Romans 8:35-37

“ Who shall separate us from the love of Christ?shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? As it is written, For Thy sake we are killed all the day long; we are accounted as sheep for the slaughter. But in all these things we are more than conquerors through Him that loved us. ”

The pronoun τίς, who, refers properly to persons; here it is applied to all the sufferings about to be enumerated, as if Paul saw in each of them an enemy bearing a grudge at the bond uniting him to Christ.

The love of Christ, from which nothing will separate him, is not the love which we have to Him; for we are not separated from our own personal feeling. It is therefore the love which He has to us; and this is confirmed by the close of Romans 8:37: “through Him that loved us.” We might, with Calv., Thol., Rück., understand; nothing will separate us from the feeling we have of the love of Jesus to us. But is not Paul rather representing this love itself as a force which takes hold of and possesses us? Comp. 2 Corinthians 5:14: “The love of Christ constraineth us (holds us pressed).” Paul is thinking of the profound action which this love exercises through the Holy Spirit at once on our heart and will. Such is the mysterious power from the operation of which nothing will be able to withdraw us. Θλίψις, tribulation: overwhelming external circumstances; στενοχωρια, anguish, literally, compression of heart, the inward effect produced by tribulation; διωγμός, legal persecution. To understand the words: famine, nakedness, peril, it is enough to refer to the sketch of St. Paul's life, given in 2 Corinthians 11:23 et seq. The sword: the symbol of capital punishment. When Paul writes this word, he designates, as Bengel observes, his own future mode of death.