This is part four of Read It Again, a series on verses we get wrong and the reading habits that would have caught the mistake. Today, the verse on the sympathy card, and the definition Paul gives one sentence later.

You have stood in the line at the funeral home. The carpet is thick, the room smells of lilies, and the widow is shaking hands she will not remember. Somebody ahead of you leans in and says it. All things work together for good.

It is meant as kindness. But watch her face when she hears it. She is being told, on the worst day of her life, that this is good, and she has no idea what to do with the word.

Paul would not have used it that way. He told us what he meant by good, and he did it in the very next verse.

The Verse on the Sympathy Card

“And we know that all things work together for good to those who love God, to those who are the called according to His purpose.”

Romans 8:28 NKJV

The common reading fills in the word “good” with whatever we would pick. The job will come through. The scan will come back clean. The prodigal will be home by Christmas. Things will turn out in the end.

Sometimes they do turn out. And sometimes the believer prays, trusts, and buries her husband anyway. If Romans 8:28 is a promise of pleasant outcomes, it fails at the first graveside, and a great many Christians have privately concluded that it did.

What Paul Calls Good

Paul does not leave the word undefined. Read one more sentence.

“For whom He foreknew, He also predestined to be conformed to the image of His Son, that He might be the firstborn among many brethren.”

Romans 8:29 NKJV

There is another “for,” and it does what that word always does. It explains. The good toward which all things work is that God’s people are conformed to the image of His Son. Every circumstance in the believer’s life is being used by God to make that person like Jesus.

The rest of the chapter confirms it. Paul has been writing about “the sufferings of this present time” (verse 18), about a creation that groans, and about believers who groan with it. A few verses later he lists what the Roman Christians could expect. Tribulation, distress, persecution, famine, nakedness, peril, sword. He never says these things will be taken away. He says that “in all these things we are more than conquerors through Him who loved us” (Romans 8:37 NKJV). In them. The promise is that nothing on that list will be wasted, and nothing on it can separate us from the love of God.

Notice too whom the promise belongs to. It is for “those who love God,” the ones “called according to His purpose.” Paul is describing what God does with the lives of His own people.

Paul defines the good of Romans 8:28 in verse 29. All things are working to make God’s people like His Son.

The Habit

Let the author define his own terms.

Big words arrive in our heads already full. Good, life, rest, blessed, peace, saved. We have used them all our lives, so when we meet one in Scripture we pour in our own meaning without noticing. The habit is to stop at a big word and ask whether the writer has told us what he means. Very often he has, within a verse or two.

Jesus does it in His prayer in John 17. “And this is eternal life, that they may know You, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom You have sent” (John 17:3 NKJV). Many of us think of eternal life as length of days. Jesus defines it as knowing God. The writer of Hebrews does it with faith in Hebrews 11:1, and James does it with “pure and undefiled religion” in James 1:27. Each time, the author’s meaning is close by for anyone who keeps reading.

When your concordance and the author’s own sentence disagree about a word, go with the sentence. He knows what he meant.

The Words Under the Verse

Word	Original	Strong’s	Meaning
synergeo	συνεργέω	G4903	To work together, to cooperate. The verb behind “work together” in verse 28
agathos	ἀγαθός	G18	Good. Defined by verse 29 as likeness to Christ
symmorphos	σύμμορφος	G4832	Conformed, sharing the same form. What God is making of His people
prothesis	πρόθεσις	G4286	Purpose, a plan set out beforehand. The purpose according to which believers are called

For the One Still Waiting on the Good

Joseph spent about thirteen years as a slave and a prisoner in Egypt before he saw what any of it was for. When he finally said it to his brothers, he did not pretend the pit had been pleasant. “But as for you, you meant evil against me; but God meant it for good” (Genesis 50:20 NKJV). The evil was evil. God was at work in it the whole time, and Joseph came out of that prison a man who could feed nations and forgive the brothers who sold him.

I can’t tell you why your loss came. Romans 8 does not tell you either. What it tells you is that your Father has not let go of the thing, and that He is doing with it what He does with everything that touches His children. He is making you like His Son, who was Himself a man of sorrows. That work is slower than we want, and it will hurt. It is also the one good that death cannot take from you, and Paul ends the chapter by saying so.

Discussion Questions

1. Read Romans 8:18-39 in one sitting. What kinds of circumstances does Paul assume his readers are facing?
2. How does verse 29 define the “good” of verse 28? How is that different from the way the verse is usually used?
3. A believer’s prayer for healing was not answered the way she asked. Explain Romans 8:28 to her using only Romans 8.
4. Think of a hard stretch of your own life. Can you see any way it made you more like Christ?
5. Pick one big word, such as peace, blessed, or life, and find a place where a biblical writer defines it for you.

Going Deeper

Read the Joseph story, Genesis 37 and 39 through 50, and note every place the text says Jehovah was with Joseph. Then read 2 Corinthians 4:16-18 and James 1:2-4 for two more writers on what trouble produces. For the mechanics of a careful word study, see One Word Can Carry a Hundred Years in the Feed Yourself series.