All the Day Long

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Just as it is written and forever remains written, “FOR YOUR SAKE WE ARE PUT TO DEATH ALL DAY LONG; WE ARE REGARDED AS SHEEP FOR THE SLAUGHTER. Paul has movingly written that nothing which can happen to us could separate us from Christ's love for us. If this is the meaning of Psalm 44:22 and the function that it serves within its original context in the psalm, what does it mean and how does it function within the very different rhetorical context in which Paul cites it in Romans 8:36?

One old man, the local sexton and gravedigger, is described as a 'complete human being', and that I had never forgotten. The ἕνεκα σοῦ of the LXX, as we have already observed above, is certainly capable of being read in a positive sense, to speak of suffering and death willingly embraced by the community as an imitation of (and participation in) the redemptive sufferings of Christ. v. 30) and assuring them that “neither death, nor life … 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). Struggles in this life are not a sign that God has abandoned us; they are hardships He works to see us through (Hebrews 12:3–11). It is possible too, as Tyler Stewart suggests, that Paul could have anticipated that some at least among his intended readers in Rome might have been aware of the urgent summons with which Psalm 44 concludes (“Rouse yourself!The book is written in the first person, and details the life of a woman, from childhood to old age; an onlooker at life so much, but heart-wrenchingly human.

Why then does Paul choose this moment, right in the middle of the section’s climactic final paragraph, to break the flow of his rhetoric with a citation from the psalms?See also the similar conclusions drawn in Tyler Stewart, “The Cry of Victory: A Cruciform Reading of Psalm 44:22 in Romans 8:36,” JSPL 3 (2013): 44–45, Jewett, Romans: A Commentary, 548, Michael J.