Truth is truth. You can put a verse label on it or you can put it in Paul’s mouth or King Nebuchadnezzar’s mouth and its still true. It’s just true that if God sets his favor on someone, it does make that person undefeatable. Do you deny, for example, that if God wants to set Israel free from Egypt, that the Pharaoh has any chance at all of stopping him? Or do you think King Nebuchadnezzar is wrong to say that God does whatever he wants in heaven and earth, and no one can stop him or even challenge what he is doing?
Paul is saying in Romans 8:31 what Hebrew Christians already knew from these and many other stories of God setting his favor on nations and individuals and overcoming their enemies for them against seemingly impossible odds. He is just applying that general truth to the specific instance of individual salvation. The Sovereignty of God is taught in one form or another on every page of Scripture.
And it occurs in our lives too, in so many different ways. The most important of these is that God will not fail to bring his sheep home to Heaven, no matter what obstacles they may face in this life, whether material or spiritual. That is the message of Paul in Romans 8:31.
But God also rules over the affairs of humankind. He raises up kings and takes them down. He sets his favor on a young sheepherder named David, and though David must quit his home and hide from King Saul in the caves like a common criminal for years, God does not forget David, but in due time puts him on the throne, just as he promised.
If God is for David, who can be against him?
If God is against Saul, who can help him?
If you believe the above two propositions are true, regardless of who said them, why would you have a problem applying that truth to someone living now? God is the same yesterday, today, and forever, right?
Scripture is placed in a specific context for a reason. I am not interested in discussing your attempts to change the subject, I am interested in discussing the gross distortion of Romans 8:31, which was not written to muse on the possibility of Sarah Palin’s presidential campaign.
Paul had a reason to include the verse where he did. Our task is not to clip the verse from its context and try to use it elsewhere, our task is to study the verse *in* context and glean *in context* applications from it.