Romans 8:31, God Is For Us

Romans 8:31 (KJV) ³¹  What shall we then say to these things? If God be for us, who can be against us?

The believer has the assurance that since God is with him, he will be kept safe under God’s protection. He expresses it by a conditional sentence stating that if God is for us, the outcome will surely be that none can overpower the will of God for our lives. The Apostle Paul has just described God’s salvific work in the believer’s life from election to calling, from calling to justification and from justification to glorification. He stills our heart by stating a truthful supposition.

The psalmist expresses this thought very well when he declared in Psalm 121:3-8, “3 He will not suffer thy foot to be moved: he that keepeth thee will not slumber. 4 Behold, he that keepeth Israel shall neither slumber nor sleep. 5 The LORD is thy keeper: the LORD is thy shade upon thy right hand. 6 The sun shall not smite thee by day, nor the moon by night. 7 The LORD shall preserve thee from all evil: he shall preserve thy soul. 8 The LORD shall preserve thy going out and thy coming in from this time forth, and even for evermore.” 

“Jonathan Edwards was suddenly converted, as by a flash of light, in the moment of reading a single verse of the New Testament. He was at home in his father’s house; some hindrances kept him from going to church one Sunday with the family. A couple of hours with nothing to do sent him listlessly into the library; the sight of a dull volume with no title on the leather back of it evoked curiosity as to what it could be; he opened it at random and found it to be a Bible; and then his eye caught this verse: “Now unto the King eternal, immortal, invisible, the only wise God, be honor and glory for ever and ever. Amen!”

He tells us in his journal that the immediate effect of it was awakening and alarming to his soul, for it brought him a most novel and most extensive thought of the vastness and majesty of the true Sovereign of the universe. Out of this grew the pain of guilt for having resisted such a Monarch so long, and for having served Him so poorly. And whereas he had hitherto had slight notions of his own wickedness and very little poignancy of acute remorse, now he felt the deepest contrition.” —C. H. Robinson¹

Indeed, when we understand who God is, it will dawn upon us what great privilege it is to have God with us and be reconciled to the truth that we are His children chosen from before the foundation of the world. Amen.

¹Tan, P. L. (1996). Encyclopedia of 7700 Illustrations: Signs of the Times (501). Garland, TX: Bible Communications, Inc.