Neither Height Nor Depth

Neither Height Nor Depth

Corrie ten Boom described the worst moment of her time in Ravensbrück: watching her sister Betsie die, in the cold, without adequate care. She wrote: 'I was certain that night that God had abandoned us.' But she also described what followed: 'I discovered later that the feeling of abandonment was not the reality of abandonment. His love had been present in that room in ways I was too grief-stricken to see. Nothing had separated us. Not even that night.' She spent decades proclaiming Romans 8:38-39. Not as a theological statement but as a hard-won testimony: 'I tested it. It held.'

Paul's catalog in Romans 8:38-39 is comprehensive: death and life, angels and demons, present and future, any powers, height and depth, anything else in all creation. The list exhausts every conceivable category of opposition. The conclusion is 'I am convinced' — the Greek peithō means fully persuaded, certain beyond reasonable doubt. Paul's conviction is not theoretical; it is the product of extensive testing. He has experienced most of what he lists. And through all of it, the love of God in Christ Jesus has held. Your worst fear — the thing that you most dread might finally separate you from God — is on this list, and it is covered. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing separates.