The Ultimate Promise

God does things, and we do things.

God does things, and Satan does things. And yet God overrules, and He overrules in such a way as to guarantee your good, not what you think of as good, but what he thinks of as good. It was true in the Apostle Paul's day, and true today, even during job loss, a terminal diagnosis, war, or economic collapse.

When challenges come our way, we can be tempted to doubt God's intentions for our good. So stay with us for this Monday edition of Renewing Your Mind, as Derek Thomas considers this profound text in Romans 8. In fact, we'll be in Romans 8 all week. You'll hear some of the messages from his 12-message series in this chapter, a chapter that he considers to be the greatest in the entire Bible.

If you'd like this series, its study guide, and the companion book, How the Gospel Brings Us All the Way Home, request this week's offer with a donation of any amount at renewingyourmind.org. Well, here's a Ligonier teaching fellow, Derek Thomas, on Romans 8, 28. We come in this study to the best known verse, perhaps in Romans 8, and one that means a great deal to many Christians, and I suspect to you too. And it's the sort of Calvinistic verse in Romans 8, 28, and it begins a lengthy section that includes the doctrine of foreknowledge and predestination and all of that.

And the verse, of course, that I'm referring to is, and we know that for those who love God, all things work together for good for those who are called according to His purpose. If you live inside this massive promise, your life is more solid and stable than Mount Everest. Nothing can blow you over when you are inside the walls of Romans 8, 28. Outside of Romans 8, 28, all is confusion and anxiety and fear and uncertainty. Outside this promise of all-encompassing future grace, there are straw houses of drugs and alcohol and numbing TV and dozens of futile diversions. There are slat walls and tin roofs of fragile investment strategies and fleeting insurance coverage and trivial retirement plans.

There are cardboard fortifications of deadbolt locks and alarm systems and anti-ballistic missiles. Outside are a thousand substitutes for Romans 8, 28. Once you walk through the door of love into the massive unshakable structure of Romans 8, 28, everything changes. They come into your life stability and depth and freedom.

You simply can't be blown over anymore. The confidence that a sovereign God governs for your good, all the pain and all the pleasure that you will ever experience, is an incomparable refuge and security and hope and power in your life. When God's people really live by the future grace of Romans 8, 28, from measles to the mortuary, they are the freest and strongest and most generous people in the world. And that, of course, was John Piper, and it's a wonderful paragraph in which he nails what Romans 8, 28 means for us as Christians. There are three things that I want us to think about in this particular verse. The first is the character of those to whom the promise is made. This is a promise that's made for those who love God. It's a promise that is made to those who are Christians. It's a promise to those who are justified by faith alone in Jesus Christ alone. It's a promise to those who have the imputed righteousness of Christ. It's a promise to those who are called by the Holy Spirit into a relationship with the Lord Jesus. It's a promise to those who think of God and call Him Abba Father, who are led by the Spirit and helped by the Spirit and interceded for by the Holy Spirit. It's a promise for Christians. It's not a promise for everybody. It's a promise for those who love God and who have discovered that love in the provision that God has made in His beautiful Son, that He freely gave and did not spare and delivered Him up for us all and along with Him freely gives us all things. So, if you're not a Christian, if you're not a believer, if you don't have the hope of glory, if you're not regenerate, if you're not indwelt by the Holy Spirit, if you haven't been called effectually and drawn to Jesus Christ to embrace Him as He is offered in the gospel, things will not ultimately turn out for your good.

That's the reality. That's the other side of this verse. Things will turn out for catastrophe because there's a heaven to be gained that is good, and there is a hell to be shunned that is very, very bad. But let's look at the plus side.

Let's look at the positive side. What a promise this is to Christians. He not only saves us. He not only forgives us our sins.

He guarantees that everything that ever happens to us will be for our good. So, the character of those to whom the promise is made. Secondly, the comprehensiveness of the promise. All things. We know that for those who love God, all things. Good things and bad things. Things that we understand and things that we don't understand.

Things that are from one point of view the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. What the world throws at us. What this fallen world throws at us. This world that is out of joint. This world that is subject to futility. This world life under the sun looks like and feels like vanity as the preacher in Ecclesiastes concludes.

Sometimes life just stinks. Sometimes things just don't go the way we want them to go, and our plans come crashing to the ground, and all of our effort and all of our energy seems to accomplish absolutely nothing. Those things. Things that seem pointless. Things that seem to us to have no sense to them whatsoever, and we find ourselves unable to pray. As Paul has said in the previous verses, in our weakness we do not know how to pray as we ought.

And the Spirit has to come alongside and help us and intercede for us and fix those prayers on the way up so that by the time they reach the heavenly Father, they are perfect. Bad things. Evil things.

Things that are of the devil. Like Job in chapters 1 and 2, and Satan is there. This evil being, this fallen angel of extraordinary power who is referred to in Scripture as the prince and power of the air, who along with a host of demons seems to exist to bring us down, to make accusations of slander against us. It's hard to imagine it, isn't it, because it's almost an oxymoron when we speak of him as pure evil. And it's hard to wrap our brains around what that means, the malevolence, the hatred, the opposition, but he exists.

He prowls about like a roaring lion seeking whom he may devour and where to resist him steadfast in the faith. And in Job, he is the one who lies behind the tragedies that befall Job in the loss of his children and the loss of his wealth and the loss of his health. Job seems to be totally ignorant of Satan.

He doesn't seem to be aware that he even exists. But behind the veil of evil that comes into our life, there is Satan, and he hates you. He hates all who are God's children.

He hates all who belong to Jesus Christ. So Paul is saying here, to those who love God, all things, the meaningless things, the evil things, things that Satan does, the tragedies and hurts that come into the lives of Christians like Job, like Joseph. Joseph was accused of rape, falsely accused of rape and imprisoned. Imagine someone languishing in prison for years and years and years, falsely accused, his friends thinking that he's guilty, his mother perhaps thinking that he's guilty, his siblings thinking that he's guilty.

Perhaps on occasions, he begins to think, maybe I am guilty, but he's innocent. And that's Joseph. And God weaves an incredible story of enormous complexity to get him to the second most important figure in ancient Egypt.

And he's raised in the Egyptian court, and he's there in Potiphar's house, and eventually he will be the one to ensure that Israel, Jacob's lineage will be held together, and the story and the narrative of redemption will take the course that God had planned all along. And he says, you remember, in the closing part of Genesis to his brothers, you meant it for evil, but God meant it for good. His brothers meant it.

They did it. They did it, and they did that which was evil, and they did that for which they were accountable. And yet, at the same time, God did it and overruled it.

And there's a proximate cause, and there's an ultimate cause, and here in Romans 8.28, Paul is thinking of the ultimate causality and the ultimate sovereignty that ensures that everything that we do and everything that we experience is so ordered by a sovereign God that they work together for good. And they do so in a way in which God is never culpable. God is never culpable for sin.

He's never culpable for the wrongdoing. And the way that the Westminster Confession resolves that, if resolve is the right word, is to introduce the idea, a medieval idea, of first causes and second causes. But there's a first cause, and the first cause of everything is God, even though the second cause might be Satan and to whom the culpability of moral defection would be leveled. Now, I'm not sure that I can say that I fully understand that, but I've repeated this to myself many, many times in a way that is compatibilist, to use one long word.

And sometimes when you throw a long word out at something, you think you understand it if you can repeat it. But actually, God does things, and we do things. God does things, and Satan does things. And yet, God overrules, and He overrules in such a way as to guarantee your good, not what you think of as good, but what He thinks of as good, the ultimate good. There's the character of those to whom the promise is made, and this is a promise that is made for Christians, for believers.

There's the comprehensiveness of the promise, all things, everything, things that I don't understand, things I wish would not happen, things I wish would happen that don't happen, all things, not just the good things, but the bad things, the loss of a spouse, the loss of one's job, the loss of wealth and income, the loss of dreams and hopes and ambitions and aspirations, and your life has turned into something that you can't even recognize anymore, and those things too. And God's hand is always on the tiller. He's always shaping and conforming and molding and driving you to that point that He has planned from all eternity within the knowledge and certainty that He loves you because He sent His Son for you. He did not spare Him, but freely delivered Him up for us all, and how shall He not along with Him freely give us all things? And those are the all things that He's talking about here in verse 28. We know that for those who love God, all things work together for good, the ultimate good.

So there's the character of those to whom the promise is made, the comprehensiveness of the promise, and then the conquest envisioned by the promise, and that conquest envisioned is good. What is our ultimate good? And the answer, of course, as we shall see at the end of verse 30, is glorification, and we'll examine how we get to glorification in verses 29 and 30 in another lesson to follow, but the good that Paul has in mind here is not a feel-good, the good that I think would be best for me or for my situation, but the good that Paul has in mind here is that God is determined to bring you home to Himself. He has saved you, but He wants to bring you all the way home.

He has saved you, and He's given you the Holy Spirit to equip you and help you and intercede for you and enable you to persevere even to the end because He has called you, and He has justified you, and eventually He's going to glorify you when Jesus comes again, and your bodies will rise from the grave and be reunited with your souls, and you will be forever with the Lord. That's good. That's God's ultimate purpose. God has a plan for you. It's a marvelous plan. It's a sovereign plan. It's an incomprehensible plan.

It's an intricate plan. The future isn't closed in the sense that we have decisions to make, but the future is closed in the sense that everything about our futures has been ordered by God. God doesn't have those surprise moments when things happen that He hadn't planned for. He says there's going to be a second coming.

Imagine all of the events and circumstances that need to happen in order to ensure the second coming, and imagine circumstances and events that could happen that could undo the second coming, or the coming of Jesus the first time, that there would be someone called Mary in the right place at the right time with the right lineage, as God had prophesied all along. God has a plan. He has a detailed plan for you and me, and how do we get to know the details of that plan? There's the ultimate plan. God wants to bring us home. God wants to glorify us, and He's going to do everything in order to ensure that having foreknown and predestined and called and justified, He will glorify us. But what about the little plan?

What about the plan from below rather than the plan from above, the plan that involves our daily lives? What are we supposed to do tomorrow? Who are we supposed to marry or not marry? Where are we supposed to live? What job are we supposed to be engaged in?

Do I turn left here or turn right here? And there are a million or a billion decisions that we make in the course of our lives, and God says, even those I superintend, not in a way that makes us robots. We make decisions, and they're real decisions, and we choose what to wear in the morning, and we choose where we're going to go and shop for food in this store or that store, and we say, is it chicken or beef or lettuce leaves for dinner tonight?

And I don't want to offend anyone in their choice of food. And those are real decisions. We're not robots. We're not automatons. And yet, God superintends. He overrules.

He orders the end from the beginning. From a pastoral point of view, that doctrine, of course, from an intellectual point of view, receives a great deal of opposition, and Calvinists are on one side, and Arminians and semi-Arminians are on another side of that, and usually it revolves around the concept of free will, whatever people mean by free will. But let's step back from all that for a minute and ask ourselves the pastoral question. What's the alternative if God isn't in control? If there's no guarantee that things are working together for good, that you can make a decision and it can be catastrophic. You can make a trivial decision, and it can derail the train from its tracks, and everything can come crashing down. There are those in our time who believe that the future is open, and they believe it in different ways, and there are subtle nuances between how they might articulate that view.

But in order to maintain a reality, a realism to free will, they suggest that there are certain things in the future that are fixed, and then there are many more things that are not fixed, and it's open, and God Himself has left it open and doesn't try to close that in any way. And Romans 8, 28 then doesn't make any sense because Romans 8, 28 is like a fortress. It's like a castle where you feel safe and secure, and you move around inside that castle, and you have fun and have relationships and make decisions. But the walls of that castle ensure that no evil can ever take you and destroy you. I imagine in times of difficulty and grief and sorrow, you've run into this castle, and you've heard the doors shut, or you've heard that gate come down and the chains rattling, and you've heard the thud on the floor, and Romans 8, 28 has been your refuge. And no one can harm you. No one can touch you. No one can take away from you what God intends for you.

He's begun it already, and He's given you the Holy Spirit as the first fruits, as the down payment, as the guarantee that a harvest is coming in all of its beauty and glory and grandeur. So, Romans 8, 28 is our refuge. It's our safe place.

Like people with houses that have a safe room, and when trouble comes, they run into that room and press a button, and everything shuts down, and they're inside Romans 8, 28. It's a beautiful place to be. It gives you assurance. It gives you confidence. It gives you hope. It gives you courage, especially in times when you don't understand what's going on.

It's not important that you understand. What's important is that you believe it and trust it. This is a message we need to be reminded of frequently. Whatever you're going through today, run to Romans 8, 28 and cling to that promise tightly.

Thanks for being with us today. For Renewing Your Mind, I'm Nathan W. Bingham. And that was a message from Derek Thomas' gospel-saturated series, simply titled, Romans 8. It's one of my favorites from Dr. Thomas, and I'm confident that by God's grace, you'll be helped as you listen to and engage with his exposition of Romans 8. We'll send you the DVD of this series, plus his companion book, How the Gospel Brings Us All the Way Home, when you give a donation of any amount at renewingyourmind.org, or when you call us at 800 435 4343. We'll also unlock the series and study guide in the free Ligonier app. Read the book, listen to the messages, and grow in your understanding of this profound chapter in Scripture. Request this offer at renewingyourmind.org or by using the link in the podcast show notes.

And if you prefer to receive these resources digitally or you live outside of the US or Canada, you can request this week's global offer at renewingyourmind.org slash global. Thank you. How do you know that you'll be in heaven and not fall away? Derek Thomas will answer that question as he digs deeper into Romans 8 tomorrow here on Renewing Your Mind. .