Monday, June 5, 2017
Yet what we suffer now is nothing compared to the glory he will reveal
to us later. For all creation is waiting
eagerly for that future day when God will reveal who his children really are. Against its will, all creation was subjected
to God’s curse. But with eager hope, the
creation looks forward to the day when it will join God’s children in glorious
freedom from death and decay. For we
know that all creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up
to the present time. And we believers
also groan, even though we have the Holy Spirit within us as a foretaste of
future glory, for we long for our bodies to be released from sin and suffering.
We, too, wait with eager hope for the
day when God will give us our full rights as his adopted children, including
the new bodies he has promised us.
Romans 8:18-23(NLT)
As an apostle
Paul was asked a lot of questions about God’s purposes. People who suffered cruelty, disease, poverty
and a host of other human ills wanted to know why life had to be so hard. Paul’s letter to the Roman church contains much
of Paul’s systematic theology, and therein we find many of the answers to life’s
tough questions.
As a
pastor, I have also been asked a lot of questions; one of the toughest ones is
about how it can be fair
that we are born into a sinful world with a sinful nature that gets us in
trouble; after all, we didn’t ask for that!
There is a single
phrase here in Paul’s Roman treatise on God’s design for all creation, which may
give us tools to unlock that question’s mystery: Against
its will.
When God finished
creating everything on the sixth day he looked around and proclaimed that it
was all very good. That
means there wasn’t anything wrong with what He had created; no pain, no anger,
no death, and nothing over which we would have to shed tears. We (the human race) were given the keys to a
perfect existence! The phrase against its will is Paul’s
way of describing how the good creation of God became subject to the curse which
made life really difficult – full of death and decay. To this moment the entire creation groans waiting
for the day God will restore Eden.
The simple
straight line drawn from this to our question about being born into this mess
of a world is that, just as the earth suffered because of the curse brought on
by Adam and Eve’s rebellion, we too are born into an existence soiled by sin. We suffer living in a world catastrophized by
our ancestors; we didn’t ask for it, but, then neither did the children who
will be born in the next century ask to live in a world polluted and left to
disintegrate by our generation. The lone
self-righteousness caveat here is that, had we been first, we would have been
first in sin just as certainly as the first couple. Whether Adam and Eve are two actual people or
just representative figureheads to describe all of humanity, every one of us is
born/created in innocence, but we choose to sin.
The
underlying lesson learned about the sin of our ancestors and this generation,
and the generation to come is that God did not create it or its resultant
decay; we humans are the ones who all participate and pass it on to infect the
next generation.
Paul ended
this passage with reference to the eager anticipation of being released from
the groaning of our sin and suffering.
This is the blessed hope of people who live under the grace and mercy of
a forgiving God.
For You Today
To
claim innocence, to say I didn’t ask
to be born, is to deny all evidence that you are human. To place yourself at the foot of the cross, a
convicted felon of sin is to place yourself in the merciful hand of Father God.
NOTES
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