Here Paul uses a rhetorical device known as a merism, which involves stating a pair of contrasting words to represent the full range of everything in between. We use a merism when we say, “He knows his subject from A to Z.” When the psalmist declares that God has removed our sins from us “as far as the east is from the west” (Psalm 103:12), he is using a merism to explain that God has removed our sins in totality.

Let’s explore these weighty pairs in greater detail in order to confirm the answer to Paul’s rhetorical question: What can separate us from the love of God?

Not the Crisis of Death or the Calamities of Life

Neither death nor life…

We can imagine no greater natural wall of separation than death. To lose a loved one is to face the hard fact that never again in this life will we encounter this person. Death is so absolute, so uncompromising, that it forces us to mourn and grieve as we endure a terrible emotional adjustment.

I suspect that most Christians have uncertain feelings about their own death. We don’t look forward to separation from our loved ones, and we have some natural apprehension about entering this unknown realm. Death separates us from everything familiar; can we really be sure it won’t also separate us from God? Will He be there to receive us when we are thrust into that unknown void?

Here is where Paul’s supreme confidence gives us great reassurance. He, too, loved many people in this world, and he didn’t want to leave any of them. But, as we have already seen, the executioner’s sword didn’t worry him a bit. Christ, he knew, had conquered death forever, and a tomb stood empty in Jerusalem attesting to the fact. He cried triumphantly, “O Death, where is your sting? O Hades, where is your victory?” (1 Corinthians 15:55). He wrote to Timothy, saying, “Jesus Christ… has abolished death and brought life and immortality to light through the gospel” (2 Timothy 1:10). Because Paul knew these facts to be true, he actually anticipated death (Philippians 1:21–24).

The writer of Hebrews explains how Jesus, through His death, destroyed the devil who held the power of death, and released those who were captive to the fear of death (Hebrews 2:14–15).

Death, then, is not a wall that separates us from God. Dr. James Montgomery Boice points out that it’s much the opposite. Far from tearing us away from God, death ushers us into the full glory of His presence. “The separator becomes the uniter.”4