Romans 8:18-25

 

The theme of Romans 5-8 is transformation. Under that general heading, we have looked at the change which God makes in the lives of believers by giving them deliverance from the power of sin. We also saw that this transformation is part of a change of relationship; we have this transformation because we are members of God's family, adopted as His children and heirs. That idea leads directly into this passage in which Paul looks forward to the final transformation God has in store for us.

But to understand this passage we need to go back to Romans 5:12: “Wherefore, as by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned.” In fiction, a story often begins with a specific event called an 'inciting incident.' This is defined as “the event that sets the main character or characters on the journey that will occupy them throughout the narrative.” And if we look at the Bible as a story, the inciting incident is the sin of Adam and Eve. Nearly everything else we read about traces back to that in one way or another. If sin had never entered the world, we would have a very different story. Nothing would exist as we presently know it without that first sin.

As we said back in our study of Romans 5, the Bible places the sin of Adam in a causative relationship to the sin of every man; the fact that we live in a world where sin is as common and seemingly intrinsic to humanity as the physical makeup of man is, in some sense and some manner, because of the sin of the first man.

Somehow, someway, we can say that we are sinners because of Adam's sin. And because of sin, we have been corrupted in nature, made guilty in status, and cut off from God's family. That is the spiritual state of man and as we have been looking at throughout this study, God has a solution for it—that is, justification, regeneration, and adoption, which changes our status, our nature, and our relationships.

But sin also brought about a corruption of our physical nature. As we've talked about previously, the flesh or the sinful nature of man is something different from our physical nature. Physicality is not sinful. But it is also true that our physical nature does hold us back. It presents us with temptations. It stops us from doing all we would like to. The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak. This does not excuse us from doing all we can, but it is a reality we must face. In 2 Corinthians, Paul puts it that we have this treasure in earthen vessels. Our spiritual life is always conditioned and limited by our physical nature. You can picture it like a man sailing a boat; no matter how skilled and knowledgeable the sailor, he cannot sail farther or faster than his boat allows.

We see this in the life of Jesus. Jesus was the only man to live a morally perfect life from beginning to end, and yet we that that life was conditioned by His physical nature. Though, as God, He could do anything, yet, as man, He was very limited; he could only go so many places and could only preach so much. Some time, go through the gospels and count how many times we have references to Jesus being tired or sleeping. Even the perfect man was limited by the fact that He had a fallen, physical body.

We cannot do all that we would—this is true, by-the-by, for the sinner just as much as for the Christian. Tiredness and weakness and sickness may prevent you from performing an act of charity and they may also prevent you from committing some sin. Given a world of sin, it is just as well we are so limited. If we had the power to do all that our mind and soul could conceive, that would allow for much greater virtue but also much greater sin.

Now we need to move on to this more general fact—which is that the sin of man has an effect not just on man's soul, not just on his body, but on his entire world. “And unto Adam he said, Because thou hast hearkened unto the voice of thy wife, and hast eaten of the tree, of which I commanded thee, saying, Thou shalt not eat of it: cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life.” (Genesis 3:17) This gives us the foundation of the idea we call The Curse—that the entire order of nature was corrupted and recast.

In verse 20, Paul sums up the state of creation as vanity. (And yes, there is some debate about the meaning of these verses, but I am taking 'the creature' in verses 19-21 as referring to the created order.) Strong defines this word as literally meaning 'inutility.' In other words, vanity is when something cannot do what it is supposed to do. The world is like a machine that had some purpose but has become broken so that it cannot fulfill that purpose. Vanity is the continual frustration of not being what you are supposed to be, the failure to bring things to completion. This world is not purely good or purely bad. It is broken. Nothing in this world is quite what it should be; nothing works exactly right. The world is full of futility, brutality, and tragedy. From insects to the stars, nature is in ruins. Like a ruin, it may be very beautiful and picturesque, and it may still provide a place of shelter, but it is still in ruins.

And with this comes the tragedy of creation. In verse 22, Paul says that the whole creation groaneth and travaileth together until now. The world is crying out in pain. 

Christianity puts a large emphasis on mankind. Man alone of this creation is made in the image of God and man was made to be the steward of the earth. Man's sin and man's redemption form the dominant thread of the Biblical story. But that doesn't mean that mankind is the only important thing in the world. The entire created world is important to God. God hears the cry even of the things which cannot cry. The tragedy of the broken created world moves God even if it does not always move us.

And the state of the created world is a tragedy—it is a tragedy of innocence. Look at verse 20, “The creature was made subject to vanity, not willingly.” The physical creation is an innocent casualty of this war.

All of this came about because of sin. All of Romans up to this point has been pointing, in one way or another, to the fact that we, as Christians, have a deliverance from and a victory over sin. But even though that is true, we are not exempt from this reality. Verse 23: we “which have the firstfuits of the Spirit”--that is, Christians, those who have the abiding, indwelling presence of the Spirit manifesting the power and glory of God within our heart—those who, as Paul says in Ephesians, are seated together in heavenly places with Christ Jesus, “even we ourselves grown within ourselves, waiting for the adoption, to wit, the redemption of our body.”

Even the highest Christian is still in the body, still under the power of the curse, still liable to all the problems and disadvantages this entails. We are better off than the physical creation because we can, through our spirit, touch something better and higher, but we are still in the same general boat. Our prison cell has a window, but it is still a prison cell.

And, yet, though all this is a tragedy, it is not a senseless tragedy. The curse and the destruction of creation came about because of man's sin, and yet man was not the primary agent. And while all this was a punishment, it was not merely a punishment.

Again, this is verse 20. Creation was made subject to vanity “by reason of him who hath subjected the same in hope.” The curse came because of man, but man is not the one who cursed the earth. It was God and God did not do it merely to make everybody miserable (even if they deserved it)--the end of the curse was hope. There was a purpose to all this; this was all part of God's plan.

There is a hope for the created order and there is hope specifically for us. Verse 23 talks about groaning, but it is not merely groaning in pain but in expectation, “waiting for the adoption, to wit, the redemption of our body.”

In the verses leading up to this, Paul spoke of our having received adoption; now he speaks of our waiting for it. Perhaps the picture is that of a child who has legally been adopted into a new family but has not yet moved in. They have a legal adoption but have not yet entered into most of the advantages of that adoption. As Christians, we are a real part of God's family—but we are not yet home. We are heirs but we have not received our full inheritance.

But there is coming a time when we will receive our inheritance; there is coming a time when we will go home. “For the Lord himself shall descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel, and with the trump of God: and the dead in Christ shall rise first: then we which are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air: and so shall we ever be with the Lord.” (1 Thessalonians 4:16-17) “Behold, I shew you a mystery; We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump: for the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed.” (1 Corinthians 15:51) We often think of these verses in the context of end-time prophecy and the attempt to calculate the timing and order of future events. But for our study here, they are important because they describe the thing Paul is talking about here; our adoption, i.e., the redemption of the body. Justification, regeneration, and adoption are the beginning of our Christian life. Entire sanctification and the continual process of transformation continue that life. And the climax or capping off of that life is what the Bible calls resurrection and what some theologians call glorification. 

It is a change, a transformation of the body into something that is distinct from and yet has continuity with our current human body. I said before there is a sort of strife or friction that exists between our soul and our body; they are often out of sync with each other. We cannot do all that we would because of the limitations of our physical bodies. There is coming a time when that will no longer be true. There is coming a time when the body is as truly saved and redeemed and spirit-filled as the soul is.

We cannot presently imagine what the resurrected life will be like. And that is not exactly the point here. Paul isn't bringing all this up merely to speculate about the future. Obviously, this does help to round out the argument of Romans 5-8; this shows the end of the process of transformation which begins at salvation. However, there is a more practical point Paul is making. In the verse directly before this passage, Paul had spoken of the Christian's suffering. This was a reality that was never very far from Paul's mind—that life for many Christians was a life of suffering, whether specifically because of their religion or just because that is what life is in this world. The Bible never promises believers freedom from all problems; often being a Christian brings you into problems. 

And so it would have been easy for someone to look at a Christian—look at someone, perhaps, poor, persecuted, and outcast—and say: “how can they be a child of God? How can they be part of God's family? If God has such a great plan of transformation for his people, why are they still in such a miserable place?”

Paul could have tried to ignore this objection; he could have tried to sugarcoat and brush over the problems and sufferings of this life. But, instead, he answers it with a single word: hope. Hope intrinsically implies a belief in and expectation of something we do not have. (v. 24-25) The word hope can be used in several different senses, but all of them share this common idea—hope refers to something not present. You do not hope for something you already have. Hope is always looking forward to something that has not yet arrived. 

Suppose two men fall off a boat and into the ocean. One man is helpless, flailing his arms in the water, but the other man manages to catch hold of a trailing rope from the ship. Both men are in the water; both men are equally cold and wet. But one man has something the other does not—he has a link back to safety. He has not climbed or been pulled back on board, but he has hold of something which connects him to his salvation.

As Christians in this world, we do not always have good circumstances. We go through the same troubles as everybody else and some troubles that only come on Christians. But we have a connection, a link to our final salvation. That is to say, we have hope.

And the hope we have is something greater than anything in this world. The key verse of this entire passage is verse 18: “For I reckon that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory which shall be revealed in us.” This was not just a momentary feeling of the apostle, for he said almost the same thing in 2 Corinthians 4:17: “For our light affliction, which is but for a moment, worketh for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory.”

Picture an old-fashioned scale; the kind where something was weighed by placing weights on one end to balance something on the other. In essence, what Paul is saying is that if all the trouble and sorrow and distress we experience in life were placed on one side of the scale, it would barely register in comparison to the glory which is ours in the future.

And it is important to remember that Paul is the one saying this, because we know—even specifically from 2 Corinthians—that Paul experienced more suffering and trouble in this life than many men. He had plenty of opportunities to weigh exactly how heavy the burden of life in this world could be. And yet he still calculated it as something not worth talking about in light of our future hope.

How great is this hope we have? Great enough that it is too big for us to keep to ourselves. That is verse 19: “The earnest expectation of the creature waiteth for the manifestation of the sons of God.” Philips paraphrases that: “The whole creation is on tiptoe to see the wonderful sight of the sons of God coming into their own.” Paul carries this thought forward in verse 21 where he says that “the creature” (which I am taking to be a personification of the created order) will “be delivered from from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God.” 

There is a hope for creation. The curse will someday turn to blessing. The groaning of this world will be remedied at last. We do not know the details of this redemption of the physical creation, but it is coming.

Imagine a man receives an inheritance from a rich relative. If it were only a few hundred dollars, he would be happy to have it, but it probably wouldn't make all that much difference to him. Possibly nobody else would even know that it had happened. If it were a few thousand dollars, he might make a few unusual purchases or share a little with his friends and family; that might be enough to make a few people take note of the fact that something had changed—but still, it wouldn't make that much difference. But imagine that the inheritance ran into the hundreds of millions. Most likely, the man's entire life is going to change. Whether he chooses to invest his money responsibly or spend it recklessly, it will have an expanding impact on everyone around him. The greater the amount of the inheritance, the greater that circle of impact is going to be, for better or for worse.

And what Paul is saying here is that our inheritance is something so great that it is enough to spill over and transform the entire created order. It was man's sin that brought ruin into the world and it will be man's glorification that brings healing to the world. 

We refer to the events surrounding the resurrection and the second coming as “The end of the world” because it involves destruction and cataclysm. But in some sense, it is only then that the story of the world can begin; and it will be truly physically as well as spiritually that where sin did abound there did grace much more abound.