Romans 8:19-22

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and you notice this week, as well as last week, I've shortened it.
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It's just a couple of verses. We're taking it slow. We're getting into the harder parts of Romans, so we'll be slowing down a little bit.
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Not that we were going very fast to begin with, but the smaller bits that we take it in, the more we can,
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I won't say ruminate on it, but the more it can be explained, and the more we can understand from it, the more we can get out of it.
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So as usual, I'll start in verse 1. It says, There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.
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For the law of the Spirit of life has set you free in Christ Jesus from the law of sin and death.
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For God has done what the law weakened by the flesh could not do by sending his own
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Son in the likeness of sinful flesh for sin.
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He condemned sin in the flesh in order that the righteous requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not according to the flesh, but according to the
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Spirit. For those who live according to the flesh set their minds on the things of the flesh, but those who live according to the
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Spirit set their minds on the things of the Spirit. For to set the mind on the flesh is death, but to set the mind on the
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Spirit is life and peace. For the mind that is set on the flesh is hostile to God, for it does not submit to God's law.
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Indeed, it cannot. Those who are in the flesh cannot please
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God. You, however, are not in the flesh, but in the
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Spirit, if in fact the Spirit of God dwells in you. Anyone who does not have the
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Spirit of Christ does not belong to him, but if Christ is in you, although the body is dead because of sin, the
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Spirit is life because of righteousness. If the
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Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, he who raised Christ Jesus from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through his
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Spirit who dwells in you. So then, brothers, we are debtors not to the flesh to live according to the flesh, for if you live according to the flesh you will die, but if by the
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Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body, you will live. For all who are led by the
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Spirit of God are sons of God. For you did not receive a spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received a spirit of adoption as sons, by whom we cry,
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Abba, Father. The Spirit himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, then heirs.
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Heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ, provided we suffer with him in order that we may also be glorified with him.
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For I consider that the suffering of this present time, or sufferings of this present time, are not worth comparing to the glory that is to be revealed to us.
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For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God. For creation was subject 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.
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For we know that the whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth until now.
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So the verses that we'll be going through today are 19 through 22, but we're gonna start way, way back in the very, very beginning of the book in Genesis, so we can get a basis for what we're talking about.
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Last week we talked about suffering and our suffering, the suffering that we go through. We've been going through that in Romans, and how saints suffer.
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We suffer the same things that non -believers do, but it brings a different outcome in us.
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Here we're talking about creation itself. So I'll bring you back to Genesis chapter 2, verses 15 and 17.
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It says, And the Lord took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it. And the Lord God commanded the man, saying,
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You may surely eat of every tree of the garden, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat.
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For the day that you eat of it you shall surely die. Now this is the first covenant, this is the
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Edimic covenant that God makes with Adam to work and keep the garden, part of his working and keeping that is his worship.
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Adam unfortunately does not prepare his wife as he ought to have, and she is tricked by the serpent into eating the fruit of the tree, the knowledge of good and evil, and then she entices him to eat as well.
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We've covered before whose fault this is. It's Adam's. There is fault with the woman, but it is
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Adam's fault entirely with him, because he has headship over the earth and over her, and he disobeyed.
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And because of his disobedience, it brought sin into the entire world, and with it death, and therefore he surely died as do we.
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Because of his federal headship, all humanity suffers sin and death, as does all creation to which he had dominion over.
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If we move forward to Genesis chapter 3, we see in verse 14 where God deals with the serpent, and the woman, and the man.
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Verse 14, he says the Lord God said to the serpent, because you have done this, cursed are you above all livestock, and above all beasts of the field.
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On your belly you shall go, and dust you shall eat all the days of your life. Now the words are a little different depending on what translation you go with, but the idea here is that the serpent isn't the only thing that's cursed.
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He's cursed above and beyond all of the other creatures. He says in verse 15, he says
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I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and her offspring, and he shall bruise your head, you shall bruise,
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I'm sorry, and he shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel.
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Here's the promise. This is the promise of Christ, the seed of the woman.
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The first instance that we see this, Christ didn't have an earthly father in that sense.
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He was conceived in the womb of Mary as the Virgin by the Holy Spirit, and while he did die an earthly death, while his heel was bruised, three days later he rose again, crushing the head of the serpent, defeating death once for all.
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In verse 16, it says to the woman, he said I will surely multiply your pain in childbearing.
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In pain you shall bring forth children. Your desire shall be contrary to your husband, but he shall rule over you.
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All pain and suffering in childbirth from the moment of conception, the moment of the birth, that is where this comes from.
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Have you ever noticed if you dealt with livestock and other animals giving birth, they don't seem to have the same kind of hardship in birth as women do.
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I'm not saying there's not pain. We can't register that with a horse or a cattle, but it seems to be a much easier process for other created beings, but this is where that comes from.
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Also if you notice the desire for the woman to rule instead of man.
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This is why women naturally have a difficulty submitting to the servant leadership.
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I say that for a reason. We can get into that way later, but to the servant leadership of her husband.
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This is also why they get mad at us when we're indecisive about because they have an idea, and we're like whatever, and then just make the decision guys.
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Consult the scriptures and make the decision. Verse 17 says, and to Adam he said, because you have listened to the voice of your wife and have eaten of the tree of which
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I commanded you, you shall not eat of it. Cursed is the ground because of you.
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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.
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By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread. Now while we don't face the same hardship in providing for our families that Adam did because that was relieved after the flood, we do face hardship in it.
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If you've ever had to earn, if you've ever had to work, you understand that it's difficult, laborious.
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We toil over things. Men are also unfortunately plagued with a desire to not work.
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We don't want to. We would much rather sit in the air conditioning, collect a paycheck, and it's even worse nowadays than it used to be, but yet some of us, we still toil, we still provide, and we do our best to glorify
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God in that work. Sometimes it's easier, sometimes it's harder, but we still have to, we must do what we were created to do.
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Work, to worship, to glorify God in both. Now that we have set the scene for why creation groans in the first place, we come to verse 19 in Romans chapter 8.
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Paul says, For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God.
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I want to express what Paul is trying to convey here.
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Eager longing, in some Bibles it'll say anxious anticipation, earnest expectation.
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The imagery that we have here is that of the head out stretched, leaned forward, waiting for what is to come.
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This is what creation is doing. It's similar to when you go to a race, or when you go to an event, and you're you're rooting for that team, and you're leaned forward across the fence, or in your seat, and you're going, come on, come on, almost there.
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This is what creation is doing in anticipation. It says,
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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 of corruption, and obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God.
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Here, Paul gives us another image. Someone subjected to unwilling bondage.
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You've grown up in America, you get the picture. People can't stop talking about it, but Paul says that it hopes, this personification of a slave in bondage, hoping to be set free, is very unlike natural man, who is so depraved that we naturally don't hope for anything, because we don't think we have to hope.
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We're not born hoping for salvation, and I think we need it.
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We don't know anything is wrong, with us at least. Maybe everybody else, but definitely not us.
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Most of the time, one thing that people are very good at is lying to themselves.
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We lie to each other, we lie to ourselves, we cook up lies and deceits to explain away the things of the world, why the world suffers, why the world is the way it is, and we become very, very good at it.
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But while we won't tell the truth, God does. If you look at Isaiah chapter 24 verses 4 and 5, it says, the earth mourns and withers.
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The world languishes and withers. The highest people of the earth languish.
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The earth lies defiled under its inhabitants, for they have transgressed the laws, violated the statutes, and broken the everlasting covenant.
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The fact that the world is broken is made blatantly clear in Scripture, but it's also evident in the world itself, just as God is evident in the world itself.
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The consequences of Adam's sin not only affect us, but everything. Take a walk in the woods.
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If you've ever gone hiking, or taken a stroll, or gone hunting, you've experienced this.
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You may not have noticed it. Take a walk in the woods and see how the animals flee when they hear you for fear of man.
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They run away. We were outside not too many days ago, and we were observing these tiny little birds, these cute, tiny, little finch looking birds.
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I don't know exactly what kind of bird they were, but they were riled up at the thought that there was something else in the yard with their tiny little babies that they were trying to teach how to fly.
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They had all come out of the nest, both parents and the two little chicks, and they were bouncing around in the yard trying to learn how to fly, and we went over and started watching them, and they went nuts because they thought that we were a thing there to eat them.
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Realistically, it wasn't always like that.
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It wasn't always that deer would run from you, squirrels would run from you.
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The animals that we were once in charge of, that we once had dominion over, they now fear us.
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Then there's the issue of predation when an animal eats another animal.
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There are some animals like cats. That's all they can eat, which is odd seeing as cats are really popular with reformed people.
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There's an animal so affected by sin that it only can eat other animals. It's an obligate carnivore, but predation that we participate in.
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Don't get me wrong. I love pork. I love bacon, and I'll be the first in line for a medium -rare steak.
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Be even rarer than medium -rare. I'll probably still eat it, but I want you to think about it for a minute.
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The living creations, these living things that Adam had dominion over, his job was to care for them and take care of them and make them fruitful.
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We eat them. Yes, they're tasty, but it is the exact opposite of what we're supposed to be doing.
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We should be caring for them. Instead, we eat them. Now, this is given to us in Scripture that we can.
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It's not a sin to eat meat, maybe fake meat, but not meat itself, right?
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But we do daily, and we don't even think about it. What Adam, the exact opposite of what the dominion mandate is supposed to be about.
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Then there are the plants, the plants and trees.
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They once brought forth fruit for us to eat, and some trees were just made for us to look at.
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They were beautiful to the eyes. God made them so we could look at them, but the plants that we were supposed to have as food, the majority of them are now poisonous, or they're covered with thorns, or we have to cook the poison out of them before we can eat them.
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How long has it taken? How many thousands of years has it taken for us to produce plants that produce as much food as they do now?
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Thousands and thousands of years of farming, and now a lot of genetic manipulation.
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We can't forget that part. We jumped ahead a little bit there once we figured out how to do that.
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The wheat that you eat is genetically modified. The watermelon that you eat is genetically modified. Look 200 years ago at a painting of a watermelon, and it is this tiny little cantaloupe sized fruit that is chock full of giant black seeds, and there's a little bit of red in there, and now go buy a watermelon.
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We had one the other day. It was delicious. Hardly any seeds whatsoever. Now, we're supposed to make things more fruitful, but look what it took to do it.
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Look at the the thousands of years of hard labor and crossbreeding different strands of wheat or corn and other plants to get them to that point.
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Never mind the genetic manipulation that we do. That's what it took.
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Then we come to the fact that we can't do this thing. We can't make them fruitful without causing other problems.
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We live in a country that produces most of the wheat for most of the world, and how do we do it?
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Monocropping. Now, we can't do it without monocropping. If you're not familiar, that's where you just grow one thing all the time.
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It depletes the soil and ruins it. We had a dust bowl almost a hundred years ago because of it, but what do we do now?
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We run massive amounts of irrigation. We have to do that. We have to supplement the soil with artificial fertilizers, which destroys the soil even more, so at the end of the day, you've only made things worse unless you keep doing what you're doing.
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Then we have to spray them with pesticides to keep the bugs off so that we don't lose that much crop from insects, and what do the pesticides do?
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They don't cook out of the food, so then you have people that are exposed to that.
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So even in the attempt to do the things that we're supposed to be doing, our world is so corrupted by sin that ultimately, those things lead to other issues.
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It's just a different type of suffering, right?
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If you've ever thought about... just explain that really quick. If you've ever left a job and gone to another job, you haven't...
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maybe you've gotten paid more going to that job, but you haven't relieved any suffering. You've just took on a different type of suffering, right?
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You've left the old problems behind, and you've picked up a brand new set of problems that you now have to deal with. They don't go away.
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They're just different, right? Paul continues in verse 22.
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He says, For we know that the whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth until now.
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Does this sound familiar? Part of Matthew. Matthew 24 verses 7 and 8, where Christ says,
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For nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom, and there will be famines and earthquakes in various places.
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All these are but the beginning of birth pains. The re could not be a more perfect personification for creation at this point than a woman in labor.
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Just as a woman, because of the curse, must labor in pain before the glory of beholding her child, so too does the earth before the glory of beholding
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Christ. I'm not sure if you've ever seen a woman in childbirth.
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I've had the pleasure of having had a career as an EMT, and I have a child, so I've seen it quite a few times.
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Not saying that I'm saying I wish I hadn't seen it for the once. Nowadays, we have modern medicine.
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We have things like epidurals and other things that doctors can do to kind of alleviate that pain and that suffering, you know, that goes on.
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Not the back of an ambulance. Nope. Let's look at for just a second at how labor takes place.
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As you have the... I apologize.
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I forget my words. Conception of the child, right? You have eight or nine months, depending.
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Somewhere around nine months, usually. You don't really know the day, do you?
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Not really. You go, well, August 24th, and then the 24th comes, and then the 25th, and then the 26th, or it could be
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August 1st. You don't know, but as it comes along, as the child develops, there are irritations, and there are pains, and there's the kicking, and sick stomach, and all the awfulness that goes on with childbearing up to the point of labor, including false labor.
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And now you have to deal with being tricked by your own body going, huh, we're ready.
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I'm just kidding. Nope, not yet. Okay, but then finally, you come to the point where you start having actual contractions.
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Well, where the woman starts to have actual contractions because there's mostly men in here today.
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I was getting a look. The first contraction starts, and they start slowly, and they're not overbearing as they will be in a couple of hours, but then they come on faster and faster, and progressively, they get worse and worse and tighter and tighter, stronger as time goes on.
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The pain builds. The cramps worsen. You come to the point where she's fully dilated, and you're right there.
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You're ready to go, and it's just like creation. Let's go. We're almost there, and there is a lot of blood, and a lot of screaming, and a lot of your hands almost being broken, and then you see the child.
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You see the absolute beauty of a brand -new living image -bearer.
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In the same way, creation labors in its pain and suffering with eager anticipation, waiting for that moment when
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Christ returns and His people are glorified because creation understands that so will it.
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It will be made new just like us, and just as a mother sets aside the memory of that pain that she just suffered for the glory of her child, creation sets aside all those thousands of years of pain and suffering for the glory of Christ, for the glorification of His people.
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Real quick, it says in Isaiah 65 verse 17, For behold, I create new heavens and a new earth, and the former things shall not be remembered come into mind.
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All the pain, all the suffering the woman just felt forgotten, as if not comparable to the joy that she feels with her child in her arms.
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Just as Paul in verse 18 of Romans chapter 8 says, For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy of being compared with the glory that is to be revealed to us.
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Another thing before we finish to consider is what does pain and suffering tell us?
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What does pain tell us in just our bodies? What does it tell us? We're hurt, right? Something's wrong.
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This is why leprosy is such a horrific disease or having that condition that I can't remember the name of where you don't feel pain at all is such a horrible condition to have.
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On the face of it, you can't feel pain. No, they can't tell when they're hurt.
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So when a wound festers, they have no idea. When it becomes gangrenous and the limb needs to be amputated, they don't know.
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They haven't even looked at it. Just as we experience pain and it lets us know that something is wrong, the fact that the world is suffering, the fact that the world is groaning, that plants don't grow as they should, that animals are eating other animals, that there are hurricanes and earthquakes and volcanoes going off and all these horrific things that are constantly killing people all over the world, we come to understand very early when we're children that doesn't seem right.
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We may not understand that we're wrong, but we understand that hurricanes and disasters are bad.
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It's this creation telling us that something is wrong. It's not supposed to be this way, and as I said before, everyone and everything in the world experiences suffering at one point or another, but keep hope because the pain and the anguish and the suffering that the
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Saints endure is to glorify us, to sanctify us, just so that we are made better.
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The non -believer, this is different. It serves to harden their hearts.
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You take a non -believer and a believer and put them in the same situation, and it will produce two different things.
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For the non -believer, it will harden their heart. For the believer, it will sanctify them and push them closer to God.
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So for now, we must endure, and we will see the world grow darker and worse off as man falls further and further and further into his sin.
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Christ says right there before in Matthew that there will be tribulation and there will be persecution, and we will be hated for his namesake.
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He isn't wrong. At one point in time, there was a line of Saints crucified that went from Rome all the way to Damascus.
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They lined the roads with us, and while we may be in a lull of persecution at the moment, it may be that way once again.
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But we in creation can have hope, because we know for a fact that one day our
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Lord will return, and on that day, well, on that day everyone who is not a
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Saint will be absolutely terrified. To them, it will be the end of the world, which is why it is so important that we fulfill the
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Great Commission, because this not only includes the people in the other city that we don't live in, it includes our neighbors, our friends, our loved ones.
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We don't know who the elect are, so we treat everyone as if they're elect.
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They all need the gospel, and either the Holy Spirit will convict them of their sins, or God will harden their hearts.
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Either way, it is the will of God. We're simply told to tell the truth.
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But on that day when Christ returns, it will be an absolutely glorious day for the
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Saints. With that anticipation that we talked about earlier, that creation waits with, so do we, waiting for the return of our
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Lord for that day when creation is made new, when we are made new.
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Saints, please be encouraged by this as we wait for our
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King, knowing that so does creation. This should bring us a sense of joy and a sense of hope, because one day
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He will return, and for those who do not have
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Christ, this should stir up in you a sense of absolute urgency, because we do not know when
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He will return. There is no one that can tell you you have 34 years, seven months, and eight days.
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It's not going to happen, and if there's someone who is telling you that, then you need to listen to someone else.
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Preferably God through the Scriptures. You don't know.
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We have no idea how long you have. This should create in you a sense of urgency that you should cry out to God to show you the truth, to open your heart, to open your eyes, to forgive you for the things that you've done.
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All of us, all of us have offended Him, and He has been merciful and provided a way for us to be redeemed through faith in Christ and His completed work on the cross.
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If you pray to Him and you ask Him to forgive you, He promises that He will.
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It's genuine. He will take that heart of stone that you have, and He will replace it with a heart of flesh, and when
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Christ returns, you will not have to face the wrath of God like everyone else.
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You will be with the rest of the saints, having Christ as your King, your mediator, and you will get to watch as creation and ourselves are made new, because He took all of the punishment that you deserve.
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I'll leave you with Isaiah 11, verses 6 -9. It says,
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And the wolf shall dwell with the lamb, and a bird shall lie down with the young goat, and the calf and the lion and the fattened calf together, and a little child shall lead them.
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The cow and the bear shall graze, their young shall lie down together, and the lion shall eat straw like the ox.
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The nursing child shall play over the hole of the cobra, and the weaned child shall put his hand in the adder's den.
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They shall not hurt or destroy in my holy mountain, for the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the
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Lord, as the waters cover the seas. Thank you.