Romans 8:18-27
A sermon preached at Geraldton Anglican Cathedral on 22 August 2021
For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us. 19 For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God. 20 For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of him who subjected it, in hope 21 that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to corruption and obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God. 22 For we know that the whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth until now. 23 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. 24 For in this hope we were saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what he sees? 25 But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience. 26 Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness. For we do not know what to pray for as we ought, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words. 27 And he who searches hearts knows what is the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God.
Some of you will remember back to the seventies when the world was gripped with anxiety that we might exhaust all of the earth’s natural resources—oil and coal in particular— and what would our children do without petrol? Odd, isn’t it, that a mere forty years later our children are worried that there is too much, and if we extract it, we will overload the atmosphere with greenhouse gases, cause global warming, and that might not be good. In fact, the world faces a bigger problem that global warming, and that’s global cooling. The earth’s temperature goes up and down, but the overall trend must be down, because the universe is cooling down, our sun included. When it starts to get cold, then we’re going to want to dig up that coal, so we might as well leave some for later. I’m joking, of course. It may well be that warming is our immediate problem, and the rest lie far into the future. A more pressing problem is our own mortality. I have got to that point in my life when I need to make a reasonable estimate of how many years I may have left. The money is running out even if the oil is not. I am dying, and so are you.
In our exploration of Romans 8 we reached the place where Paul tells us that if we are God’s children, then we are heirs: his heirs and Christ’s fellow heirs. And he adds a rider: “provided we are willing to suffer with him, that we may also be glorified with him.” We left it with the question what this inheritance might be all about. What does he mean that we will be glorified? And why must we also suffer? This is very relevant, since we have come to a point when you can get a doctor in and switch off the suffering permanently. Why wouldn’t you do that?
Up to now in Romans we have been thinking about ourselves—now Paul turns our attention to the planet, and the first truth which confronts us there, is that everything is dying. “In bondage to decay” is the way Paul describes it. Its Science Week so let’s give ourselves a science lesson.
There are three laws of thermodynamics. Thermodynamics is the study of heat and other forms of energy and the way one form of energy can be converted into another. These days we have to factor in that matter also can be converted into energy. In a closed system—like the universe—the overall amount of mass-energy cannot increase or decrease. That is the first law. What this means is that if you use a tank of petrol in your car, and collect all the gases from the exhaust, and if you weigh the fuel you used and the oxygen it took to burn it, it will weigh the same as all the gases it produced. Nothing is created or annihilated. This is the first law. The second law says that the amount of randomness in a closed system always increases. The easiest way to understand this is to light a candle and watch what happens. It will burn down till there is nothing left, the smoke will spread out in the air and cause global warming, and so will the heat. If you could collect it all, it would weigh the same, but all that smoke and heat never comes back together to form a new candle; that doesn’t happen. “Heat will not of itself pass from one body to a hotter body.” That’s a line from Flanders and Swann, At the Drop of Another Hat. Google “Flanders Swann Entropy”! You will enjoy it. Entropy means that once you have used up your tank of petrol, you can’t collect all the exhaust gases and put them back together again—not without a lot of pushing from the outside. The law of conservation of mass-energy, and the law of entropy are two of the fundamental laws of the universe. What the second law means is that things fall apart, things age, things die, you and me included. The nature of our world is that things can only live by other things dying. In the end everything will be dead. This is the bondage to decay Paul speaks of.
Before we look at what else he says let’s note one implication of these laws. You and I are alive; some things are still not dead. That fact means the universe must have had a beginning. If it were that much older, it would be dead. But the sun is still shining, and it’s a lovely day. Our planet still has an atmosphere, and the air is sweet; if the universe were older, it would be like Mars. And if the universe had a beginning, then creation is real; there was a time when the first and second laws didn’t apply. Someone filled the tank! Now let’s get back to Paul. In Romans 8:18 he says
I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed.
In our last sermon we learned that the goal of God’s work in creating the world, letting it fall into sin, placing it under judgement, sending his Son to carry our sins, forgiving and justifying us, and giving us his Holy Spirit is to make us his sons and daughters. We learned that we have been made alive in our spirits, but we continue to live in dying bodies. But then, one day the Holy Spirit will make our bodies alive too.
How can that be? No sooner do we die than decay sets in and our softer parts become a horrible smelly mess. In a year or so all that is left is bones and hair. That is entropy at work. The rest will in the air. How then can our bodies be made alive again? It can only be by another act of creation. The God who made us in the first place, who holds the blueprint—the hard disk with all the information—not only for making our bodies, but for rebooting them and making them alive, and restoring all their files—bringing back all our memories—our personalities—will make us alive again: this is what we call resurrection. The Holy Spirit has already done it for Jesus, says Paul; one day he will do it for all his sons and daughters.
And now he tells us something quite remarkable. When I first met Christ, I was overwhelmed by the thought that God loved me, and Jesus died for me, and now I had a personal relationship with God; I was going to live forever. It was personal—God cared about me; that was the wonder. I just wanted other people to know that for themselves. But there came a time when I realized it was more than me and God. God was concerned about societies, nations, culture, politics. He was building a kingdom. What thrilled me then was that Jesus is building a new world, but could still be interested in every individual person. Marx and Lenin envisaged a new world, but people were just pawns. If you had to slaughter a few million to get the economic structures right, that was fine. The individual didn’t matter, only the classless society—the golden age. But Jesus knows and loves every citizen in his kingdom. This personalness of the kingdom of God grabbed me, and still does. But now Paul says there is something more. God also cares about the physical world itself. In verse 21 he says:
The creation itself will be set free from its bondage to corruption and obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God.
Not only will your physical body we resurrected, the whole physical universe will be resurrected too.
I used to read a lot of science fiction. One short story I recall was a about a big computer. They fed in all the data they could and asked it whether entropy could be reversed. The computer whirred and the lights flashed, and out came the answer: “Insufficient data to give an answer!” A few hundred years later when they had bigger and better computers they did it again, and the answer came out: “Insufficient information to give an answer. This went on from age to age, until eventually everything was getting darker and colder, and the universe was close to burning out. But by then they had this gigantic computer and were able to feed into it all the data of the universe, and ask the question one more time: “Can entropy be reversed?” The computer whirred and lights flashed for a time after the last star went out and the last person died. Finally the answer emerged: “Let there be light!” And the story ends, “And there was light.” Well, there you go!
The point that Paul is making is that God is going to resurrect the universe, just as he will us, just has he did Jesus. He explains that death and decay is not the natural state of things—that’s how we see it—the world was subjected to that form of slavery by God. God not only condemned Adam to death when he rebelled, he also condemned to death the world he had made for him. In verse 20 he says
For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of him who subjected it … For we know that the whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth until now.
Note four things here. Firstly, this was something imposed by God; it is not just Nature: the universe was subjected to futility “because of him who subjected it”. Second, it was subjected to futility: nothing makes sense. Twenty years in Afghanistan trying to build a nation and it all gets torn apart—the same in Haiti. Life is like that. Third, it is painful; creation groans: the bushfire, the flood, the mudslide, the earthquake, the baby born with an abnormality. Fourth, and this is where hope comes in: it is like the pains of childbirth—severe, but with a wonderful outcome. Creation’s suffering is not forever; it is bringing about a wonderful new world; Jesus taught this. We may not know what God is doing—we seldom do—but Afghanistan’s and Haiti’s agony, like Jerusalem’s, is about the coming of a new world. As Jeremiah once said—and this is a fifth thing—“God does not willingly afflict the sons of men.” (Lamentations 3)
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 corruption and obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God.
This is the gospel: not just you and me going to heaven when we die. We will do that if we have made our peace with God. But God engages with the societies and nations of the world, seeking to establish righteousness. But more than that: when Jesus returns he will reconstruct your body; you will live again, a full life, gloriously healthy and free. And not only that: there will be a renewed resurrection world for us to explore and enjoy and share with each other, and our King, the Lord Jesus, who lived and died and rose again for us.
You see, God did not create the universe to annihilate it at the end, so we could live ghostly lives. No, from the beginning he wanted us to live embodied lives together—with each other, and with his Son—in a solid world, with light, and sky, and earth and plants, and sea, and fish, and animals, and each other and music—don’t forget the music.
We mustn’t get carried away and start drawing pictures of the new world, as some people do. We have no idea what a world without death could be like; in this world things only live by other things dying. Think of the blind man to whom Jesus gave sight. He had no conception of what even the visible world was like until the moment he was healed. Just know that it will be worth waiting for, that one day we will awake from blindness into an indescribably beautiful world, that nothing we have gone through in this life will be worth comparing with.
But, as C.S.Lewis once said, “Tomorrow is Monday morning.” We are stuck here in this suffering world for as long as it takes. Christians are not exempt. Verse 22 says:
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.
Even Christians suffer and groan. Paul is not talking about persecution here, it is the common sufferings of everything in the universe: the weakness, the sickness, the dying. The gospel is not a ticket to good health. We inherit the new world with Christ, “provided we suffer with him, that we may also be glorified with him.”
Why must we suffer? A man in Haiti stands in the midst of the rubble; next to him a woman whose child died in her arms. He cries out, “Sometimes I ask if there is really a God.” There may be a time when you will ask the same question. Suffering seems pointless. It is part of the futility Paul speaks of. There is no answer—not in this world—not that we can construct. The world was subjected to futility, the whole creation groans, in bondage to corruption. But there is hope: glory when the children of God are revealed. Glory means weight, heaviness, substance; not the futility and meaninglessness of things that are here today and gone tomorrow, but of the solid, lasting, good and beautiful.
Why must we suffer? Why did Jesus suffer? Because he saw a new resurrected world of resurrected sons and daughters of God, and the cross what what it would take. God is building a new world. We may not know the reason, but suffering, even our suffering may be a necessary part of it. I do not wish it on anyone, but I say to you, if suffer you must, and one way or another we will all suffer, settle it in your mind that the sufferings of this present age are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us.