The Love That Cannot Be Unraveled

I'm not very good with tangled knots. Whether it's a fishing line or a string of Christmas lights, I am more likely to get frustrated, toss it aside, and go by new lines/lights. I mean, every time I think I've got it, I start to pull... and then with every pull, the knot gets tighter.

Now imagine there's a knot so tangled, so tight, that every human attempt failed to pull apart.

Sometimes that's what life feels like. A situations so complex, so disordered, so messy, that we're tempted to just throw our hands in the air and say, "forget it." We might go out and try and "find" a replacement, a distraction, something new. We might resort to a pair of scissors, and start cutting. Do that with Christmas lights, though, and it defeats the purpose. Because the entire point of even attempting to untangle the knot is so that the lights can be properly displayed and illuminated. A cut line won't light up.

This is something like the list of hardships, trials, and circumstances that Paul details in the eighth chapter of Romans. Think about it. It's not too many years later when Paul, himself, will be martyred in that very city. The church there cannot be "displayed" out in the open, and the forces pressed against them are such a tangled knot of oppression, persecution, and hardship, that it looks like it will never be undone.

But Paul's answer is this: it has already been undone.

 

The Climax of Everything

Romans 8:35-39 is, in many ways, what Paul has spent the entire letter building toward.

Paul has taken us at this point through the mess of sin, how the wages of it is death, how even in his flesh he is in a constant battle doing the very things he does not want to do. He's also spoken of grace and salvation. He says we are adopted as sons of God that the Spirit groans within us, that creation itself is waiting with an eager longing for its redemption.

But now he's confronting the question that keeps some people awake at night. The kind of tangled knot that so many are too impatient to untangle, that seems impossible to pull apart:

”Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Will hardship, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword?” (Romans 8:35)

Notice what Paul lists. These are not abstract sufferings. These are the things the people reading (or hearing it read out loud) were enduring in that very moment.

And in our modern world, these are like the kinds of sufferings, the injustices, the betrayals, that make many people abandon the faith.

These are the reasons people vent about, in bitterness, when they stepped away from the Church, and tried to find something new. These are the things that many appeal to as justification for why they walked away. Today, someone might say:

He didn’t show up when I lost my job. 

He was silent when the diagnosis came. 

He seemed absent when the marriage ended, when my child died. 

What does he have to do with this corrupt institution that calls itself a Church? 

What does he have to do with the faith that these hypocrites are preaching? 

The world reads these experiences as evidence of divine abandonment.

But Paul says exactly the opposite. These are the very places where Divine Love has entered and conquered.

The Greek verb Paul uses for “separate” is chōrisei, which carries the sense of dividing, splitting, or setting apart at a distance. It’s the same root used when Jesus speaks of what “God has joined together, let no one separate” (Matthew 19:6) in marriage.

Paul is asking: what force in the universe is powerful enough to divorce us from Christ’s love? What blade is sharp enough to cleave this bond?

The answer, hammered home with seven negations and one glorious affirmation, is: nothing.

 

Sheep for the Slaughter

But Paul is not minimizing these experiences. He isn't explaining them away . He's honest about them. To drive home the point, lest someone think he's trying to brush it aside, he quotes Psalm 44:

"As it is written, ‘For your sake we are being killed all day long; we are accounted as sheep to be slaughtered.’" (Romans 8:36)

Read the psalm sometime. It is a psalm of complaint, of confusion. The psalmist protests that Israel has been faithful, and yet God seems to have handed them over to their enemies. It is a psalm that asks, ”Why?”

Paul quotes it not to explain suffering away, but to acknowledge that yes, this is the shape of the faithful life. To follow the Lamb who was slain is often to be counted among the sheep destined for slaughter.

Christianity has never promised exemption from suffering. It never promised a perfect, successful, or pristine Church somehow unscathed by these attacks. Because there are spiritual attacks that happen in the Church, there are worldly influences that sometimes make it feel like the corruption is so deep that it can't be untangled. And there is real pain, real sorrow, real wounds inflicted sometimes by the very people we were supposed to be able to trust.

Paul doesn't promise any of these things will go away. He says that the Gospel promises us something far greater:

"No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us.” (Romans 8:37)

The word Paul coins here is remarkable: hypernikōmen. It’s a compound word, and Paul may well have invented it. Nikē (like the shoes) means “victory,” and hyper means “over” or “beyond.” We are not merely victors, we are super-victors, hyper-conquerors, more than champions.

But here is what must be understood: we do not become more than conquerors by escaping the hardship, the distress, the persecution, the famine, the nakedness, the peril, the sword. We become more than conquerors within these things, through these things, precisely because His love has already entered these things before us.

Because often it is precisely where it feels and seems that Christ is most absent where He's actually most present.

 

The Places God Has Gone

This is the mystery at the heart of the Incarnation. God did not merely send a message about His love. He did not simply mail us a beautifully worded letter of affection. He entered into all of it.

He entered life. He entered a womb, a manger, a carpenter’s shop, a Nazareth village. He entered the exhaustion of ministry, the ache of misunderstood conversations, the loneliness of being surrounded by disciples who never quite understood, who often betrayed Him. I'm not just talking about Judas. I mean the little betrayals when they turned people away Jesus meant to welcome, when they chastised people He meant to bless. During three years of ministry, Jesus' very love is often unwittingly betrayed by those closest to Him, those who would become the pillars of the Church He was establishing.

He entered hunger in the wilderness, thirst at the well, weariness at the tomb of Lazarus where "Jesus began to weep” (John 11:35).

And then He entered death. Not merely a "peaceful" death, either, but death as a bloody, gasping, forsaken reality on a Roman cross. He entered the grave.

Paul continues:

"For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.” (Romans 8:38-39)

Look at that list carefully. It is not a random list of challenges. These are not "small" threats. They are the biggest threats, worldly and spiritual. And none of them can separate us from His love.

So long as we don't let them. So long as we don't cleave to these as "excuses," and start running away from Him.

Death and life: these include everything from the womb to the tomb. The "start" and supposed "finish line" of a human life.

Angels and rulers: the spiritual powers, both heavenly and demonic. The word for “rulers” here (archai) is the same word Paul uses elsewhere for the principalities and powers of darkness. Jesus faced these. The Gospels are, among other things, a record of spiritual combat. From the temptation in the wilderness to the demoniacs at Gerasa to the great cry of dereliction on the cross, Jesus went to war with the spiritual forces that terrorize humanity, and He won.

Things present and things to come: the entire span of time. Whatever you're facing now, whatever you have faced, whatever you will face. Already entered into in Jesus' love for you.

Powers: earthly powers, empires, governments. He faced Rome. He faced Herod. He faced the Sanhedrin. And He conquered them not by summoning legions of angels, but by absorbing their violence into His love. He conquered the cross by surrendering to it.

Height and depth: astrological terms in Paul’s day, referring to the highest and lowest points of the heavens where hostile cosmic forces were thought to dwell.

Nor anything else in all creation: just in case Paul missed something, he sweeps the entire created order into the net.

There is nowhere love has not gone. There is no country of the human experience that God has not entered and conquered in love.

 

The Heart of Everything

Sometimes people think of doctrine and dogma as cold and cerebral things, dry rules erected to fence us in.

But every true doctrine of the faith, when properly understood, is meant to lure us deeper into this love. The Trinity is love in eternal communion. The Incarnation is love descending. The atonement is love bearing our weight. The resurrection is love breaking the last chain. The Church is love gathering a people. The sacraments are love touching us in bread and wine and water. Because Jesus won't let the Gospel be reduced to an idea you accept. He meets us in the body, in our senses, in tangible things.

The Last Things are love bringing all things home.

If any doctrine seems to lead us away from love, we have misunderstood the doctrine. If any teaching about God makes Him seem smaller or stingier than the God who could not be separated from us by death itself, we have not yet understood what we are being taught.

Saint Augustine's words I often share with you resonate here as well: “You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in you” (Confessions, Book I, Chapter 1).

The whole of Christian existence is the restless heart discovering, slowly, painfully, and joyfully, that the love it has been seeking has been chasing it all along.

The world promises us hardship, suffering, betrayal, corruption, and injustice. It comes at us through spiritual and worldly attack.

And Paul says, in the midst of it, we can find peace. True Shalom.

The peace that comes from this realization is not the peace of circumstances arranged in our favor. It is not the peace of a life without hardship. It is not about hopping around from church to church, denomination to denomination, hoping we'll find a community free of sinners who might hurt us.

It is the peace of knowing that whatever hardship comes, love has already gone before us into it and is waiting for us there.

This is shalom in its fullest Hebrew sense: not merely the absence of conflict, but the presence of wholeness. It is the wholeness of knowing that you are held. That the knot has been tied by hands that will not let go.

And it is a peace we find not by avoiding or running away. It is by finding Him whose love is manifest most perfectly in these very hardships, in these very injustices, in these painful experiences, in everything that happens to us from the moment we emerge from the womb until we enter the tomb, in every betrayal, and in every failure and sin, whether it be our own or those we suffer because we are knotted up in a world full of other broken people.

 

Living This

How, then, do we let this truth live in us? Let me suggest a few practical paths:

First, name your fears out loud in prayer. Take Paul’s list and personalize it. What is your version of hardship, distress, persecution, famine, nakedness, peril, sword? Say to God, “Even in this, you love me. Even here, you have gone before me.” It matters to speak it out-loud, because in doing that, it becomes a kind of surrender, even a sacrifice. The list of Paul is not general. It is specific. So must your surrender be.

Second, when you suffer, resist the ancient lie that suffering is evidence of abandonment. The world teaches us that pain means God has walked away. That if we're in a room (a Church?) full of sick people, we are not where we're supposed to be: but the Church is not a refuge for those who are healthy and already saints; it is a hospital for sinners, and the very place where sin meets its ultimate cure in Christ's love. The cross is our permanent reminder that God is most present precisely where He seems most absent.

Third, examine what teachings of the faith you find cold or intimidating, and ask, “How is this teaching, rightly understood, an invitation to love?” The doctrines of the Church are not walls. They are windows. There are certainly false doctrines out there, many people who all claim to stand on the "bible alone" who hold competing truths. But get back to the heart of it all. The faith that's been believed everywhere, always, and the same. The faith Christ gives us in the Gospel, and He's maintained through the Church (as Paul tells us elsewhere) which is the pillar and foundation of the truth (1 Tim. 3:15). Don't just look for which teachings feel right, or resonate with your experience. Don't rely on your surface-level understanding, ask deeper questions about things you don't understand and ask those who might know more: "how does this lead me deeper into the love of Jesus Christ?" Look for the teaching that Christ has clearly maintained through the Holy Spirit across two thousand years, that He has worked through even in spite of corrupt institutions, even under suffering and injustice waged from both outside and inside the walls of our church buildings and institutions. I think you will see that Jesus was telling the truth when he said that the gates of hell would never prevail against His church (Matt 16:18). They never have. They never will. And no experience of "attack" has ultimately defeated the Body of Christ, because His Body is not confined to a tomb.

Fourth, become a person who enters. Because we have been loved by a God who entered our lives, we are called to enter into the lives of others. Not to fix everything (we can't), not to explain it all (some things can't be easily explained), but to be present. To be the love of Christ, His presence, for one another. When someone in your life is suffering, refuse the temptation to keep your distance. Enter their sorrow, as Christ entered ours. Because that's how Christ still enters our suffering, our sorrow, the injustices we suffer, our betrayals. He does it through His Body, through you and me who are members of His body, as we hold a hand, as we open our ears to listen, as we remain present.

Fifth, memorize passages like Romans 8:38-39 and speak them as prayers, as weapons against every hardship. This is not just as a nice verse. It is as a weapon against the accusations of the enemy, the voice that whispers you are alone, forgotten, unloved. When those voices come, and they will come, speak this truth aloud. Let the words of Paul become the words of your own convinced heart.

The knot cannot be undone by human hands. But He has tied Himself to us in a love that can never be undone by any outside force, any amount of suffering or sorrow. His love cannot be severed from those whom He loves. The hand that holds you will not let go.

And in this, we have true peace, true shalom.