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8:22 “All of creation groans in labor pains.” Not just Christian believers, but all people and all of creation await redemption. “Thanks to our bodies, God has joined us so closely to the world around us that we can feel the deserti cation of the soil almost as a physical ailment, and the extinction of a species as a painful dis gurement. Let us not leave in our wake a swath of destruction and death which will a ect our own lives and those of future generations.” (Pope Francis, The Joy of the Gospel, 215).
8:29 The concept of predestination is confusing for many: if we are predestined, does that mean that we do not have free will? Paul’s point here is that God’s plan is for our good, and that God has loved us from the beginning. It is not that we have chosen God, but that God has chosen us. This does not change the fact that God has given us free will—God has given us the God-like power to choose. As in many places in the Scriptures (see, for example, Romans 9), the plan of God and human freedom are not resolved philosophically. Rather, they are simply placed side by side as realities with which we live.
8:33 Paul uses imagery from the courts to express God’s amazing love for us. If the judge stands up in our defense, what prosecutor will dare to speak? Nothing on earth or in heaven can separate us from this love, no human being, no angel or host of angels. Do we believe in this astounding love?
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ROMANS 
anguish, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or the sword? 36As it is written:b
“For your sake we are being slain all the day;
we are looked upon as sheep to be slaughtered.”
37No, in all these things we conquer overwhelmingly through him who loved us.c 38For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor present things,* nor future things, nor powers,d 39nor height, nor depth,* nor any other creature will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.
Troubled. Jean-Baptiste Greuze (1725-1 5)
*[8:38] Present things and future things may refer to astrological data. Paul appears to be saying that the gospel liberates believers from dependence on astrologers.
* [8:39] Height, depth may refer to positions in the zodiac, positions of heavenly bodies relative to the horizon. In astrological documents the term for “height” means “exaltation” or the position of greatest in uence exerted by a planet. Since hostile spirits were associated with the planets and stars, Paul includes powers (Rom 8:38) in his list of malevolent forces.
b. [8:36]Ps44:23;1Cor4:9;15:30;2Cor4:11;2Tm3:12. c. [8:37] 1 Jn 5:4.
d. [8:38–39] 1 Cor 3:22; Eph 1:21; 1 Pt 3:22.