Above you can find a 6-minute AI-generated podcast based on my essay about Romans 8, faith, and assurance for the early Christians.
In sum … Paul’s thought is elegantly captured by N.T. Wright: “Those who follow their Messiah into the valley of the shadow of death will find that they need fear no evil. Though they sometimes seem sheep for the slaughter, yet they may trust the Shepherd, whose love will follow them all the days of their life.”
We need to appreciate how Paul’s words in Romans 8 would be a consoling message for the Gentile-majority house churches in Rome, meeting in tenements and shops, some of whom had associations with Jewish communities and may have continued to observe some Jewish rites and customs. These Gentile Christ-believers consisted mostly of slaves and freedman, laborers and artisans, living on or beneath the poverty line, where death filled the streets, poverty was only one illness away, a dense urban life that was cut-throat, and full of rivalries. These believers very probably faced opposition on several fronts, perhaps chastised by family for neglecting the household lares, ejected from professional guilds for failing to honor the emperor, neighbors gossiping that they had drifted into Jewish ways, or had been ostracized by former Jewish friends for association with a rogue messianic cult.
