More Than Conquerors
People Loved by God, Redeemed in Christ
Football season is upon us again. This is opening week for college football and the NFL kicks off its 2022 football season the following week. Now if you’re not much of a football fan, then you probably don’t care but many people are. Plus, if you hang with me, you’ll like what I want to share with you. But back to football for a moment.
I’m sure there will be many exciting football games played over the next four to five months. However, some will be blowouts and especially so in college football. For example, last year Alabama beat Mississippi State 49-9 and Michigan defeated Northern Illinois 63-10. Both games were likely, for all intents and purposes, over by the end of the third quarter.
Those examples are what we call lopsided games. However, neither of those games compared to a game back in 1916 when Georgia Tech beat Cumberland College by the score of 222-0. I kid you not, the final score was 222-0. Having scored 63 points in each of the first two quarters, Georgia Tech was up by 126 points at the end of the first half. There should have been a mercy rule enacted then but there wasn’t, allowing Georgia Tech to score another 96 points in the second half.
Such a win might be the best way of helping us understand what Paul is trying to describe when he writes in Romans 8:37-39:
But in all these things we win a sweeping victory through the one who loved us. I’m convinced that nothing can separate us from God’s love in Christ Jesus our Lord: not death or life, not angels or rulers, not present things or future things, not powers or height or depth, or any other thing that is created.1
Most English translations, going back to the Geneva Bible, used the phrase “more than conquerors” in this passage. In the original language, it’s one compound word. There’s the word nikaō which means “victory” but this compound word, hupernikaō, means more than just a victory. As I said, most English translations have rendered this word with the phrase “more than conquerors” but a couple of other English translations have chosen other phrases, such as a “sweeping victory” or “overwhelming victory” (NLT).
The point that Paul is making is that in Christ we have this victory that keeps winning and winning without any quit.2 That’s the reason why Paul is convinced that nothing can separate us from the Love of God in Christ.
Pastorally speaking, this is a passage of scripture worth memorizing and repeating so often that it burrows deep within our psyche. As a minister, I have encountered more than a few believers who still doubt God’s love and the assurance of their salvation because of the struggles, either in the past or more recent, they have. Some people I have met even struggle to believe God loves them. Unfortunately, Christian preaching has sometimes portrayed God as a maniacal deity bent on anger and contempt for sinners. The most famous example of such preaching was Jonathan Edward’s sermon Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.3
This is unfortunate, especially because such theology portrays a false view of the God who has revealed himself in Jesus Christ. Earlier in Romans, Paul wrote that “God shows his love for us, because while we were still sinners Christ died for us” (Rom 5:8). God did not start loving us once we received Christ, rather God loved us so much, even as sinners, that he sent his Son to redeem us. It is in the crucifixion of Jesus Christ that we encounter “the divine axis of love.”4 The good news is that Jesus Christ was not only crucified as an expression of God’s love for us but that God raised Jesus Christ and exalted him so that in Christ we would be more than conquerors.
More than conquerors is who we are in Jesus Christ because of God’s love. Whatever our past sins and struggles may be or whatever trials we may face this week, we need not fear. For God loves us and that’s not changing, not today, not tomorrow… never.
Unless otherwise noted, all scripture quotations are taken from the Common English Bible, copyright 2011. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
C.E.B. Cranfield, Romans: A Shorter Commentary, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1985, 225-226, notes that this word is a militant expression of which the present tense implies that the redemptive work of God bringing about the victory of the believers as something that happens always rather than only occasionally.
Jonathan Edwards, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” in Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God and Other Puritan Sermons, Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2005. The most famous quote from this sermon read, “The God that holds you over the pit of Hell, much as one holds a spider, or some loathsome insect, over the Fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked; his wrath towards you burns like fire; he looks upon you as worthy of nothing else, but to be cast into the fire; he is of purer eyes than to bear to have you in his sight; you are ten thousand times so abominable in his eyes as the most hateful venomous serpent is in ours” (p. 178).
Brian Zahnd, Sinners in the Hands of a Loving God: The Scandalous Truth of the Good News, Colorado Springs: Waterbrook, 2017, 80.