<p>8:37&nbsp;<i>No</i>- Paul seems again to be interpreting his readers&rsquo; response. &lsquo;Surely it can&rsquo;t be right that if we are in Christ, then we will suffer so much? Aren&rsquo;t all these terrible tribulations the sign that we are rejected by God rather than accepted by Him?&rsquo;. And Paul answers that &ldquo;No&rdquo;- in fact the way that we lose in this life is a sign that we have won, and more than won- we have become &ldquo;more than conquerors&rdquo;. Truly &ldquo;I feel like I win when I lose&rdquo; can become our credo in spiritual life.</p><p><i>In all these things</i>- Every time they happen to us, they are the proof that we have therefore already won, in the very thing wherein it seems we have &lsquo;lost&rsquo;. The sense here is very much what we meet in the sermon on the mount- that we are to rejoice when we are persecuted, attacked and abused, because in that moment our reward is very great in Heaven.</p><p><i>We are more than conquerors</i>- See on Rom. 8:34 &ldquo;for us&rdquo;. Again the word&nbsp;<i>huper&nbsp;</i>is used; there is the idea of being over and above conquerors. There is something superlative about the great salvation which there is in Christ. We don&rsquo;t just scrape in to God&rsquo;s Kingdom and sit there in humble gratitude for eternity thinking how blessed / lucky we were. Not at all. We are in Christ, and all that is true of Him is now and shall eternally be true of us. We are crowned as conquerors- and &ldquo;more than <i>huper</i> conquerors&rdquo;. There&rsquo;s something &lsquo;hyper&rsquo; about the nature and quality of our salvation. It is all so hyper abundantly above all we ask or think. And it begins now, and in this sense we have some sense, at least a gasp from a great distance, of the &lsquo;hyper&rsquo; nature of it all. Paul surely has in mind how the Lord had comforted His people that &ldquo;I have overcome s.w. &lsquo;conquer&rsquo; the world&rdquo; (Jn. 16:33). We are counted not only as overcomers just as Jesus was; but hyper-conquerors, hyper-overcomers. John alludes to this passage in his Gospel record when he comments in his letters that&nbsp;<i>we&nbsp;</i>have overcome the world because of our belief into Jesus (1 Jn. 2:13,14; 4:4; 5:4,5). Clearly John like Paul perceived the believer into Christ involving baptism into Him as having the same status as Christ; if He has overcome, so have we. There is also a legal connotation to the word translated &ldquo;conquerors&rdquo;. The same word has been used in Rom. 3:4 to describe how God &lsquo;overcomes&rsquo; when He is put in the dock and judged by human disbeliefs in His declared plan of salvation. Paul is now drawing his treatise to a conclusion. He began with us as sinners in the dock, accused by our own sins. He has argued that we have been declared right because we are in Christ; not simply &lsquo;let off&rsquo;, but declared right. We have won the case; the whole thing has been turned around. We the condemned are now the justified, we leave the courtroom as conquerors, as having legally overcome when we were judged; all, of course, because we are in Christ. We are right now more than conquerors through Christ (Rom. 8:37); and yet to he who overcomes s.w. conquers the Kingdom shall be given (Rev. 3:21). This doesn&rsquo;t mean we can sit back and do nothing. And so Paul goes on to exhort us not to be overcome s.w. conquered of evil, but to overcome evil with good (Rom. 13:21). &ldquo;What shall we then say to these things? If God be for us, who (or what)<i>&nbsp;can</i>&nbsp;be against us?&quot;. Paul caught the gloriously positive spirit of all this, and reflected it in his fondness for words with the&nbsp;<i>hyper-</i>&nbsp;prefix (Rom. 8:37; 1 Cor. 10:13; 2 Cor. 7:4; Phil. 2:9; 4:7; 1 Thess. 3:10; 4:6; 5:13; 2 Thess. 1:3). God is not passively waiting for us to act, indifferently offering us the possible futures of salvation or condemnation according to our deeds. He earnestly desires our salvation, He wills and wishes us into the upward spiral of relationship with Him; He has given us spiritual potential and strength.</p><p><i>Through Him that loved us</i>- The love of Christ is often specifically related to His death for us on the cross. We can only become &ldquo;in Him&rdquo; because He was so fully our representative, including in death itself. All this wonderful schema of salvation and justification of sinners, counting them as if they are Christ, could only come true because of His death. This was and is the central point of all things; it is not simply so that Christ as a person is the central means by which all was made possible, but more specifically it was His love unto death which was and is that central point.</p>