In order to understand and feel the full force of this triumphant saying of the Apostle, we must observe that it is a negative answer to the preceding questions, ’Who shall separate us from the love of Christ?  Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword?’ A heterogeneous mass the Apostle here brigades together as an antagonistic army.  They are alike in nothing except that they are all evils.  There is no attempt at an exhaustive enumeration, or at classification.  He clashes down, as it were, a miscellaneous mass of evil things, and then triumphs over them, and all the genus to which they belong, as being utterly impotent to drag men away from Jesus Christ.  To ask the question is to answer it, but the form of the answer is worth notice.  Instead of directly replying, ’No! no such powerless things as these can separate us from the love of Christ,’ he says, ’No!  In all these things, whilst weltering amongst them, whilst ringed round about by them, as by encircling enemies, “we are more than conquerors."’ Thereby, he suggests that there is something needing to be done by us, in order that the foes may not exercise their natural effect.  And so, taking the words of my text in connection with that to which they are an answer, we have three things—­the impotent enemies of love; the abundant victory of love; ‘We are more than conquerors’; and the love that makes us victorious.  Let us look then at these three things briefly.

I. First of all, the impotent enemies of love.

There is contempt in the careless massing together of the foes which the Apostle enumerates.  He begins with the widest word that covers everything—­’affliction.’  Then he specifies various forms of it—­’distress,’ straitening, as the word might be rendered, then he comes to evils inflicted for Christ’s sake by hostile men—­’persecution,’ then he names purely physical evils, ‘hunger’ and ‘nakedness,’ then he harks back again to man’s antagonism, ‘peril,’ and ‘sword.’  And thus carelessly, and without an effort at logical order, he throws together, as specimens of their class, these salient points, as it were, and crests of the great sea, whose billows threaten to roll over us; and he laughs at them all, as impotent and nought, when compared with the love of Christ, which shields us from them all.

Now it must be noticed that here, in his triumphant question, the Apostle means not our love to Christ but His to us; and not even our sense of that love, but the fact itself.  And his question is just this:—­Is there any evil in the world that can make Christ stop loving a man that cleaves to Him?  And, as I said, to ask the question is to answer it.  The two things belong to two different regions.  They have nothing in common.  The one moves amongst the low levels of earth; the other dwells up amidst the abysses of eternity, and to suppose that anything that assails and afflicts us here has any effect in making that great heart cease to love us is to fancy that the mists can quench the sunlight, is to suppose that that which lies down low in the earth can rise to poison and to darken the heavens.