An Eternal Perspective on Suffering: 8:18-27

Welcome to Episode 9 of Series 2. If you have been following Series 2, thank you for coming back and joining us again. If you are new to this series, I would encourage you to go back and listen to the previous episodes because they all fit together in one continuous story. Paul thinks in terms of themes and ideas which he develops step by step. That is what he has done throughout the book of Romans.

Recap and Background

Series 2 is about how to live the Christian life and all the way through this series Paul been giving us ideas about how to live the Christian life effectively. It started in Romans 5:1 – 2 when he explained very clearly about the power of justification by faith and the fact that now we are in a different type of life experience as Christians. Our old life has gone. God has forgotten about all our sins and is treating us as his children. At the beginning of Romans 8, we saw the magnificent words that introduce the theme of the Holy Spirit which has been the theme of the last two episodes. We have been looking at how to live the Christian life by the power of the Holy Spirit. Paul mentions the Holy Spirit by name twenty-one times in Romans 8 but only once in Romans 7 and very rarely in other parts of the book of Romans. So he is really focussing on the power of the Spirit. It all started In Romans 8:1 - 2, where Paul says,

“Therefore, there’s now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus, because through Christ Jesus the law of the Spirit who gives life has set you free from the law of sin and death.”

Romans 8:1-2, NIV

‘The Spirit who gives life’. That is the theme that he has been talking about in the last couple of episodes. In the last episode in particular, we looked at the very important issue of how the Holy Spirit enables us to relate to God. This is something many people find challenging in all sorts of different religious traditions. How do you know God? How are you confident in him? How sure are you of your relationship with him? Paul says, for Christians this issue is totally resolved in a miraculous and wonderful way because the Holy Spirit comes into us when we become believers and shows us that we are adopted into God’s family. He is our Father and we can speak to him as our Father, as Jesus indeed commanded us to do in the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 6.

The last episode was all good news; it was all about how wonderful our relationship with God is as Father and how, through adoption, we are going to inherit a wonderful future after we die – we are going to join all those who are redeemed, we are going to have a wonderful eternal future in a new heaven and a new earth. But he introduces an idea at the very end of the passage we looked at last time which is very important as a way of explaining the context by which all these wonderful things happen. In Romans 8: 17 he says,

“Now if we are children, then we are heirs and co-heirs with Christ, if indeed we share in his sufferings in order that we may also share in his glory.”

Romans 8:17, NIV

He introduces the idea of suffering. This is very important because sometimes these great Christian truths are hard for us to appreciate because we live in a world of actual suffering and difficulty. How do we link together the wonderful realities of being a Christian with the fact that life is often very difficult and suffering comes our way?

This particular passage now is one of the most important passages in the whole New Testament to help us to understand how to deal with the sufferings of this life in the power of the Spirit. Therefore, it is a wonderful passage for us to study and it enables us to make sense of the world around us.

The Effect of Sin on Creation

“I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us. For the creation waits in eager expectation for the children of God to be revealed. For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be liberated, from its bondage to decay, and brought into the freedom and glory of the children of God. We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time.”

Romans 8:18-22, NIV

Paul here is addressing the question of suffering. He starts out with an astonishing statement that our present sufferings are going to be very small when you compare them with everything that will happen to us, and what we will experience, in eternity. They will seem to be small even though now suffering is very real, challenging and a big experience in our life. He is saying that in the glorious and wonderful future for believers, it is worth going through the sufferings and difficulties of this life. It gives us hope and encouragement if we remember that that suffering comes to an end.

He goes on to talk about the creation generally and how it is frustrated; it is in ‘bondage to decay’. We begin to see something of Paul’s thinking about the effect of sin on this world. Up until this point in the book of Romans, when we have been talking about sin, we have been talking about its effects on human life - on individual people and ethnic groups including the Jews, and saying all are subject to the power of sin, and under its control. We are slaves to sin, we can’t escape from it. Paul now explains that sin has actually affected the natural world, or creation as our Bibles translate it. He doesn’t explain exactly what that connection is but if we go back to the book of Genesis 3, we find there is a direct connection. When Adam and Eve first sinned, they experienced a curse from God and the curse upon Adam related in part to the productivity of the ground and the natural world. God said that it would be harder for Adam to bring fruitfulness from the ground after the fall, sin, and the separation between Adam and Eve, and God. When sin came into the world it didn’t just affect human beings, although it affected us very profoundly as Paul has explained very clearly, it affects the whole natural world. It is frustrated - it can’t fulfil its full potential, and is subject to decay. Things in the natural world don’t work perfectly. Although they are well-designed, problems develop. We know this is true from our experience. Sometimes we ask deep and difficult questions about why there are diseases, why there are disasters in the natural world and why things go wrong. Paul, here, begins to help us understand the fundamental reason why the natural world around us does not function perfectly.

Recently in the world, as I am recording, there has been an outbreak of Covid-19, a pandemic that has affected your country as it has affected my country. There are people I know who have died. There are probably people you know who died from this infectious disease. ‘Why do things like that happen?’ We ask ourselves. There is an answer here from Paul. The creation isn’t as it was originally intended to be; it is subject to bondage to decay and to frustration. As I record this talk today there has been news from Turkey and Syria, of a major earthquake and we know that thousands have died, many hundreds injured and many buildings have fallen to the ground. People have experienced absolute trauma. One man said, ‘I’ve never felt anything like it in the 40 years that I’ve lived.’ The natural disaster of an earthquake is a common experience in different parts of the world and can have devastating effects. Diseases and pandemics we experience all over the world, in different ways. Increasingly, we are experiencing more extreme weather conditions particularly extreme rainfall, flooding and droughts. The natural world doesn’t function perfectly.

Paul goes on to say that the whole creation “is groaning as in the pains of childbirth”. It is another way of illustrating this particular experience. The groans of childbirth for the pregnant woman are intense in the period just before the baby is born and Paul implies here that the creation is waiting for something to happen to the redeemed - believers, Christians. They are going to be brought into a complete freedom. Paul goes on to tell us more. What he is hinting at is the fact that we are going to be changed. We are going to experience physical resurrection and eternal life. That will also enable the creation to be changed so that the problems in the created order are resolved and taken away. Creation then functions perfectly like it did at the very beginning of time.

Suffering v Future Glory

Creation is suffering now but we Christians are also suffering.

“Not only so, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for our adoption to sonship, the redemption of our bodies. For in this hope we were saved. But hope that is seen is no hope at all. Who hopes for what they already have? But if we hope for what we do not yet have, we wait for it patiently.”

Romans 8:23-25, NIV

Paul comes back to Christians and their future experience. In all sorts of different ways, we are in Paul’s words ‘groaning’. We are feeling the pain of the suffering of this life in one way or another. It might be emotional. It might be financial and economic. It might be relational. It might be to do with the process of aging. I spent about 10 years supporting my father who was living on his own as he aged in his 80s, and all the time he was feeling the sadness of the decline of his body and his physical abilities, until he died. He was struggling with this very thing that we are talking about here, ‘groaning’ because of the weaknesses and suffering of this world. Paul says, we are “waiting eagerly for our adoption to sonship, the redemption of our bodies”. This is a reference to the Second Coming of Jesus and what happens to Christians at that particular point. We need to pause and think about this. Paul, all the writers of the New Testament, and Jesus himself, teach us very clearly that Jesus comes to this world twice. The first coming was when he came as a man, was born in Bethlehem, lived in Israel, died on the cross and rose again from the dead which brought us salvation. But it is promised that he will return to this world at the end of this age. This is stated in many different places, for example 1 Thessalonians 4:16 says,

“For the Lord himself, (referring to Jesus), will come down from heaven with a loud command, with a voice of the archangel, and with a trumpet call of God, and the dead in Christ will rise first.”

In that passage, Paul is speaking about the Second Coming, and he says as Jesus returns in power to this world, Christians will experience physical resurrection. If we die in Christ spiritually, our inner being goes to heaven and we live with God, in wonderful glory. But we await the reconnection with our physical body - our actual physical body looking similar to what we are now but without pain, without decay, without disease. Paul makes it clear that it will happen at the time when Jesus returns. That is what he is referring to here - ‘the redemption of our bodies, our adoption to sonship’. It means our formal public declaration as God’s children before the whole universe with our resurrection bodies - a wonderful glorious moment!

Paul wants us to remember when life is difficult that we have hope. Christianity is not just a faith for this life, it is a faith also for eternity. In this life things are usually difficult for Christians. There are usually problems. Some of this is to do with opposition to our faith and many of you reading this will know exactly what I mean; opposition is the greatest form of suffering for you. For some of us we experience economic hardship or physical diseases that have a grip on our bodies, or we experience getting older and less strong and less capable, or we experience big problems in relationships or work. We might be experiencing civil war, or the lack of food in the markets. There are all sorts of different things that cause us real suffering. We ‘groan inwardly’ but Paul says we have hope. We have got the Holy Spirit within us. We know God as father. We know we have been saved. We know we are no longer under the power of sin. We know that in the future, we are going to get out of the difficulties of this world. We know that we are going to experience the resurrection body. We know that we are going to see Christ, face to face, in glory. We know that in eternity there will be a wonderful world to explore and enjoy forever.

We have hope. But Paul is a realist. He knows that in reality things can be very difficult for us now. So take encouragement from this passage if life is difficult for you right now. Paul experienced tremendous difficulties in his own life - tremendous opposition, financial problems, uncertainty and loneliness. He was beaten many times, shipwrecked, isolated, and in prison for a number of years. He had a hard life; he spoke from experience. But he had hope. He wants you to have hope as well.

Holy Spirit Help in Our Suffering

As we are struggling, what does the Spirit do within us?

“In the same way, the Spirit helps us in our weakness. We do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us through wordless groans. He who searches our hearts knows the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for God’s people in accordance with the will of God.”

Romans 8:26-27, NIV

Paul makes an amazing series of statements here. First of all, the Spirit understands our weakness. The Spirit within us feels some of the feelings that we have of vulnerability and suffering. The Spirit helps us to pray. That is wonderful isn’t it? So when we are struggling, we need to pray, to call out to God. We need to draw close to him and the Spirit helps us with that praying. The Spirit can come alongside us and encourage us in our prayers and help us to pray from our hearts. Sometimes those prayers are silent, or are sighing, or groaning. They are even accompanied sometimes by tears. Paul has this in mind when he is talking about prayer in this context. But the Spirit understands our suffering; the Spirit comes alongside us and strengthens us. Paul says, hope strengthens us. We know what our future is but the Spirit helps us right now, to deal with whatever problems that we have.

As I am recording this series, there has been the outbreak of a terrible war in Europe between Russia and Ukraine. This war has had a big impact on me personally because I have been to Ukraine many times and I know many people there. I know people who are suffering and indeed some who have died as a result of the warfare they have experienced in recent years. But how do I pray with this suffering? This passage is really helpful, and I have experienced in the last year some times of praying when tears, or sighs, or groans have just been expressed through prayer. As I read this passage, I think, ‘Oh now I begin to understand’. The Holy Spirit helps us to pray and out of that experience, the Holy Spirit will help us to have faith and to pray more confidently, even in very dark and difficult situations, for God to have mercy and for God to intervene in those dark and difficult situations.

Reflections

As we draw this episode to an end, we reflect on a few things that we might learn and consider. First of all, I want to encourage you to understand the natural world in the way that Paul does, with two things in mind: it is wonderfully designed but because of sin it doesn’t always work perfectly. When you are experiencing the natural world, you will often experience a sense of beauty, wonder and joy at the amazing way things work and then sometimes you will see things that don’t work. Both things are important to accept as realities at the moment. That is what Paul points out in this passage.

The second thing I want to encourage us in, is the importance of hope for the future. Christian hope is based on God’s promises and the word of God - not just on trying to escape from this world but our hope is certain. We will be saved. At the end of time we will experience God’s blessing: we will escape judgment and condemnation; we will experience resurrection; and we will experience the eternal world. These things really matter and to focus on them can help us deal with the tough things that we face in this life.

My final reflection would be to encourage us to ask the Holy Spirit to help us when we pray. When we are struggling with things, sometimes we just don’t know how to pray, what to say, how to deal with a difficult situation. It is at that point that the Holy Spirit comes alongside the faithful believer and helps us in our weakness, and helps us to pray in faith.

Thanks for listening to this episode and I hope you’ll join us for the next one.