Here is the Bible’s description of the unbreakable rope that binds us to God:

Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? As it is written:

“For Your sake we are killed all day long;

We are accounted as sheep for the slaughter.”

Yet in all these things we are more than conquerors through Him who loved us. For I am persuaded that neither death nor life, nor angels nor principalities nor powers, nor things present nor things to come, nor height nor depth, nor any other created thing, shall be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.

—ROMANS 8:35–39

In these verses the apostle gives us, if you will, a sales demonstration of God’s love. It’s a bit like an old commercial for superglue in which a car was suspended in midair, held to the cable by nothing but a dab or two of that incredible adhesive. The test was intended to convince people that this glue would do any job needed. If it could hold that car, surely it would patch up your broken vase.

Twice Paul emphatically asserts that nothing can separate us from the love of God found in Christ Jesus (vv. 35, 39). Surely few would disagree that this is the greatest message of the Bible—that nothing in the entire universe can stop God from loving us. It simply cannot and will not happen.

Please notice that Paul doesn’t say we must hang on to God’s love; he says that God’s love hangs on to us. Think again of the climber, bound by a powerful line to his fellows and the mountain. His hands are free to work with tools, to interact with the surface, to get his canteen. The rope is wrapped around him, and it’s not going to break. He can slip, he can fall, or he can even faint, and the rope will bear him up.

God’s love doesn’t depend on how well we love Him back. It doesn’t depend upon whether or not we let go. We don’t earn it, deserve it, or maintain it. Yet His love is wrapped around us, reinforced by His promises. It holds us perfectly and permanently. We may slip and fall, but we are not lost. As Paul wrote to Timothy, “If we are faithless, He remains faithful; He cannot deny Himself” (2 Timothy 2:13). Whatever happens, the rope holds fast. Nothing can separate us from His love.

The apostle Paul, writing from the inspired insight of the Holy Spirit, knows us pretty well. He understands that we struggle with this concept of the durability of God’s love. Why? One reason is that what we know of love we learn from other people. People stop “loving” one another for just about every selfish or faulty reason imaginable. Marriage vows are signed with vanishing ink. Friends fall out. Even parents and children become irreconcilable. Most human love is conditional and limited. Fail to meet the conditions, and the “love” is withdrawn.