Print this pageROMANS 8:28
Brother John G. Gassaway
Romans 8:28 - And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose.
As the world seems to go further and further off the cliff, headed for destruction, I often reflect upon God's promises and am comforted by what the Bible says about the future of the world. It is no surprise that men are becoming more vile and corrupt in their ways. I am disturbed for my children's sakes that they may experience an even viler and corrupt world during their lifetimes. Yet, I accept that since I know the ending of the story. Jesus will come again and set things aright.
While I understand that God works in these greater spheres of circumstances, sometimes my confidence is not as great that God works in every mundane aspect of our lives. He surely is not at work during times of my greatest sins or is He? I am going to tackle a subject here that many have tried and failed in my opinion. Perhaps I will do no better. The subject is Romans 8:28. Now I grew up in the church hearing various parts of Romans 8 being preached and I fully understood why everyone dubbed it the "greasy text" because people spent so much time reading that chapter that the very oils from their skin became embedded on the pages. My King James is in the same condition!
I am not going to write about all the rich language of the verses before the 28th verse. They are comfort to any child of God. Here is my problem. Verse 28, if understood as it is translated and traditionally viewed, is not much comfort to me at times. My interpretation of it may not be yours but I will bet when I finish we are closer than you think. Primitive Baptists are lightly accused of being consummate Calvinists, even supreme Calvinists by those who do not really know us, because we hold to a once saved (eternally) always saved in regard to eternal salvation and that it was predetermined in the councils of Heaven before the world began. We do not believe that God has predetermined every step in our lives. There may be some "absoluters" among some but I have not run into them except in the most rigid stoic Presbyterians.
In contrast to our eternal destination, life here on earth is not so perfectly ordered or predestined (at least as we see with our eyes). God above all gave us freedom to act so that we might freely love Him and have faith. God had a heaven full of perfection with the angels once the bad angels were cast out with Satan. Perfection was not what God wanted most in man. He wanted freely given love and freely developed faith in Him. While God gave a set of laws to His special people, the Israelites, and warned them of consequences if they broke them, He at the very same time gave to Moses a complex set of sacrificial activities to take care of the sins of the people once a year. The blood of goats and calves was required, for these people would break God's perfect law. God set loose something quite dangerous on earth with that freedom and we see the result of that freedom in the world today. We can use that freedom in disobedience to God's will for us or we can accept His will on earth in all matters. God knows when a sparrow falls but He does not prevent them from falling. He knows our problems and He even knows them before they occur but quite often He sees fit to stand aside and to train us through experiences or, through such, even punish us when we have taken wrong paths. He is not the author of death but knows the exact days of our lives. He can see fit to extend them or to allow laws of nature to rule. I do believe in a special providence of God when He intercedes to protect us from harm. But He does not intercede in all things that happen to us. He does work in all things providing that we are counted as ones who LOVE GOD, called according to purpose.
As I grew up with this verse, I never could understand the 28th verse because I thought it meant that God actually thought and therefore we should think that somehow the evil things that I saw about me in the world were actually good in that they "worked for good." Evil men killed good men. How did that work for good? I have a car wreck and nearly die from it. How did that work for good for me or anyone? When I saw the father of a good friend who had just died in the ER from a car accident ... when I saw him outside the Baldwin Hospital ER crying so loud you could hear him from blocks away, standing there beating on his chest and looking up to heaven and crying, "why God?"-how any of that could be working any good for anyone, especially that father was just unacceptable. Wars, famine, political strife and riots ... and so on-how do these things work together for anyone's good, particularly those who love God?
First, I understand that one way to partially resolve this by saying the "things" that Paul is speaking of here are those remarks made before verse 28 and indeed, Paul does pose the question, "what shall we say to these things," clearly giving an impression that the things that work together are just those that Paul has mentioned in this chapter and the one before. He goes on to list a number of bad things though that are not "good" in verses 35 to 39. He assures us that those bad things will not separate us from the love of God. He does not say that they work for good. Paul states, "For thy sake we are killed all the day long; we are accounted as sheep for the slaughter." It is not God that is killing us all day long. They are those things which include death, misfortunes of life, evil angels, and evil principalities which kill us all day long. It is not God's will that we must go through these experiences.
If I can just pick and choose the "things" that Paul states in Romans 8, I can agree that these things, themselves, work for our good. I do not believe that Paul is meaning to impress us that bad things are good because they "work for good" in of themselves. I have a different view and that comes from a somewhat different translation of verse 28. Greek is precise and there is a critical word missing there, the word "these" or "those" things. The word "all" is there, standing alone and it is used just as we would such as "All stood up for the last song." Some noun is inferred after "all" such as "the people" or "the congregation." Critical to translating this verse is to translate "all" and it is "panta" and comes from a root "pas" and when used as a noun in a sentence, it is given endings according to who or what is being considered. Here are the twenty-four endings:
| Singular | masc. | fem. | neut. |
| Nominative | pas | pasa | pan |
| Genitive | pantos | pases | pantos |
| Dative | panti | pase | panti |
| Accusative | panta | pasan | pan |
| Plural | masc. | fem. | neut. |
| Nominative | pantes | pasai | panta |
| Genitive | panton | pason | panton |
| Dative | pasi | pasais | pasi |
| Accusative | pantas | pasas | panta |
I have placed in bold three cases where panta is used. There are three possible ways to translate this by using these forms and we are looking for "panta." Is it ...
1. "panta" meaning every (male) thing, singular, used in the accusative voice or as we say in English, as a direct object;
2. all things, plural, "panta" meaning all things used in the nominative voice or as we would say in English a noun used as a subject;
3. Or finally "panta" meaning all things, plural, used in the accusative voice or as in English, a direct object.
There are three choices. King James translators picked number two, the nominative plural or "all things" as a subject, thus, the "all things" are acting. The action taken is to "work with" or "work together" thus we read "all things work together." The prefix "sun" means "with." The verb root is "ergo" meaning to work." Below are the various conjugations of sunergeo, "to work with."
Sunergo - first person singular
Sunergeis - second person singular
Sunergei - third person singular
Sunergomen - first person plural
Sunergete - second person plural
Sunergousi - third person plural
Greek requires subjects and direct objects match in case and number. If "things" are working then we should find a conjugated form of the verb sunergo that matches in case, person and number, meaning a nominative plural form, that is sunergousi. (All things [they] work together). But we do NOT find a plural form in this verse. The form used in the Greek text of verse 28 is sunergei, the third person singular. That forces us to reconsider just what (or WHO) is the subject of this sentence and what function does panta play in the sentence. Since it can't be the subject or nominative case, it has to function as direct object of the verb sunergei. Thus we see that someone or something is working on the "things" in order for the parts of this sentence to match person, case and number. Now you look at this verse and strangely you do not find any other entity to do that work. The subject is missing for some reason. God is there in the first clause but there, God belongs to the statement, "We know that to the ones loving (God)." If "things" is not the subject that is acting then where or what is acting? The "working together" produces "good" towards those who love God and are called according to purpose. I will transliterate the Greek words as close to English letters as possible:
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The answer to this is found in several manuscripts whose discovery postdated 1611 but were dated in the third and fourth centuries in their writing. The third century Chester Beatty manuscript P46 (probably from the early second century), the Codex Alexandrinus (A) (compiled in the fourth century and flowed through the Eastern Greek Empire) and the Codex Vaticanus (B) (third century)-all have Theos (God) written twice, once where we find it in our King James Bible but again following the verb sunergei. The King James translators might have had access to material indirectly from the Alexandrinus through Byzantine Greek (Eastern text) copies but apparently those manuscript copies did not help them. Many manuscripts, even most, were incomplete and these verses of Romans 8 may not have been present. The "Textus Receptus" as reconstructed by Scrivener, the second "Theos" is not there. The Vaticanus was not available to them and the Chester Beatty manuscripts of the Pauline epistles were not found until recent times. Read this way it produces:
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Rewritten with this translation it is: Romans 8:28 And we know that God works together all things for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose.
Think of God as a master chef taking many ingredients, some maybe not so appetizing, but mixing them or "working them together" to make a perfect entree. And all you have to do to get God to working on your problems is to love Him? Correct; and you don't even have to work at it for elsewhere we are told:
1st John 4:19 We love him, because he first loved us.
And of course you must be called according to purpose. Now we are in familiar territory. Paul tells us how that happened in the very next verse.
Romans 8:29 For whom he did foreknow, he also did predestinate to be conformed to the image of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brethren.
We understand that verse to apply to being called according to purpose through His grace by the determinate councils of God before the world began. And if there is yet any question of God's interest in entering into the good and bad things in our lives to preserve us in His mercies, Paul states:
Romans 8:38 For I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, 39 Nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.
I think I have given you sound reason for my translation of this verse. Wringing the pure words out of this requires a mindset that I have but enough scholars that I respect have told me that that translation is correct that I have confidence. I also have confidence in the Greek as we have it. It is such a precise language that I can be sure of the meaning. The added information from the Chester Beatty manuscripts as well as the Uncial manuscripts also helps to clarify the verse.
You might ask what difference it makes whether the things work for good versus God makes good out of all things, including the bad, since the outcome is the same. I think it makes a great difference to the person who is beset by catastrophe in his or her life and then someone tries to comfort them by quoting Romans 8:28. How of earth and in heaven can this sorrow be good for me, the grieving person asks? I agree. God does not will your troubles. That is stoic philosophy. Living by the first paradigm leads to a life of Stoicism and the Christian way is seldom one of joy to a stoic. Living by the second, there is always hope that in spite of the difficulties of the moment, we know that God is already at work to rearrange things so that we will experience joy again in our lives. It also gives us a better view of a loving God. Many stoics see God as the cosmic killjoy who would rather make a Job out of them than a David. God wants us to have joy in our lives. We must learn to follow His will for our lives as best we can discern it in order to find that joy. That is what we know as the joy of our salvation. The Apostle Paul was not a stoic. He did glory in tribulation not because it of itself brought joy but because it brought patience. Patience was what was needed to withstand the tribulation that he had during his lifetime, beaten with rods, five times with 39 stripes, five times shipwrecked, robbed, and perils everywhere he journeyed. Yet he could take comfort in that what followed these perils was always a new opportunity to preach the Gospel of.Iesus Christ. That was his joy. He understood that, even in tribulation, there was hope for God worked in those trials and he could rejoice in that hope.
Now I see bad things happen and if it is affecting someone who loves God, I can in faith say, "what happened was very bad and maybe unfair and even unjust but God did not cause it and does not expect you to think that what happened was good because of what Romans 8:28 states. It was bad. God does not show Himself to the point of abruptly changing natural forces and such, but God will enter into your life through this terrible thing that has happened and He will work HIS GOOD in your life in ways that you may or may not see right away, but there will be some changes in your life, including some good things that will happen to you as result of God's love for you, from which you can not be separated. He did not choose to enter in to stop what happened to you. I don't know why. We know that God has done so at times in the past from reading the Bible. We also know that God did not relieve Paul of the "thorn in his side." The answer has to do with the all-knowing and sovereign nature of God that we cannot even come close to understanding. But He WILL enter in to this and work good in ways that you cannot imagine right now. I think you will in time. There will be a difference in your life that you will recognize but not know the source other than it is in God's Word that He does work all things together for His good that is directed towards you." You may have already come to a point of peace with the tragedy that you experienced. You will know that it is not that you have become callused and stoic to such problems. You will know that God has brought other joy into your heart to ease the sorrow.
If for no other reason, I am a lover of prophecy because I can see how God has made lemonade out of lemons so often in history and will continue to do so in order that His Word stand in spite of man's disobedience. He will help us the same way.
Finally it is important that we understand this for Psalm 37:5 tells us to commit our way to God, trust in Him and He shall bring it to pass. The wording of that verse "bring it to pass" can be translated "He worketh." And its meaning is even more profound in that the verbiage indicates that God is already working before we have committed. Deuteronomy 33:27 calls Him the eternal God, better translated as the "God of the forefront."
The eternal God is thy refuge, and underneath are the everlasting arms: and he shall thrust out the enemy from be-fore thee; and shall say, Destroy them.
God is out in front of you knowing ahead of time what the, obstacles are and what you will need and He is working already before you get there. The Everlasting Arms are underneath to catch you when you fall. You' may think that there are enemies enough in your path but what this states is that God is removing some really bad guys from your path. He will not tempt you beyond your ability to withstand [I Corinthians 10:13]. That is exactly what Paul is stating in Romans 8:28. God's faith in us is that strong. How do we commit to Him? Begin with prayer. That is always a good place to start.
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