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Japanese Romans 8:28 says that for people who love God, everything that happens to them, the painful things included, is made to serve their good. The next verse says what that good is: to be “conformed to the image of his Son.” The verse does not call suffering good, and Paul wrote it in a chapter about suffering.
Romans 8:28 in the ESV and the King James Version
The English Standard Version reads: “And we know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose.”
The wording most people know by heart is the King James Version’s: “And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose.”
Paul wrote the letter to the church in Rome, a congregation he had not yet visited, and he probably wrote it at Corinth in about AD 57, according to Britannica.
Why do Bibles translate it differently?
English Bibles do not agree on who or what does the working in this verse. The New International Version reads “in all things God works for the good of those who love him,” and the New American Standard Bible (1995) “God causes all things to work together for good.” The Revised Standard Version has “in everything God works for good with those who love him.” The ESV and the King James keep “all things” as the subject.
Two things lie behind the difference. The first is Greek grammar. The verb is synergei, “works together,” from the same Greek root as the English word “synergy.” The word for “all things,” panta, is a neuter plural, and a Greek neuter plural has the same form whether it is the subject of a verb or its object. A neuter plural subject also takes a singular verb, as synergei is. So the sentence can mean “all things work together,” with panta as the subject, or “he works all things together,” with an unstated “he” as the subject and panta as the object.
The second is a difference among the manuscripts. Three early copies of Romans, the papyrus known as P46 and the codices Vaticanus and Alexandrinus, “include the word ‘God’ (θεός) explicitly as the subject, even though most manuscripts do not include it,” writes Kenneth Berding, a professor of New Testament at Talbot School of Theology. Berding also reports the view of “the majority of text critics,” the scholars who compare manuscripts to recover the original wording: “the verse did not originally include the word ‘God’ in the text.” On that view the word was added in those three copies. The ESV follows the shorter text and gives the longer one in a footnote: “Some manuscripts God works all things together for good, or God works in all things for the good.” The NIV and NASB make God the subject all the same. Berding says the three manuscripts have led some translators “to fill in the unstated subject of the verb with ‘God,’ since that’s how it appears in those three manuscripts.” The RSV, which also has God as the subject, notes that “Other ancient authorities read in everything he works for good, or everything works for good.”
Berding names a third reading, held by F. F. Bruce, Gordon Fee, Robert Jewett and others: the unstated subject is the Holy Spirit, who is the subject of the verses just before. Read that way, it is the Spirit who “works all things together for good.” Berding prefers this reading, though he writes, “I am not positive which of these three is correct.” He adds that “no substantial theological take-aways emerge” from the choice, “since on any reading, all things work together for good because of the God who makes it so.”
What comes before the verse: suffering and the Spirit’s groaning
Romans 8:28 is often quoted on its own, but it answers what Paul has just written. Ten verses earlier he says, “For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us” (8:18). The whole creation “has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth until now,” and so do believers: “we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies” (8:22–23).
Then Paul admits a weakness. “For we do not know what to pray for as we ought, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words” (8:26). The King James renders the last phrase “with groanings which cannot be uttered.” Only after this, with the Spirit praying for people who cannot find the words, does Paul say “we know” that all things work together for good.
John Chrysostom, in his sermons on Romans, read the verse in that light. He thought Paul raised the whole subject for readers “who were in danger.” When Paul speaks of all things, “he mentions even the things that seem painful,” and whatever comes, “God is able to change all these things into the opposite.”
What is the “good” in Romans 8:28?
Paul answers in the next sentence. “For those whom he foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, in order that he might be the firstborn among many brothers” (8:29). The good Paul names is to become like Christ, and in the end to share his glory: “those whom he justified he also glorified” (8:30).
That is why the verse does not say that bad things are good. The Catechism of the Catholic Church, which quotes Romans 8:28, puts it plainly: “But for all that, evil never becomes a good.” Its example is Joseph, whose brothers sold him into Egypt and to whom he later said, “As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good, to bring it about that many people should be kept alive, as they are today” (Genesis 50:20). The selling stayed a sin. What God made of it was good.
Chrysostom made a related point about the three young men thrown into the furnace at Babylon. Paul “does not say, that them that love God, no grievance approaches, but, that it works together for good,” and in that story God did not prevent their falling into the furnace or put out the fire, “but let it burn on, and made them by this very flame greater objects of wonder.”
Who are “those who love God” and “the called”?
The verse names two descriptions of the same people: those who love God, and those “called according to his purpose.” “Called” is Paul’s ordinary word for Christians. He greets the letter’s first readers as “all those in Rome who are loved by God and called to be saints” (Romans 1:7). The verse is not a general law that everything turns out well for everyone.
Whose purpose is meant, and how the calling works, is where Christians have long differed, because the next verses speak of God foreknowing, predestining and calling. Augustine read “his purpose” as God’s choice of those who would persevere: some love God for a while “and do not continue in that good way unto the end,” so Paul “immediately added, to them who are the called according to His purpose.” John Calvin agreed and pressed further. The clause, he wrote, keeps anyone from thinking that believers, “because they love God, obtain by their own merit the advantage of deriving such fruit from their adversities.”
John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, took “his purpose” to be God’s “gracious design of saving a lost world by the death of his Son,” and those foreknown to be “those who are conformable to the image of his Son.” The Greek Fathers read the phrase another way, as the Orthodox section below explains. These questions belong to the larger debate over Predestinación. On the promise itself, all of these readers agree: it is made to those who love God.
How Catholic, Protestant and Orthodox Christians read the verse
Catholic and Protestant readers both build on Augustine. The Catechism quotes his Enquiridión in its teaching on evil, and Calvin answers his reading of this verse by name. Augustine took “all things” as far as it would go. “To such as love Him, God co-works with all things for good,” he wrote, “so absolutely all things, that even if any of them go astray, and break out of the way, even this itself He makes to avail them for good, so that they return more lowly and more instructed.” Behind this lay his larger conviction that God “would never permit the existence of anything evil among His works, if He were not so omnipotent and good that He can bring good even out of evil.”
La Iglesia Católica
The Catechism sets Romans 8:28 in its teaching on providence and evil. God is “in no way, directly or indirectly, the cause of moral evil,” but he permits it and “knows how to derive good from it.” It then gives the saints’ witness to the verse. Catherine of Siena told “those who are scandalized and rebel against what happens to them” that “everything comes from love, all is ordained for the salvation of man.” Thomas More, shortly before his execution, consoled his daughter with the words “Nothing can come but that that God wills,” and “whatsoever that be, seem it never so bad in sight, it shall indeed be the best.” The Catechism also admits the limit of what anyone can see now: “the ways of his providence are often unknown to us,” and only at the end will we “fully know the ways by which” God has guided his creation.
Calvin, Wesley and Protestant readers
Calvin read the verse as a word about the cross. The troubles of this life, he wrote, are so far from hindering salvation “that, on the contrary, they are helps to it.” God “trains up the faithful by afflictions.” In his paraphrase, Paul meant that “all things which happen to the saints are so overruled by God, that what the world regards as evil, the issue shows to be good.” He granted that Augustine was right that even the sins of the saints can be turned to their good, but held that “this belongs not to this passage, the subject of which is the cross.” In Calvin’s reading, afflictions are “the manner by which they are conformed to the image of Christ.”
Wesley read “all things” in the widest sense: “Ease or pain, poverty or riches, and the ten thousand changes of life,” all of them working “strongly and sweetly for spiritual and eternal good.”
La Iglesia Ortodoxa
Orthodox Christians read Romans with the Greek Fathers, and on this verse Chrysostom stresses two things. The first is God’s power to turn painful things “into that which is helpful to us.” The second is his reading of “purpose,” which for him includes the purpose of the people called: “it is not the calling alone, but the purpose of those called too, that works the salvation. For the calling was not forced upon them, nor compulsory. All then were called, but all did not obey the call.” He was not alone. John Owen, who translated and edited Calvin’s commentary into English, noted that Chrysostom, Origen, Theodoret and Theophylact, among others, took the phrase as “according to their purpose,” the purpose of those who love God, while Ambrose, Augustine and Jerome took it as God’s.
The Orthodox Church in America’s teaching series by Father Thomas Hopko does not discuss this verse, but its teaching on suffering runs along the same lines. A person who suffers, it says, either “humbly accepts them and transforms them into the way of salvation for oneself and others,” or is defeated by them.
Does Romans 8:28 mean everything happens for a reason?
Not in the way the saying is usually meant. The verse speaks about the outcome, what God makes of events for those who love him. It does not say why each event happened, and it gives no one the key to read a particular loss. Christians hold different views of how God’s will relates to the causes of suffering and sin, a question this verse does not settle. None of the readings above makes a death or a betrayal itself good.
What Paul says next: nothing can separate us
The chapter ends by naming the bad things outright. “Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or danger, or sword?” (8:35). The King James has “peril” where the ESV has “danger.” Paul then quotes Psalm 44:22: “For your sake we are being killed all the day long; we are regarded as sheep to be slaughtered” (8:36).
Paul knew such a list from his own life. In another letter he counts his own sufferings: “far more imprisonments, with countless beatings, and often near death” (2 Corinthians 11:23). Five times he was given forty lashes less one, three times he was beaten with rods, once he was stoned, and three times he was shipwrecked (11:24–25). His answer to the list in Romans 8 is that none of it cuts a person off from God: “For I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord” (8:38–39).
A word about quoting Romans 8:28 to someone who is grieving
The verse is often said to people at the worst moment of their lives. Said then, it can sound as though the loss itself is being called good, and Paul does not say that. The “we” of “we know” is Paul and the Christians he was writing to, a hope they shared from inside their own sufferings, and Paul had been beaten and shipwrecked. It is not a verdict on someone else’s grief.
The same letter says, “Rejoice with those who rejoice, weep with those who weep” (Romans 12:15). At the tomb of his friend Lazarus, Jesús lloró (John 11:35), though he was about to raise him. Other passages for that time are gathered in these Versículos bíblicos sobre el duelo.
