<p>8:34&nbsp;<i>Who is he that condemns?</i>- There are many links between Romans and John's Gospel; when Paul asks where is anyone to condemn us (Rom. 8:34), we are surely intended to make the connection&nbsp; to Jn. 8:10, where the Lord asks the condemned woman the very same question. It's as if she, there, alone with the Lord, face down, is the dead ringer of every one of us. The legal allusion is definitely to the judge, the one who will pass sentence. The question is &ldquo;Who is?&rdquo; rather than &ldquo;Where is?&rdquo;. It&rsquo;s not that God, the judge of all, abdicates His judgment throne and ceases to tell right from wrong. There is an integrity in His judgment. The answer of course is that it is&nbsp;<i>God</i>&nbsp;who is the One who passes sentence. The rest of the verse goes on to speak of the Lord Jesus as our intercessor at His right hand. The point is, that God the righteous judge is going to take notice of the pleadings of His Son, whom He gave to die for our forgiveness and redemption. The idea of condemning must be seen in the context of Rom. 8:3, where we have just read that it is sin which is condemned by God, and He has already condemned it, in the crucified flesh of the Lord Jesus. &ldquo;Sin&rdquo; is condemned; we are not condemned. The point clearly is that it is our status &ldquo;in Christ&rdquo; and our disassociation from &ldquo;sin&rdquo;, as strongly as Paul disassociated himself from &ldquo;sin&rdquo; in Rom. 7:15-23, which is the means by which we are saved, and not only saved but declared right.</p><p><i><br />It is Christ Jesus that died, yes rather, that was raised from the dead</i>- This is said in the context of the comment that it is God who judges. It&rsquo;s not that the death and resurrection of a person of itself can change the mind of God or lead Him to not condemn us, in some mystical way. We are saved by the Lord&rsquo;s death and resurrection in that we can identify with it by baptism into His death and resurrection, and be counted as Christ, the Son of God. It is this which affects how God judges us. There seems to be a link made between the Lord&rsquo;s death and the judgment in Rom. 8:34: &ldquo;Who is he that judgeth / condemneth? It is Christ that died&hellip;&quot;, as if&nbsp;<i>He</i>&nbsp;and His death are the ultimate judgment. The Old Testament idea of judgment was that in it, the Lord speaks, roars and cries, and there is an earthquake and eclipse of the sun (Joel 3:16; Am. 1:2; Jer. 25:30; Ps. 46:7; Rev. 10:3). Yet all these things are associated with the Lord&rsquo;s death.</p><p><i>Who is moreover at the right hand of God</i>- Note the double use of the idea of &ldquo;moreover&rdquo;. Paul is building up his logic towards the final crescendo- that we are in fact saved from condemnation in Christ. This is classic Paul. The death of God&rsquo;s Son for us would be enough to persuade God the Judge of all. But further, He rose again; and we who are in Him are counted likewise to have died and risen again, as Paul has laboured in Romans 6. So, for sure we are saved. But yet further, God&rsquo;s risen Son is now at His right hand, pleading for us I suggest that the sequence here of &ldquo;Died, rose again, alive at God&rsquo;s right hand interceding for us&rdquo; is somehow repeated in Rom. 14:9: &ldquo;Christ both died and rose and revived&rdquo;. In this case the &ldquo;revived&rdquo; would be a reference to the fact that He not only resurrected but is alive and active for us in mediation. In this sense, perhaps, &ldquo;we are saved by His life&rdquo; (Rom. 5:10). Being at the right hand was the position of favour, of honour. The point in this context is that if God so deeply respects His Son- and the theme of the Father&rsquo;s genuine respect of His Son is a beautiful theme in Scripture- then surely He will be very open to the Son&rsquo;s work for us. The suggestion has been made that the Greek for &ldquo;right hand&rdquo; is from the root word &ldquo;to receive&rdquo;, and in this verse the idea that Christ stands to receive is balanced with the comment that from that position He makes intercession or request for us His people. He is in the supreme place to receive- and He asks from there for us to be counted as in Him.</p><p><i>Who also makes intercession for us-</i> See on Rom. 8:27. We should not think that whenever we sin, we have an intercessor in Heaven who can gain forgiveness for us and set us back right with God. The whole argument in Romans is that we are &ldquo;in Christ&rdquo; by status and are counted as Him; all that is true of Him becomes true for us. It is not that we are in Christ one moment and then out of Him the next, to be brought back into our &ldquo;in Christ&rdquo; status by His intercession. For if this were the case, the implication would be that we were perfect when we were &lsquo;being good&rsquo;; and if one happened to die at a point of weakness, then we would be eternally damned. God&rsquo;s way is more profound. We are counted permanently as &ldquo;in Christ&rdquo; by status, and in this sense we have already been redeemed, and are simply awaiting the physical articulation of that redemption at the Lord&rsquo;s return. The imagery of the Lord Jesus as a priest offering Heavenly sacrifices is metaphor, and as such is limited. The position between Him today, His work for us, and the work of the Mosaic priests is not completely analogous. We do not need a Levitical priesthood because the Lord Jesus has replaced that, but this is not to say that He is exactly for us what the Levitical priests were for sinful Israel. For what, then, does the Lord Jesus make intercession? I suggested under Rom. 8:27 that the intercession involves a transference of our mind, our spirit, to that of the Lord Jesus as He sits before God. In this sense the intercession of the Lord Jesus for us personally has an eternal quality to it (Heb. 7:25) in that our spirit, the essence of who we are, continues in the mind of the Lord Jesus even after we die; just as the memory or spirit of those we love lives on within us after their falling asleep. We are eternally positioned before God, thanks to the intercession of the Lord Jesus. However, it cannot be denied that the Greek for &ldquo;intercession&rdquo; does indeed carry the idea of obtaining something. It is used here in the very context of stating that the intercession is made at the &ldquo;right hand&rdquo; of God, the place of receiving (see commentary above). Paul uses a related word to that translated &ldquo;intercession&rdquo; in saying at another judgment seat that he has &ldquo;obtained help from God&rdquo; (Acts 26:22). Perhaps he said that fully aware that he in fact had a Heavenly intercessor, a true counsel for the defence. The same word for &ldquo;obtain&rdquo; which is part of that translated &ldquo;intercessor&rdquo; occurs in the context of our obtaining salvation and resurrection to life (2 Tim. 2:10; Heb. 11:35). It is this which has been interceded for and obtained for us by the Lord Jesus, seated as He is at the right hand, the place of receiving, of the Judge of all. In this sense His intercession has that eternal quality to it which we earlier observed (Heb. 7:25). And yet even this idea, that the intercession is for our salvation, still seems to be a too simplistic summary of what Paul really has in mind here. The Lord&rsquo;s intercession for Stephen in his time of dying was surely not simply for Stephen&rsquo;s salvation. Rather it seems to involve a representation of our spirit, our deepest essence of thought, feeling, personality and life situation, before the Father; intercession for our salvation; and also for other things which are on the Lord&rsquo;s agenda for us, and which we in this life may always be ignorant of.</p><p>The pregnant phrase&nbsp;<i>huper hemon</i>&nbsp;may mean simply &ldquo;for us&rdquo;, but&nbsp;<i>huper</i>&nbsp;could suggest the idea of over and above, beyond us, more than us. In this case, there would be connection with the thought recently expressed by Paul that although we know not how to pray for as we ought, the Lord Jesus as &ldquo;the Lord the Spirit&rdquo; makes intercession for us, beyond what we can verbalize. And of course the idea would freely connect with Eph. 3:20, where Paul exalts that the Lord Jesus can do &ldquo;exceeding Gk.&nbsp;<i>huper</i> abundantly above Gk.&nbsp;<i>huper</i>&nbsp;again- the sense of &lsquo;beyond&rsquo; is very strong here in the Greek all we ask or think, through the power that works in us&rdquo;.&nbsp; The wonder of it all will literally take us eternity to appreciate. Our innermost desire is for salvation, to serve God, to be as the Lord Jesus, to achieve His glory, both in our own characters and in all of creation. This, yet again, is the significance of Rom. 7:15-23, that despite our failings and weakness, these are indeed our core desires. And it is this spirit of ours which is transferred to the Lord Jesus and understood by the Father and Judge of all. And in response to those desires, even now, there is a power working within us to do and be for us, to work in and for us, things beyond our wildest dreams and spiritual fantasies.</p><p>Rom. 8:34,35 suggest that the love of Christ, from which we cannot be separated, is manifested to us through His intercessions for us. He doesn't offer our prayers to God all the time; He is our intercessor in the sense that He is always there as our representative, and on this basis we have acceptability with God, as we are in Him. This is proof enough that intercession is not equal to merely translating our prayers into a language God understands. We offer our prayers ourselves to God, as men have ever done. We are, in this sense, our own priesthood. We offer ourselves to God (Rom. 12:1; 1 Pet. 2:5). He Himself made only one offering of Himself; He does not offer Himself again. If He were on earth, He would not be a priest. It is the fact we are in Him that makes our offerings acceptable. Many passages concerning mediation refer to the Lord's mediation of the new covenant through the atonement God achieved through Him. None of them associate His mediation with the offering of our prayers to God. Indeed, several passages suggest that the actual fact of the exalted Lord now being in heavenly places, and we being in Him, is in fact the intercession necessary to bring about our redemption- rather than His translating, as it were, of our actual words (Rom. 7:25; 8:34; 1 Jn. 2:1). The references to intercession likewise never suggest that Christ intercedes in the sense of offering our prayers to God. &quot;Intercession&quot; can be read as another way of describing prayer; this is how the term is invariably used (Jer. 7:16; 27:18; Rom. 11:2; 1 Tim. 2:1). Thus when Jeremiah is told not to intercede for Israel, this meant he was not to pray for them; it does not imply that he was acting as a priest to offer Israel's prayers to God. Nowhere in the Bible is the idea floated that a man can offer another man's prayers to God and thereby make them acceptable. The Greek for &quot;intercession&quot; essentially means to meet a person; prayer / intercession is a meeting with God. There is evidently nothing morally impossible about a man having direct contact with God in prayer without any priest or 'mediator'; the Old Testament abounds with such examples. The fact we are called upon to make intercession for others is surely conclusive proof that &quot;intercession&quot; means prayer, not relaying the words of another to God (1 Tim. 2:1). This meaning of intercession needs to be borne in mind when we consider its occurrences in Rom. 8. There we are taught that we know not what to pray for as we ought; the Lord Jesus makes intercession for us- i.e. He prays for us- not with words, i.e. not transferring our human words into God's language, not shuttling to and from between us and God as it were, but with His own groanings of the spirit. We don't know how to pray, so Christ prays (intercedes, in the language of Rom. 8) for us.</p>