Subjected to Humility in Hope of Redemption
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"The End is Near" by David Sipress (The Phoenix)
“For I consider that the sufferings of this
present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to
us. For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of
God. For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of
him who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be set free from
its bondage to decay and obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God.
And not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the
Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for adoption as sons, the redemption
of our bodies” (Romans 8:18-23).
Grace to you and peace
from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ!
It seems the world is
getting worse and worse. There’s a good reason for that…it’s true. Despite
advancements in many areas our world is winding down. One step forward and two
steps back. Science even has a name for this condition—entropy. Things left to
themselves deteriorate and decay. You don’t have to look far for evidence. How
about your home? Do the appliances last forever? Shingles and eaves? Check
inside the refrigerator. What happened to that sealed container of leftovers
that got pushed to the back? It turned into big petri dish, didn’t it? Growing
a colorful, perhaps pungent collection of molds and bacteria.
But the evidence is
even closer to home than your home. You carry it with you. You can eat the
right foods, make sure to get enough exercise, avoid too much sun and toxic substances,
and you’re still going to age. The aches and pains build up, no matter how
careful you are, because you’re wearing out, too. And then, there’s all the
stuff outside of your control—cancers and auto-immune deficiencies, mental
failures, and various viruses and infections that come along and find you. Because
you are a part of creation, you are subject to corruption as well. You can work
hard and try to maintain for a while, but in the end it’s futile.
Why is it like this? We’re
going to do a little time travel today to find out. Not just a few years
forward or back. Not even just a few centuries. No, that kind of time travel is
for amateurs. Our guide, St. Paul, is going to take us to the dawn of time, then
to the end of the age, and back again. In just a few sentences, the apostle gives
us a brief history of the world, starting with the present suffering and
futility, going back to creation and the fall, then looking forward to Judgment
Day and restoration, and finally back to what this all means for us now.
Declaring, “I consider
that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory
that is to be revealed to us,” St. Paul sets the stage for the entire
discussion to follow. He is driving toward a satisfactory answer to explain how
and why these “sufferings” are to be endured, even overcome.
So, he continues: “For
the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God”
(Romans 8:19). Paul personifies creation, ascribing to it personal qualities
and characteristics. Creation “waits in eager expectation.” Creation “has been
groaning.” With the phrase “eager longing,” he pictures creation stretching its
neck forward, looking ahead for an eagerly awaited event. Creation seems to
comprehend that it will only be made perfect when we are.
The restoration of
creation will not happen apart from the revelation of the sons of God. In the everyday
world, it is impossible to tell with certainty who is a child of God. We cannot
read hearts. But who is and who is not among the “sons of God” will become
public knowledge only on Judgment Day.
The apostle explains,
“For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of Him
who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its
bondage to decay and obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God”
(Romans 8:20-21). Creation is eagerly waiting Judgment Day, when believers will
be identified, because that day correlates closely with its own release from
“futility.” Creation is frustrated because its original goodness is diminished
by man’s fall into sin. Ever since that time, there has been a constant
deterioration. Creation is in “bondage to decay” through no fault of its own.
So, how did creation
end up in this situation? Not willingly, Paul says; instead, it was subjected.
The one who subjected creation is not explicitly identified here. Some propose
Adam or Satan. But Genesis 3:17-18 provides the answer. There the Lord God tells
Adam: “Because you have listened to the voice of your wife and have eaten of
the tree of which I commanded you, ‘You shall not eat of it,’ cursed is the
ground because of you; in pain you shall eat of it all the days of your life;
thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you; and you shall eat the plants
of the field.”
This subjecting of
creation to futility happened in the fall into sin. But Adam is not the one who
is doing the subjecting. Rather, God is the one. Through Adam, sin and death
entered the world (Romans 5:12) but it is God who subjected creation to futility.
It was God’s will to curse the earth and have it produce thorns and thistles.
In this way it became hard to work and such served as a constant reminder to
Adam and his descendants of the seriousness of their sin. But, as Paul reminds
us, suffering is also a method of hope on God’s part. It is a gift to teach us
that our pains have purpose and meaning.
In expounding Psalm 6,
Luther reminds us his pastoral and practical way to remember, first and foremost, that our
suffering comes from the Almighty.
In all trials and affliction man should first
of all run to God; he should realize and accept the fact that everything is
sent by God, whether it comes from the devil or from man. This is what the
prophet does here. In this psalm he mentions his trials, but first he hurries
to God and accepts these trials from Him; for this is the way to learn patience
and the fear of God. But he who looks to man and does not accept these things
from God becomes impatient and a despiser of God.[i]
It seems strange (even
blasphemous, I know) to hold that God brings suffering into our world. But it
is so. After chronicling Job’s grief, the Holy Spirit tells us that our brother
was comforted “for all the evil that the Lord had brought upon him” (Job
42:11). Some of my fellow pastors try to “defend” God by explaining, “God
doesn’t want you to suffer. It’s better to say that He allowed this to
happen.” But as Luther and Psalm 6 teach us, this, too, is from God. God’s
permissive will is still God’s will.
This is a very painful
example of what we Lutherans call the alien work of God the Holy Spirit.
His main and favorite work is to comfort us with the Good News of what the Son
has done for us with His own death and resurrection. But before we will become
interested at all in trusting Jesus to be our Way, He must show us beyond all
doubt how lost we are, and the consequences of our sin and rebellion—both to us
and to all of creation.
Creation suffers
collateral damage from man’s fall into sin. It is waiting to be freed “from the
bondage to decay,” something it has endured ever since Genesis 3:17-18. Creation
will only be freed from, this bondage and made perfect together with us on
Judgment Day when our role as God’s children is fully and finally revealed to
all. In fact, we, will then be heirs of the world.
Paul’s main emphasis
here is for us believers to patiently endure under suffering. “For we know that
the whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth until
now. And not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of
the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for adoption as sons, the
redemption of our bodies” (Romans 8:22-23).
In Old Testament times,
God commanded His people to offer the first of the harvest to Him. For the
believers to cheerfully offer the first of the crop to the Lord implied their
trust and confidence that God would be giving them more later. As such, the
“firstfruits” came to be looked at as a pledge, God’s down payment, assuring that
He would give them the rest of the harvest also. Here, Paul emphasizes the
firstfruits are not our offering to God, but a gift from God to us. God’s
sending the Holy Spirit into our hearts as firstfruits is God’s down payment
assuring us that He will also give us the rest of what He has promised.
What has He promised? Our
adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies. Our adoption is present—in
baptism, God made us His son, heirs of His inheritance. But it is also future,
as is “the glory which is to be revealed to us.” The longed for “not yet” aspect
is the redemption of our body.
The divine solution
promised by Paul—the bodily resurrection—is in marked contrast to the dominant
philosophical expectations of his day, as well as those of our own modern age.
Physical creation is not something to be destroyed or from which one must
escape. Neither does our future redemption consist of being permanently
delivered from any physical body. As creation longs for future restoration as
the solution to its own present groaning and travail, so also believers yearn
for the redemption of our bodies, not from them. This redemption
will take place in the final resurrection on the Last Day when we are raised
with glorified bodies to live with God forever in a new heaven and a new earth.
That glorious hope is to strengthen us in anticipation of God’s great day at
the end of the age.
From this text, we can
see in astonishing clarity the whole plan of salvation for all of God’s
creation. It is the kind of view that speaks to our souls and changes our
perspective. The key to understanding what God has been doing in the world, and
will continue to do, throughout all of world history all pivots on the
incarnation, life, death, resurrection, and ascension of the Son of God.
Man was created in the
image of God and put in charge of creation. When our first parents rebelled, man
lost the image of God, creation fell into disrepair—weeds and wild, poisonous
and deadly. But even then, human hearts corrupt it further: “Exchanging the
glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and
animals and creeping things. Therefore God gave [us] up in the lusts of [our]
hearts to impurity, to the dishonoring of [our] bodies among ourselves, because
[we] exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the
creature rather than the Creator” (Romans 1:24-25).
God allows this state
of our self-enslavement to continue, not because the created order wanted to be
like that, but He is determined to eventually—at the fulness of time—reclaim
His usurped earthly kingdom and restore it. God sent the new Adam, Jesus Christ,
to redeem mankind, so that we might take our place under God and over the
world, worshiping the one and only Lord, and exercising glorious stewardship
over the world.
The creation is not
waiting to share the freedom of God’s children, as some translations imply. It
is waiting to benefit when God’s justified-by-grace children are at last restored
and glorified. It is waiting expectantly for the freedom it will enjoy when God
gives to His adopted-through-baptism children that glory, that wise rule, and
stewardship, which was always intended for those who bear God’s glorious image.
It is an image perfected in the Son of God and gifted to those clothed in
Christ’s righteousness.
This perspective on the
created order has all kinds of implications for you and me; from the way we
think about the ultimate future of the world and ourselves to our present
anticipation of that final responsibility for God’s world. Going to Heaven, it
turns out is not the final goal, but rather the staging ground for our
glorification. This is a positive, world-affirming view, without any of the
risks associated with pantheism on the one hand or the cult of environmentalism
on the other. Yes, there is still evil, and mankind is the source of it in the
world and the world continues to be affected by it… so it groans. But think
about how hopeful Paul’s message is, how far-reaching the Gospel is: The Earth
itself, into which the blood of Christ seeped, will be redeemed and renewed,
just like our bodies on the day of the resurrection. God through Christ Jesus
reclaims His kingdom and creation from corruption and, behold, all things are
new.
In saying, “The
sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is
to be revealed to us” (Romans 8:18), Paul is not making light of your
suffering. He’s not saying it is no big thing. Rather, he is saying that no
matter how terrible the wages of sin you encounter in this life, the glory of the
resurrection is that much indescribably better. You simply cannot imagine how
great and wonderful are the blessings of eternal life that await. But they are
yours.
They are yours because
Christ has died to make you His.
They are yours because
the Spirit safeguards them to you as He delivers repentance and grace by His
Word.
They are yours because
you are forgiven for all of your sins.
In the name of the
Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen
Unless otherwise indicated, all Scripture
quotations are from the Holy Bible, English Standard Version, copyright © 2001
by Crossway Bibles, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by
permission. All rights reserved.
[i]
Luther, M. (1999).
Luther’s works,
vol. 14: Selected Psalms III. (J. J. Pelikan, H. C. Oswald,
& H. T. Lehmann, Eds.) (Vol. 14, p. 140). Saint Louis: Concordia Publishing
House.
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