“For those who love God all things work together for good.” So wrote the apostle Paul, and so we believe. Of course, as with other frequently quoted verses of scripture, a variety of interpretations and applications exist and are commonly (and sometimes unreflectively) held by fellow believers.
Supposing your elders tasked you with expositing that familiar quotation from Romans on a Sunday morning, you might find you have to clear away a few cobwebs first.
I came across some cobwebby thinking about that passage in an internet forum just the other day, along with a few solid, thoughtful people parsing Paul’s wording. Four different reactions follow.
1/ Big Picture Goodness
Gene Riemenschneider writes:
“Stephen’s stoning was no doubt unpleasant for Stephen, but God used it to help bring Saul (Paul) to Christ.”
That’s an interesting take, to be sure. In Gene’s view, then, God is working all things together for the good of the Body of Christ at large. A particular event may be wretchedly painful for me, but if it advances the Lord’s agenda in the world, eventually bringing blessing to others, we ought to acknowledge its ultimate goodness. The “good” Paul has in view, then, would include the good of others and the goodness of God’s fulfilled purposes.
Does that work for you?
2/ Sticking to the Wording of the Text
Another reader disagrees:
“It’s not just ‘good’ in some nebulous, cosmic sense, but specifically good toward the persons involved.”
She bases her argument on a translation of the verse similar to that of the NIV, which makes the good specific to the individual experiencing suffering (“in all things God works for the good of those who love him”). Numerous translations of the Greek take this well-attested position, so she’s not coming out of left field.
I tend to agree.
3/ Rising to the Bait
A further comment, this time from a former minister:
“Predestination. They have taken a glorious verse and ruined it. This seems to be the verse people go to if they are stuck on predestination and want to exclude everything else in the Bible.”
Having run into the occasional systematic theology monomaniac who cannot see the trees for the forest, I know this sort of thing can happen. Still, if we are being fair to the apostle, we have to acknowledge the theme of predestination is right there in passage. Paul uses the word twice, and we are obliged to consider context in our search for meaning. So long as we are referring to the same process Paul was (being “predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son”), we cannot reasonably distance ourselves from associating the promise of good-from-evil with the idea that God has a foreordained plan for all those who come to faith in Christ. His purpose is to make us like him. In this God will inevitably succeed, being God, and he is not restricted from using otherwise-unpleasant events to accomplish his will.
All the same, in investing the bulk of our time on that age-old theological battle between determinism and agency, we may find nothing else in the passage and see only what we are accustomed to seeing there.
4/ Questions? What Questions?
Cher responds:
“I don’t understand the question. There is nothing there for us to ‘apply’. It’s a statement of fact.”
You often get this sort of reaction from people reading a passage for the first time and to whom certain entirely legitimate ways of looking at it have never occurred. I recently heard a brother draw conclusions for Christians from a different set of verses, quite oblivious to the possibility that the NT writers might use the word ekklēsia to designate anything other than the local gathering of Christians with which he is familiar, or something very close to it. In fact, in this context I’m quite confident ekklēsia referred to something else entirely.
Even the plainest of plain statements in scripture requires we determine the answers to a question or two before we can apply it across the board. For example, in this situation, we might ask if context places any limitations on the word “all”. All what? We might also ask, as others have, “Good in what sense? Good for whom?” We have already discovered readers differ on that. Again, we might reasonably ask, “How has this passage been translated? Are we considering all the legitimate options by looking only at one English translation?”
I share these examples with a point in mind, and it’s not to give you a definitive answer with respect to the correct meaning or appropriate application of Romans 8:28.
Consider the Audience
Teaching scripture from the platform or online requires we consider the possibility that any of these four types of Christians I discovered reacting to scripture online may be sitting in our audience on any given Sunday morning. In fact, all four might be sitting there, perhaps even in the same pew, and there will undoubtedly be other types as well.
- There’s a guy in the third row with a strange, easy-to-disprove take on the text that would probably never occur to anyone else. Still, to be useful to him, you need to take his weird outlier of a position into account and invest a sentence or two to explain why it doesn’t work.
- Beside him is the veteran theological warrior who hears the spiritual equivalent of a
dog-whistle every time you use a biblical term without first defining it, and it sends him off on rabbit trails that take him right out of the passage. He’s convinced you are sending coded messages to the audience with your choice of terminology, and equally sure they must be ominous. If you decide not to engage with him, at least do it consciously and expect to hear from him at the door. - To his right is a woman with no familiarity with the text at all, who is in every way his opposite. She reads each line as she might read her favorite mommy blogger, oblivious to any but the most obvious modern English explanation of the meaning and mildly contemptuous of any effort to go deeper and consider other possibilities. She needs you to show her what else might be in there, and why it matters to her.
- At the other end of the row is a young lady raised in a solid Christian home who has probably given more thought to the passage than you did in preparing your sermon. Nothing you do will surprise or engage her unless you appear on the platform without a shirt. Perhaps you can’t make her day, but if you choose your words with care and she feels you are helping others to understand the passage, she may consider her morning well spent.
Wildly Different Needs
How do you help all these people with wildly differing needs, especially all at the same time? Some would say you can’t, and they may be right — at least, not unless they get a chance to ask questions or make comments, assuming of course that you can motivate them to do so by getting them to care about your subject. In the average Sunday morning local church gathering, you have to pick the hills you are willing to die on, the disclaimers you make, the qualifications you add, the arguments you take on and debunk, and so on. You have to decide which issues are important enough to spend time on and which are trivial enough to let slide. If you didn’t, you wouldn’t get far.
But if you can’t put yourself in the shoes of every weird and wacky member of your audience, you really don’t have any basis to make those decisions, do you? That takes empathy, life experience, and a lot of reading. Not everybody has the time or energy to work through the many ways a Bible teacher may comprehensively miss the mark despite all the goodwill in the world.
When I see a speaker trying to handle an entire chapter of scripture in any given 45-minute gathering, I know we are going to get a surface treatment at best. Surface treatments are fine when doing something clearly identified as an overview, much less fine if the preacher breezes through the chapter, then launches into an ill-considered polemic for which he has failed to provide any intellectual or theological basis. Whenever a man takes on too much material, I can almost guarantee I could raise five or six good questions the speaker has never considered, let alone has a decent answer for, and that one or two of these may go right to the heart of the inspired thought flow of the author. The poor man has simply failed to understand the variety of personality types, knowledge levels and mindsets in his audience, let alone how default thinking impedes real learning.
He needs to clear away the cobwebs first.
An Alternative
I have been listening to a bunch of 40-year-old messages preached by my father when he was — as they say — “in his prime”. I was shocked to discover that he rarely covered more than a single paragraph of scripture in the course of any sermon. Sometimes he spent almost 45 minutes on one sentence or verse, providing illustrations to wake up his audience, anticipating objections from those who might read the text casually or infer things from it that weren’t there, and carefully setting out the way he had come to understand it after hours of study, prayer and reflection.
There is more to reaching hearts and minds than being orthodox, repeating what the text says in your own words, and successfully killing the time allotted. Many speakers are technically correct in most of what they say, but only a few provide real insight to large numbers in their audiences. The best of these do far more listening and thinking than talking.
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