NOTES for Rom 8:26-30

God loves us always, all the time, without stopping for a second. And nothing "can separate us" from His love. From outside, nothing. No other creature, not even affliction. Only sin. Sin can. We ourselves can. God gave us freedom, including the freedom to refuse Him, His love, and His forgiveness.

Father Daniel-Ange wrote: "Sin is a short circuit of love." We begin to resist the love of God already when we commit sin; we separate ourselves from it when we refuse to ask forgiveness. God can forgive everything, everything of which we repent. He gives us the strength to forgive and to ask forgiveness, He gives us the strength to change, He loves us and always accepts us. Only we ourselves can reject Him; He gave us such freedom. And then we drive another nail into His arms opened toward us.

It is interesting, what Paul means, by saying that sometimes, when we do not know ourselves about what to pray, "the Spirit maketh intercession for us"? We would have been able of course to remember the experience, probably familiar to every Christian, when the prayer which we begin with our own will, is as if seized from above, and we pray already not alone and not only by ourselves: it's as if a certain power supports and leads us, power of the breath of God, and we understand then that God was very near and we are really not alone any more. But here, it is all the same our prayer, our relationships with God and Christ.

Is it what the apostle meant, or maybe, there is still something more? Or the emotion so familiar to us hides again something else, of what we can only guess. The entire Kingdom is penetrated by the breath of God; as Christians, as inhabitants of the Kingdom, it is impossible for us not to feel it. That is why, as seen, we sometimes experience this breath, as God's participation in our prayers. But indeed, the Kingdom is something more, than just our relationships with God and with Christ. Of course relationships form its foundation, but it also has its spiritual substance, which is formed by the same breath of God, that we began to call afterward the Spirit and perceive as the third hypostasis of the Trinity. But such a substance of course stops already being just a substance, similar to substances of our world.

Because it is in itself full of live, full as never has been no substance of the non transformed creation. It is not simply the nature; it is the living embodiment of the wisdom of God and God's love. In our non transformed world the nature is inert; it is against any spiritual influence, as such. In the Kingdom everything is different: there the nature is absolutely malleable, answering kindly to any spiritual influence. And the man living in the Kingdom becomes a part of this spiritualized nature.

His prayer becomes not only the element of his spiritual life, but also a part of the nature of the Kingdom. And then the entire Kingdom can respond, particularly, if the one who prays suddenly got confuse and does not know what to ask next. The proverb of one’s own house, where walls help, is in this case more than ever relevant: in the Kingdom its inhabitants are not only really helped by all, but also by everything. And if words are not enough for us, the breath of God that pervades the Kingdom, speaks for us. Or, more exactly says the words that we miss.

Paul speaks of Christians as the new people of God, as the Church in its spiritual dimension. In the rabbinic tradition of the Second Temple period, there was an idea that the people of God had been conceived by God even before the creation of the world. This, of course, does not mean that the fate of every person born a Jew is completely predetermined from beginning to end. After all, there were Jews who betrayed their calling to be God's people. And with the new people of God the situation is even less predictable, because people are not born Christians. But as a spiritual reality, in Paul's thought, the Church was conceived by God from the very beginning, and everyone who enters it finds himself among those whose life was predestined, perhaps even before the creation of the world. He becomes part of God's plan and God's people.

But one still has to enter the Church. Until that has happened, a person is in the world of chance, where nothing is predetermined and nothing is definite, where anything at all can happen to anyone, and where chance appears to a superficial gaze as freedom. But God does not deprive a person of freedom; each person is free to choose whether to live in the world of chance or in the world of God's definiteness.

Meanwhile, the discussion of the new people of God, of the Church, allows the apostle to raise the question of the scale of the process we know by the name of salvation. And that scale turns out to be truly universal. It is no accident that Paul says we are saved "in hope": indeed, the process of our sharing in the life of the Kingdom, of our becoming a living Torah and, accordingly, of the transformation of our nature has only just begun. It will plainly require time, and no small amount of it. Our earthly life can be only the beginning of this path.

And the path itself is inseparable from the process of transforming all creation as a whole. All of it, in one way or another, suffered because of the fall, whose cause was humanity. Therefore this situation can only be corrected as a whole, with both humanity and all the rest of creation in view. But then the path of a person's spiritual formation, his deliverance from the consequences of the fall, must inevitably be synchronized with the corresponding work that touches the rest of creation. And this path will be completed only with Christ's return in glory. For now, all that remains for us is to hope that everyone who has begun it will safely reach the end.

Truly, we are saved in hope. Hope sustains us when we are in conflict with the world and in difficult moments of life. But what do we hope for? First of all, that nothing will happen to us apart from the Father’s will; we hope for adoption in the Son and for the Spirit, who will support us in our weaknesses and guide us in prayer. In short, hope in your God always. If we keep this constantly in mind, experience will soon convince us that such hope does not disappoint.

Continuing the theme of the Kingdom and the spiritual wholeness of the human being, Paul draws attention to the fact that the Kingdom, although it has already entered the world, has still not been revealed in it completely. Therefore the faithful still do not know the Kingdom in all its fullness, for which for now they can only hope (vv. 24-25). It would seem that they can be at peace regarding the promises given to them by the Savior. According to ideas commonly accepted in those days among learned rabbis, the people of God, like the Messiah Himself, had been conceived by God even before He created the world. Paul transfers this idea to the Church, seeing in it the new people of God, and he regards all who belong to it as those who, by God's mercy, have become part of the plan that guarantees them the attainment of the fullness of the Kingdom (vv. 28-30).

If so, then all whom God has brought into the Church through Jesus Christ can truly be at peace: they have entered the number of those whose path was determined by God already at the beginning of time. But on the other hand, as long as the Kingdom has not been revealed in all its fullness, evil still partly rules in the world. There is not yet wholeness, not only in human nature but in creation as a whole, so that until the complete transfiguration of the world not only the human being but all the rest of creation is doomed to suffer (vv. 18-21). It is no accident that the apostle, when speaking of the body, again turns to the idea of "redemption," or more precisely, ransom: just as a slave can obtain freedom only if he is ransomed into freedom, so the body too must be "ransomed," liberated from the slave-like dependence in which sin holds it (vv. 22-23).

Seen this way, sin becomes not only a person's guilt, but also his misfortune: with all his heart he would like to attain the Kingdom in all its fullness, but he cannot do this until the Savior frees him, just as a slave, however much he desires it, cannot free himself from slavery unless he is ransomed. Those who have entered the Church and become sharers in the Kingdom receive a kind of advance, but they do not receive it for no reason: this gift becomes the consequence of the choice they have made, after which suffering is inevitable insofar as the world lies in evil (vv. 17-18). The advance they have received allows them to share in the Kingdom already when it would appear that they are not yet ready for anything of the kind, since sin still nests in their nature. But now their whole life is already determined by the Savior's will and unfolds according to the laws of the Kingdom, so that resistance to the sin in which the world lies also becomes, for them, resistance to their own sin. That is why the Risen One no longer condemns His faithful for their sins (vv. 31-34). As we can see, a person's relationship with God and with the Messiah sent by Him is determined only by that person's own choice, and if the choice has been made rightly, nothing can tear him away from Christ and from the Kingdom (vv. 35-39). Not even his own sin, which has not yet been fully overcome.