Into the Heart of Romans: A Deep Dive into Paul's Greatest Letter

by Tom Wright

‘In everything God works for good with those who love him.’ The verse doesn’t say (in other words) that ‘all things work together for good to those who love God’, which appears to give God’s people a kind of inside privilege of knowing that things will fall out the way they want them to. It means that God is the subject of the main verb: it is God who is ‘working’, rather than the ‘all things’. And it means that God works not just for those who love him – as though they were simply the passive recipients of his ongoing benevolence – but that he works with those who love him.1 He is affirming, in other words, that their present work and struggles, to which Paul has just referred, and which are themselves part of what’s happening through the spirit’s work in them, actively contribute in the present time to God’s overall working out of his purposes. Paul is saying that we – ‘those who love God’, in the sense of those in whose hearts the seemingly inarticulate dialogue of the spirit and the father is going on – are God’s co-workers.