is as much a miracle as regeneration, and as much a miracle as the glorification still to come: no one can make himself holy by his own power, any more than he can give himself new life or raise his own body from the grave.

Adopted as sons

Romans 8:14-16 is about family. Paul speaks of “sons of God” in verse 14, of “a spirit of adoption as sons” in verse 15, and of “children of God” in verse 16. Adoption is the covenant relationship that brings a person into God’s family: “I will be a father to you, and you shall be sons and daughters to Me” (2 Corinthians 6:18). To become a son of God is a great privilege, and the Spirit’s work is to make sons who bear the family likeness, like their Father and like Christ, the firstborn among many brethren (Romans 8:29).

Some think of adoption as second-class. In first-century Rome it was not. A Roman did not adopt to rescue a child from the street; he deliberately chose a son, to carry on his name and inherit his estate, and the adopted son might well become the joy of his father’s heart. The picture is of a deliberate choice, and God chose believers freely, by sovereign and gracious election, “before the foundation of the world” (Ephesians 1:4).

Roman adoption was formal because the son had to pass out of one father’s absolute power, the patria potestas, into another’s. A Roman father held that authority as long as he lived, and in early Rome it extended to life and death. The birth father released his son by a symbolic sale, and the adopting father then presented the case to the praetor, the Roman magistrate. Four things followed:

• The adopted son lost every right in his old family and gained every right of a born son in his new one.
• He became heir to his new father’s estate, and sons born afterward could not challenge his share.
• In law his old life was wiped out, as if he had been born that day.
• In the eyes of the law he was permanently and absolutely his new father’s son.

Scripture fills in the believer’s own adoption papers:

A human adoption can confer a name but cannot change a nature. God does both: believers become His sons by adoption, which gives them the name, the title and the rights, and by regeneration, which gives them the nature of their new family, and the Holy Spirit makes both real in them.

What the Spirit of adoption does

Romans 8:14-16 shows three ways the Spirit makes adoption real in a believer’s life:

1. 1

   He leads the sons of God

   “For all who are being led by the Spirit of God, these are sons of God” (Romans 8:14). Whoever is a son of God is being led by the Spirit, and the verb is in the present tense: he is led continually. Being led by the Spirit is not a moment of ecstasy or emotional elation but a way of life. He leads in two ways: outwardly through the Scripture, and inwardly by changing what the believer wants. He does not drive the believer against his will; He changes the will itself, his desires, longings and affections, so that he loves what God loves. Paul could say, “I joyfully concur with the law of God in the inner man” (Romans 7:22).

   Two psalms pray for the Spirit’s leading in both ways, through the Word and in the will: “Open my eyes, that I may behold wonderful things from Your law” (Psalm 119:18), and “Teach me to do Your will, for You are my God; let Your good Spirit lead me on level ground” (Psalm 143:10).

2. 2

   He gives them access to the Father

   “You have not received a spirit of slavery leading to fear again, but you have received a spirit of adoption as sons by which we cry out, ‘Abba! Father!’” (Romans 8:15). Before regeneration a person lives in fear, in bondage to sin and therefore to guilt, anxiety and the dread of judgment.

   Abba is the Aramaic word a son used for his father at home, familiar and unafraid. The Spirit gives the believer that access to the infinitely holy God (Galatians 4:6). John MacArthur spoke of his joy as a grandfather when his grandchildren came running to him from every direction with their arms open. Many people approached him with some caution; his grandchildren ran straight to him. That is the access the Spirit gives: believers come to God without the dread of judgment, as sons by new birth and by adoption.

3. 3

   He assures them that they are His

   “The Spirit Himself testifies with our spirit that we are children of God” (Romans 8:16). A Roman adoption was made before witnesses, so that if anyone later disputed the adopted heir’s claim, the witnesses could confirm that the adoption was legitimate. In the believer’s adoption the witness is the Holy Spirit Himself, testifying together with the believer’s own spirit.

   His witness is not a voice or a feeling apart from Scripture. He testifies through the Word He wrote, which tells believers that they have eternal life (1 John 5:13), and through what He produces in them: the cry “Abba” of verse 15, love for God, and obedience (1 John 2:3). A believer need not live each day afraid that he may not reach heaven, because the Spirit within him testifies that he belongs to God.

Heirs of God

Paul draws the conclusion of Romans 8:14-16: “and if children, heirs also, heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ” (Romans 8:17). The “if” does not express doubt: Paul has just shown in verse 16 that believers are children of God, so it has the force of “since.” Paul reasons the same way, from son to heir, in Galatians:

⁴But when the fullness of the time came, God sent forth His Son, born of a woman, born under the Law, ⁵so that He might redeem those who were under the Law, that we might receive the adoption as sons. ⁶Because you are sons, God has sent forth the Spirit of His Son into our hearts, crying, “Abba! Father!” ⁷Therefore you are no longer a slave, but a son; and if a son, then an heir through God.

Galatians 4:4-7 · NASB95

The inheritance comes from God; “from the Lord you will receive the reward of the inheritance” (Colossians 3:24). What is it? It includes perfection: holiness, absolute righteousness, the completeness of glorified humanity. But the inheritance is more than that. The psalmist could say, “The LORD is the portion of my inheritance and my cup” (Psalm 16:5), and when the new heaven and new earth come, “the tabernacle of God is among men, and He will dwell among them, and they shall be His people, and God Himself will be among them” (Revelation 21:3). The inheritance is God Himself. No one can see His face and live (Exodus 33:20), yet believers will step into the full blaze of His glory and not be consumed, because they will be holy and blameless: “they will see His face” (Revelation 22:4).

Believers are also fellow heirs with Christ, the One “whom He appointed heir of all things” (Hebrews 1:2), and they will share His inheritance. They will reign with Him (Revelation 20:6), sit with Him on His throne (Revelation 3:21) and bear “the image of the heavenly” (1 Corinthians 15:49).

Christ gladly shares what the Father has given Him. He prayed, “The glory which You have given Me I have given to them” (John 17:22). The inheritance is not made smaller by being divided among many heirs, because the inheritance is God Himself, and He is infinite.

All believers receive the same eternal life and the same glory, as every laborer in Jesus’ parable received the same denarius however long he had worked (Matthew 20:9-10). Yet there will be degrees of responsibility in the age to come, tied to faithfulness in this life: in Jesus’ parable of the minas one servant is “to be in authority over ten cities”, and another “to be over five cities” (Luke 19:17-19).

Peter describes how secure the inheritance is. God “has caused us to be born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, to obtain an inheritance which is imperishable and undefiled and will not fade away, reserved in heaven for you, who are protected by the power of God through faith for a salvation ready to be revealed in the last time” (1 Peter 1:3-5). It comes by grace and not by works, it rests on the promise of a God who cannot lie (Titus 1:2) and does not change (Malachi 3:6), and the Spirit who lives in believers is the pledge of it (Ephesians 1:14).

Through suffering to glory

Paul’s sentence in verse 17 ends with a condition: “if indeed we suffer with Him so that we may also be glorified with Him” (Romans 8:17). Paul takes this as true of every believer, for “all who desire to live godly in Christ Jesus will be persecuted” (2 Timothy 3:12): believers do suffer with Christ, and they will be glorified with Him.

The suffering Paul means is not illness, a hard marriage or trouble at work. Those belong to ordinary human suffering, and the Lord is sympathetic and compassionate toward them. They are part of the groaning of a fallen world, which Paul turns to in verse 23. Here Paul means the suffering believers receive for the name of Christ, because they exalt Him, live for Him and proclaim Him in a world that hates and rejects Him. It does not always end in martyrdom, though for many it has. It means bearing His reproach (Hebrews 13:13). Jesus said, “In the world you have tribulation, but take courage; I have overcome the world” (John 16:33), and “If they persecuted Me, they will also persecute you” (John 15:20).

Paul longed to know “the fellowship of His sufferings” (Philippians 3:10), and Peter told believers to keep on rejoicing “to the degree that you share the sufferings of Christ” (1 Peter 4:13). The path to glory runs through suffering, as it did for Christ, who asked the two on the road to Emmaus, “Was it not necessary for the Christ to suffer these things and to enter into His glory?” (Luke 24:26). That is far from the teaching that God wants every believer healthy, wealthy, happy, successful, popular and comfortable. The Spirit’s concern is the believer’s eternal glory, and He knows that the way to it is to bear the reproach of Christ.

Suffering borne for Christ also produces something eternal: “momentary, light affliction is producing for us an eternal weight of glory far beyond all comparison” (2 Corinthians 4:17). Paul weighed it all and concluded:

¹⁸For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory that is to be revealed to us.

Romans 8:18 · NASB95

Paul wrote it with the scars of persecution on him: “I bear on my body the brand-marks of Jesus” (Galatians 6:17). Peter tells those reviled for the name of Christ that “the Spirit of glory and of God rests on you” (1 Peter 4:14). The Spirit is with believers in their suffering and keeps them all the way to that glory.

A creation subjected to futility

From verse 17 to verse 30 the subject of Romans 8 is the glory to come, and one word runs through the passage: groaning. Paul names three groans, each longing for a glory not yet revealed:

1. Creation groans

   Subjected to futility, the whole creation waits eagerly for the revealing of the sons of God.

   Romans 8:19-22

2. Believers groan

   Having the first fruits of the Spirit, believers wait eagerly for the redemption of the body.

   Romans 8:23-25

3. The Spirit groans

   He intercedes for the saints with groanings too deep for words.

   Romans 8:26-27

Paul begins with creation: “For the anxious longing of the creation waits eagerly for the revealing of the sons of God” (Romans 8:19). By “the creation” Paul cannot mean the holy angels, who are already in eternal perfection around the throne and have nothing better to hope for. Nor can he mean the fallen angels, for whom there is no liberation, only the lake of fire. Nor can he mean believers, for the creation waits for their revealing. Unbelievers have no hope of glory and no desire for it, and they are willing sinners, while the creation was subjected “not willingly”. What remains is the non-rational creation, animate and inanimate: the sun, moon and stars, the earth, its waters and land, its plants and animals. Paul personifies it, as the prophets did when they wrote that “the mountains and the hills will break forth into shouts of joy before you, and all the trees of the field will clap their hands” (Isaiah 55:12).

“Anxious longing” translates ἀποκαραδοκία (apokaradokia), a word for watching with the head stretched forward, straining to see something in the distance. The creation is pictured on tiptoe, straining for the day when the sons of God are revealed in their glory, when, as Jesus said, the righteous will shine like the sun (Matthew 13:43).

It waits like that because “the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of Him who subjected it, in hope” (Romans 8:20). Futility means aimlessness and emptiness, the inability to reach a goal or achieve a purpose. When God finished creating, “God saw all that He had made, and behold, it was very good” (Genesis 1:31). The verb “was subjected” points to a definite event in the past, a moment in history when the creation went from purpose and perfection to futility and decay. It was not the creation’s fault, and it was no evolutionary accident. God subjected it when He pronounced the curse on the ground because of Adam’s sin (Genesis 3:17-19).

The whole human race fell with Adam (Romans 5:12), and the ruin did not stop with mankind: nothing in nature escapes decay. Nature’s destiny is bound up with man’s, and the creation is in “slavery to corruption” (Romans 8:21).

No human effort will reverse it. No program of education, technology or conservation can lift a divine curse. The world is not on an upward trend; it is on the way down from perfection. When man sinned, he lost the right to enjoy a perfect environment as king of the earth. God had crowned him to rule over the works of His hands (Psalm 8:5-6), but now “we do not yet see all things subjected to him” (Hebrews 2:8).

Waiting for a new creation

The creation’s hope is “that 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). It cannot become what it was made to be until the children of God are glorified. That glory is the Spirit’s work, for He will give life to their mortal bodies (Romans 8:11), so the creation’s freedom waits on Him.

The psalmist foresaw how it will end: “Of old You founded the earth, and the heavens are the work of Your hands. Even they will perish, but You endure; and all of them will wear out like a garment; like clothing You will change them and they will be changed” (Psalm 102:25-26). Peter describes it in detail: “the heavens will pass away with a roar and the elements will be destroyed with intense heat, and the earth and its works will be burned up” (2 Peter 3:10). Then, “according to His promise we are looking for new heavens and a new earth, in which righteousness dwells” (2 Peter 3:13). The creation is set free from corruption by being remade (Revelation 21:1).

The first chapters of the Bible show a creation cursed because man fell, and the closing chapters of Revelation show a new creation in perfect righteousness because the redeemed have been glorified. Between them lies the long, sad history of sin and corruption. Until then, Paul says, the creation groans:

²²For we know that the whole creation groans and suffers the pains of childbirth together until now.

Romans 8:22 · NASB95

The pains of childbirth are pain with a purpose; they end in new life. The London preacher Martyn Lloyd-Jones wondered whether spring is a picture of the creation’s groaning. Every year nature seems to labor to bring life out of the death of winter, and every year the labor fails, for spring leads only to summer, autumn and winter again. The creation’s pains will end in birth only when God makes all things new (Revelation 21:5).

We ourselves groan

²³And not only this, but also we ourselves, having the first fruits of the Spirit, even we ourselves groan within ourselves, waiting eagerly for our adoption as sons, the redemption of our body. ²⁴For in hope we have been saved, but hope that is seen is not hope; for who hopes for what he already sees? ²⁵But if we hope for what we do not see, with perseverance we wait eagerly for it.

Romans 8:23-25 · NASB95

Believers groan because they live in the fallen creation, in bodies that share its decay, and because sin remains in them. Paul cried, “Wretched man that I am! Who will set me free from the body of this death?” (Romans 7:24). “For indeed while we are in this tent, we groan, being burdened, because we do not want to be unclothed but to be clothed, so that what is mortal will be swallowed up by life” (2 Corinthians 5:4).

Believers have already been adopted, as verses 14 to 16 showed, so the adoption they wait for is its completion. They have not yet received the inheritance, and it comes with the redemption of the body, on the day when “this perishable must put on the imperishable, and this mortal must put on immortality” (1 Corinthians 15:53).

They will receive the inheritance, because they already have “the first fruits of the Spirit”. The phrase does not mean the first of the Spirit’s gifts: the Spirit Himself is the first fruits. A farmer brought in the first part of the crop while the rest was still ripening, and from it he knew that the whole harvest was coming, and what it would be. The Spirit living in believers now is the first part of that harvest, the beginning of the life they will have in glory. Through Him Christ lives in them (Romans 8:9-10), which is why Paul calls their hope “Christ in you, the hope of glory” (Colossians 1:27).

As a believer grows older he usually groans more, because he can do less, and he feels more of the decay of his own body and the corruption of the world around him. John MacArthur once sat between services with a man in his church whose wife of sixty-two years had just died, suddenly, of a stroke, and MacArthur felt the groaning of that man’s heart. Hope burns brighter as believers grow older and see more of what it is to live in a corrupt and fallen world.

Believers are saved by faith, but they are saved in hope, because their salvation is not yet complete; it is “nearer to us than when we believed” (Romans 13:11). Biblical hope is not a wish but a fixed certainty that rests on the promises of God. What keeps it bright is the Spirit in them, who leads them, cries “Abba” in them, testifies with their spirit and holds them fast, so that with perseverance they wait for Christ to come for His church, and with it the redemption of their bodies.

A salvation that cannot be lost

Among the greatest blessings God gives to believers is the secure promise of eternal life in heavenly glory. What would a salvation be worth that could be forfeited? If salvation could be lost, keeping it would rest on the believer, and every believer would lose it, because no one can keep himself saved, any more than he could save himself. So God saves by grace and keeps by grace. He saves by His power, the power of the Spirit in regeneration, and He keeps by His power, the power of the Spirit’s protection, to the end.

That is what Scripture means when it says believers are sealed:

¹³In Him, you also, after listening to the message of truth, the gospel of your salvation—having also believed, you were sealed in Him with the Holy Spirit of promise, ¹⁴who is given as a pledge of our inheritance, with a view to the redemption of God’s own possession, to the praise of His glory.

Ephesians 1:13-14 · NASB95

A seal was a stamp of authenticity, authority and ownership, and no one can break this one. The word for pledge, ἀρραβών (arrabon), means a down payment, the first installment that guarantees the rest; in modern Greek it means an engagement, the pledge that the wedding will take place. “He who establishes us with you in Christ and anointed us is God, who also sealed us and gave us the Spirit in our hearts as a pledge” (2 Corinthians 1:21-22). The One who began the work will finish it: “He who began a good work in you will perfect it until the day of Christ Jesus” (Philippians 1:6).

Some teach the opposite. A well-known leader in the Pentecostal movement has written, “The greatest deception which has been devised by Satan is the false doctrine of once saved, always saved.” Another teacher holds that the Spirit’s seal can be broken by a person who chooses to live in sin, and that a believer unfaithful to his spouse could lose his place in heaven, as Satan and his angels lost theirs. Those who sit under such teaching live in needless fear, the fear of falling away and of losing what can never be lost. They have to ask, “How do I keep myself saved? How do I hang on?” and the questions assume a power the human will does not have. Many of them look for one outward experience after another to bolster a weak faith and quiet their fears. The teaching dishonors the Spirit, whose ministry is to bring believers safely from grace to glory.

Anyone who says a person can have salvation and lose it does not understand salvation. Jesus said, “All that the Father gives Me will come to Me, and the one who comes to Me I will certainly not cast out” (John 6:37), and “This is the will of Him who sent Me, that of all that He has given Me I lose nothing, but raise it up on the last day” (John 6:39). Romans 8 sets out that security from its first verse to its last, and in verses 26 and 27 it shows the Spirit’s own part in it.

Groanings too deep for words

²⁶In the same way the Spirit also helps our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we should, but the Spirit Himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words; ²⁷and He who searches the hearts knows what the mind of the Spirit is, because He intercedes for the saints according to the will of God.

Romans 8:26-27 · NASB95

Romans 8 names three groans: the creation’s (verse 22), the believers’ (verse 23) and the Spirit’s (verse 26). The groaning of the creation and of believers does not secure glory. The Spirit’s does, and that makes it the most important of the three. He feels the weight of the sin that remains in those He lives in, and He longs with them for the day they are free of the flesh and receive their full salvation.

The Spirit “helps our weakness”. The weakness is the whole debilitating power of fallenness that remains in the believer, so great that he does not even know how to pray as he should. Left to himself, he is helpless in his sin and in his suffering, and he cannot guard his own soul.

Peter shows how little a believer knows of his own weakness. On the night of the betrayal Jesus told him, “Simon, Simon, behold, Satan has demanded permission to sift you like wheat; but I have prayed for you, that your faith may not fail” (Luke 22:31-32). Peter answered, “Lord, with You I am ready to go both to prison and to death!” (Luke 22:33). In the garden, told to keep watching and praying, he slept (Mark 14:37-38). What kept him was not the strength of his faith or of his will but Jesus’ prayer for him, that his faith would not fail. That is a picture of Christ’s work as high priest: “He always lives to make intercession for them” (Hebrews 7:25). The believer has an Intercessor in heaven, and in the Holy Spirit he has a second Intercessor living in him: Paul stresses that it is “the Spirit Himself” who intercedes (Romans 8:26).

Many charismatics take “groanings too deep for words” as a proof text for speaking in tongues: a believer who does not know how to pray in words he understands should launch into words he does not understand, and the Spirit will pray through him. The text says nothing of the kind. The groanings are the Spirit’s, not the believer’s, and Paul calls them too deep for words: they are never put into words at all, so they cannot be speech of any kind. Within the Trinity, unheard by any human ear, the Spirit pleads with the Father for the glorification of every believer.

“He who searches the hearts” is the Father. “Man looks at the outward appearance, but the LORD looks at the heart” (1 Samuel 16:7); “I, the LORD, search the heart, I test the mind” (Jeremiah 17:10); “there is no creature hidden from His sight” (Hebrews 4:13). The One who searches every heart knows the mind of the Spirit perfectly, and the Spirit always intercedes “according to the will of God”, so the Father grants all that the Spirit asks. God’s will for His people is their glory: those He predestined He called, justified and glorified (Romans 8:30), so the Spirit’s intercession brings every one of them there.

The Spirit who intercedes knows the believer’s weakness and his temptation, and the God to whom He pleads is faithful: “God is faithful, who will not allow you to be tempted beyond what you are able, but with the temptation will provide the way of escape also” (1 Corinthians 10:13). Jesus did the same for His disciples on the night of His arrest. He would not let them be taken when they could not yet have stood the test, and He told the men sent to arrest Him, “let these go their way” (John 18:8). John adds that this was “to fulfill the word which He spoke, ‘Of those whom You have given Me I lost not one’” (John 18:9). Through every struggle of life the Spirit intercedes for the believer without ceasing.

All things for good

²⁸And we know that God causes all things to work together for good to those who love God, to those who are called according to His purpose.

Romans 8:28 · NASB95

Romans 8:28 is one of the best-known verses in the Bible, and it is often taken out of context. It follows directly from the Spirit’s intercession. Believers do not know how to pray as they should (verse 26), but they do know this: God causes all things to work together for good to those who love Him.

The good is eternal glory. That is the theme of the whole passage: the glory to be revealed (verse 18), the revealing of the sons of God (verse 19), the glory of the children of God (verse 21), the hope (verses 24 and 25), and the word “glorified” at the end (verse 30). The verse does not promise that every trouble turns out well in this life. Some believers live with illness and with lost jobs, homes and friends. Trouble may still teach a believer: it may draw him to the Lord, strengthen his prayer, give him patience, mature him and enable him to comfort others with the comfort he received (2 Corinthians 1:4). All of that is real, and it is part of the Spirit’s work of making him like Christ, but the good this verse promises is where that work ends: eternal glory.

God is the One who makes all things work together, and that is His providence. Good things work together for the believer’s good, and so do bad things: suffering, the struggle with temptation, even his sin. God never excuses a believer’s sin, but He turns even its bitter fruit to his good, as He used Peter’s denial to humble him and fit him to strengthen his brothers (Luke 22:32). God takes hold of all of it and weaves it into the believer’s final good. If everything that happens works together for a believer’s eternal good, how could he ever lose his salvation?

Paul gives those who receive the promise three names: verse 27 calls them “the saints”, set apart to God as His own, and verse 28 “those who love God” and those “called according to His purpose”, with the call of verse 30, which is always followed by justification.

The promise is for those who love God, and love for God, not a prayer once prayed or attendance at church, is what marks a true Christian: “If anyone does not love the Lord, he is to be accursed” (1 Corinthians 16:22). Like the woman of Luke 7, who loved much because she had been forgiven much (Luke 7:47), believers love God, imperfectly but truly, and their love has marks:

• ✓It meditates on His majestic glory, and longs to worship Him and sing His praise.
• ✓It seeks communion with God, and the fellowship of others who love Him.
• ✓It seeks to know God more through His Word.
• ✓It is sensitive to His honor and grieved when He is dishonored.
• ✓It loves what He loves and hates what He hates, grieves over sin and rejoices in righteousness.
• ✓It does not love the world (1 John 2:15), and it longs for the coming of Christ.
• ✓Above all, it obeys: “If you love Me, you will keep My commandments” (John 14:15).

God works all things together for the eternal good of those who love Him, and Paul states it as knowledge: “we know”.

The end declared from the beginning

All things work together for good, Paul says, for those who are called according to His purpose (Romans 8:28), and the phrase “according to His purpose” is the key to the believer’s security. Salvation is what God purposed it to be. What it will be at the end will match exactly what He intended at the beginning, and nothing is lost along the way. God set out the principle through Isaiah, comparing Himself with the idols of Babylon:

⁹Remember the former things long past, for I am God, and there is no other; I am God, and there is no one like Me, ¹⁰declaring the end from the beginning, and from ancient times things which have not been done, saying, ‘My purpose will be established, and I will accomplish all My good pleasure’; ¹¹… truly I have spoken; truly I will bring it to pass. I have planned it, surely I will do it.

Isaiah 46:9-11 · NASB95

God knows the future as perfectly as He knows the past. Whether a thing has happened or not makes no difference to His knowledge of it. More than that, He determines what will happen; He declares the end at the beginning. So whatever God determined as the end of salvation is the end it will have.

Paul shows the same purpose in Ephesians. God “chose us in Him before the foundation of the world, that we would be holy and blameless before Him” (Ephesians 1:4). That will not be fully true in this life. It is the end for which He chose: a holy people standing before Him. He “predestined us to adoption as sons through Jesus Christ to Himself, according to the kind intention of His will, to the praise of the glory of His grace” (Ephesians 1:5-6). He saves sinners by grace, keeps them by grace and brings them to glory, to put His grace on display in them forever: “so that in the ages to come He might show the surpassing riches of His grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus” (Ephesians 2:7). Even the angels look on; these are “things into which angels long to look” (1 Peter 1:12). Grace is favor shown to those who deserve the opposite, so without sinners redeemed by it, God’s grace would never have been displayed.

Hebrews says God bound that unchangeable purpose with an oath:

¹⁷In the same way God, desiring even more to show to the heirs of the promise the unchangeableness of His purpose, interposed with an oath, ¹⁸so that by two unchangeable things in which it is impossible for God to lie, we who have taken refuge would have strong encouragement to take hold of the hope set before us. ¹⁹This hope we have as an anchor of the soul, a hope both sure and steadfast and one which enters within the veil,

Hebrews 6:17-19 · NASB95

The veil was the curtain that closed off the holy of holies, the place of God’s presence, and that room was a copy of the true one in heaven (Hebrews 9:24). The believer’s hope is anchored in heaven itself, where “Jesus has entered as a forerunner for us” (Hebrews 6:20). Believers are kept by the Father’s sworn promise, by the priestly work of Christ at the Father’s right hand, and by the personal intercession of the Spirit within them.

Conformed to the image of His Son

What is God’s purpose in salvation? To bring people to heaven is part of the answer, but not the whole. Paul gives God’s purpose in verse 29, and it has two parts. The first is that believers are predestined “to become conformed to the image of His Son” (Romans 8:29).

Conformity to Christ means that, as far as glorified humanity can be like the incarnate Son, believers will be like Him: “We know that when He appears, we will be like Him, because we will see Him just as He is” (1 John 3:2). That is “the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus” (Philippians 3:14).

To be conformed is to be shaped, by design, to match a pattern. The Spirit is doing it now (2 Corinthians 3:18), and the work will be complete when the body is redeemed. Paul could say, “Not that I have already obtained it or have already become perfect, but I press on” (Philippians 3:12).

The second part of God’s purpose, and the greater, comes in the next words: “so that He would be the firstborn among many brethren”. In English “firstborn” sounds like a matter of birth order, but πρωτότοκος (prototokos) means far more. In Scripture the word came to mean the preeminent one, the heir with the first rights. God said of David, the youngest of Jesse’s sons, “I also shall make him My firstborn, the highest of the kings of the earth” (Psalm 89:27). That is how it is used of Christ in Colossians: “He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation” (Colossians 1:15). He was not the first created being; the eternal Son was never created. He is preeminent over all creation, for “all things have been created through Him and for Him” (Colossians 1:16), and He is “the firstborn from the dead, so that He Himself will come to have first place in everything” (Colossians 1:18).

Christ “is not ashamed to call them brethren” (Hebrews 2:11), and He shares His glory with them. Yet among the many brethren, He will be preeminent, and that is the highest end of salvation. The Father loves the Son so perfectly that He determined to give Him a gift of love: a vast company of redeemed people who would praise Him, honor Him, serve Him and reflect His glory forever. “The Father loves the Son and has given all things into His hand” (John 3:35).

In John’s vision of heaven the elders fall down before the Lamb and sing a new song: “You were slain, and purchased for God with Your blood men from every tribe and tongue and people and nation” (Revelation 5:9). Every knee will bow and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, “to the glory of God the Father” (Philippians 2:10-11). God’s purpose was never to save people for a while in the hope that they could hang on. It was to create a redeemed humanity that would praise the Son forever, and what God purposes, He does.

A chain that cannot break

²⁹For those whom He foreknew, He also predestined to become conformed to the image of His Son, so that He would be the firstborn among many brethren; ³⁰and these whom He predestined, He also called; and these whom He called, He also justified; and these whom He justified, He also glorified.

Romans 8:29-30 · NASB95

These two verses set out the whole of salvation in five links of one chain, from eternity past to eternity future:

1. 1
   ForeknewBefore timeHe set His love on His people beforehand, knowing them and their faith before the world began.
2. 2
   PredestinedBefore timeHe marked out their end: to be conformed to the image of His Son.
3. 3
   CalledIn timeHe called them to Himself through the gospel, with a call that brings the dead to life.
4. 4
   JustifiedIn timeHe declared them righteous, for Christ’s sake.
5. 5
   GlorifiedStill to comeHe will make them like Christ, so surely that Paul writes it as done.

Paul begins with “those whom He foreknew”. God knows everything that will happen before it happens, the end from the beginning, so His foreknowledge includes His knowing beforehand who would believe. But in Scripture, “to know” often means far more than to have information about someone. When Jesus says, “I know My own and My own know Me” (John 10:14), He means a relationship of love. God said to Israel, “You only have I chosen among all the families of the earth” (Amos 3:2), and the Hebrew word rendered “chosen,” יָדַע (yada), is the ordinary word for “known.” Paul writes, “if anyone loves God, he is known by Him” (1 Corinthians 8:3), and he describes salvation as coming “to be known by God” (Galatians 4:9). To those who never belonged to Him, Jesus will say, “I never knew you” (Matthew 7:23). He knows who they are; He never set His love on them.

So God’s foreknowledge includes a love set on His people before they were born: “God has not rejected His people whom He foreknew” (Romans 11:2). Moses told Israel that the LORD “did not set His love on you nor choose you because you were more in number than any of the peoples”, but “because the LORD loved you” (Deuteronomy 7:7-8). In Scripture God’s foreknowledge is also bound to His appointing. Peter uses the word of Christ Himself: “He was foreknown before the foundation of the world, but has appeared in these last times for the sake of you” (1 Peter 1:20). On the day of Pentecost he said that Christ was “delivered over by the predetermined plan and foreknowledge of God” (Acts 2:23). God’s foreknowledge is both His knowing beforehand who would believe and His choosing beforehand, in love, those who would be His, and the two do not exclude each other. Salvation begins in God’s eternal, loving knowledge of His people.

“He also predestined”: He determined their destiny beforehand. Foreknowledge names the people God knew and loved beforehand, and predestination the end He marked out for them, conformity to the image of His Son. Scripture speaks of names written in the book of life from the foundation of the world (Revelation 13:8).

Then the chain moves into time: “these whom He predestined, He also called”. This is not the general invitation of the gospel, which many hear and refuse, as in Jesus’ parable: “many are called, but few are chosen” (Matthew 22:14). It is the effectual call, the inner, saving call of the Spirit in regeneration, which theologians have also called irresistible. Wherever the epistles speak of believers as called, they mean this: “to all who are beloved of God in Rome, called as saints” (Romans 1:7). God “has saved us and called us with a holy calling, not according to our works, but according to His own purpose and grace” (2 Timothy 1:9). The call comes through the gospel: “God has chosen you from the beginning for salvation through sanctification by the Spirit and faith in the truth. It was for this He called you through our gospel, that you may gain the glory of our Lord Jesus Christ” (2 Thessalonians 2:13-14).

“These whom He called, He also justified”: declared righteous before God. Justification is a legal act. God is satisfied with the sacrifice of Christ for all their sins, the penalty is paid in full, and He credits Christ’s righteousness to them. They have no righteousness of their own; they are covered with His.

“These whom He justified, He also glorified”. Every verb in verse 30 is in the past tense, even “glorified,” though the glorification of believers is still to come. Grammarians call this a proleptic aorist: a future event so certain that it can be spoken of as already done. A believer’s glory is as secure as his predestination, which took place before the world began.

If God is for us, who is against us?

Paul answers every objection to the believer’s security himself, beginning, “What then shall we say to these things?” (Romans 8:31). Verses 31 to 34 answer anyone who might take salvation away, and verses 35 to 39 every trial and every power, earthly or spiritual, that might come between the believer and the love of Christ. Open a card below for the answer to each, the last of them the believer himself:

Nothing can separate us

“Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Will tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword?” (Romans 8:35). What holds the believer is not his love for Christ but Christ’s love for him, which verse 39 calls the love of God. Paul names the worst a believer can suffer, rising to the sword.

1. 1Tribulation

   Pressure from outside: trouble, rejection, harm.

2. 2Distress

   Pressure inside: fear, anxiety, doubt and dread.

3. 3Persecution

   Open abuse for the testimony of Jesus.

4. 4Famine

   Hunger, from poverty or imprisonment.

5. 5Nakedness

   Too little clothing against the cold (2 Corinthians 11:27).

6. 6Peril

   Danger on every side (2 Corinthians 11:26).

7. 7Sword

   Execution.

Romans 8:35

Such trials had been the experience of God’s people long before Paul, who quotes Psalm 44 (Romans 8:36), where Israel pleaded with God: “But for Your sake we are killed all day long; we are considered as sheep to be slaughtered” (Psalm 44:22). Belonging to God has always been dangerous.

These trials were Paul’s own experience too. He wrote Romans, most likely from Corinth, already marked by most of these trials (2 Corinthians 11:23-27) and asking for prayer against the dangers that awaited him in Judea (Romans 15:30-31). He would go through every trial on the list, and the church’s ancient testimony is that he died by the sword in Rome. Within a few years the believers in Rome were caught up in Nero’s persecution: some were sewn into animal skins and torn apart by dogs, some crucified, and some burned as torches to light Nero’s gardens. They died, and they were still safe in the love of Christ.

The faith of the martyrs did not fail, because it was a faith given by God, a supernatural faith like that of every believer. Peter wrote of faith proved genuine by trial, as gold is proved by fire, and added, “though you have not seen Him, you love Him” (1 Peter 1:7-8). Under the worst, true believers do not finally turn against Christ. They love Him to the end, because “He first loved us” (1 John 4:19).

“But in all these things we overwhelmingly conquer through Him who loved us” (Romans 8:37). To conquer overwhelmingly is more than to survive: trial, however severe, proves true faith genuine, and believers conquer through Christ’s love, not their own strength. The believer who lives through it comes out with a firmer faith and a settled assurance, and the believer who dies under it goes to be with Christ, “for that is very much better” (Philippians 1:23).

Then comes the close of the chapter:

³⁸For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, ³⁹nor height, nor depth, nor any other created thing, will be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Romans 8:38-39 · NASB95

Paul names the extremes of existence:

• Death and life.
• The present and whatever is to come.
• Angels and principalities, the holy angels and the fallen.
• Powers, a word that in the plural refers to mighty works and supernatural forces.
• Height and depth, terms ancient astrology used for the highest and lowest points of the stars’ courses, which pagans believed ruled human fate.
• And, so that nothing is left out, “any other created thing” (Romans 8:39), the believer himself included.

God says to His people, “I have loved you with an everlasting love” (Jeremiah 31:3), and that love “has been poured out within our hearts through the Holy Spirit who was given to us” (Romans 5:5).