June 4, 2017 Suffering With Hope by Pastor Josh Sheldon

Romans 8:16-25 and the Key Verse on Present Suffering

We'll turn in your Bibles again, please, to Romans chapter 8 and read to you starting at verse 16. We'll go down to 25, Romans 8, 16 to 25. The Spirit himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God.

And if children, then heirs, heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ, provided we suffer with him, in order that we may also be glorified with him. I'll pause for just a moment. The next verse, verse 18, is really the key verse to the preaching that is to come in a few moments.

For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us. For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God.

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 decay and obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God.

For we know that the whole creation has been groaning together in the pain of childbirth until now. And not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for the adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies.

For in this hope we were saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope, for who hopes for what he sees? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience. This is the word of God. May God bless the reading of his word and now the preaching of his word and its hearing.

Suffering as a Fact of Life in a Fallen World

The subject that Paul is speaking of here is really suffering as a fact of life. Suffering just as a part and parcel of what it means to live as Christians in this fallen world. It is a suffering existence that we have.

And the fact that God will one day redeem even this physical, this created world, just seems to make it a little bit more intolerable. That the suffering is just a little bit more intense because of what we look ahead to by faith, by looking at the promises of God and what this is all going to become.

And as Paul says, by comparison, a comparison that really cannot be made. Notice he gives no metaphor, no allegorical type comparison. He just says it cannot be compared. And that fact that is just so inexplicably better than what is now, makes us a suffering existence in the here and now.

You know, there are times when life here is so wonderful, so joyous, when God blesses us, when he answers our prayers, when he brings together the brethren and we sing together with one accord. Sometimes it just fits together in a special way as the spirit moves and we say, what could be better than this?

God has blessed us in this moment. And so we praise God for that. And there's other times when the world around us is so apparently not what it is supposed to be that all we can do is cry out, come Lord Jesus, let's get this over with.

I cannot stand this anymore. I cannot suffer like this any longer. Yet here we are today today in this place, in this time, still here, still suffering, still waiting. So it's suffering. It's suffering.

And how do we endure this? How do we endure this suffering? How do we get through it? Well, God willing, we will answer that this morning. I believe that's what Paul answers for us. It's really this question.

How do we get by? How do we stand it? God willing, we will find that answer in these verses this morning. And by that, we'll be strengthened by God as we hear what he has to say about this. Much more important than anything I would have to say.

Hope That Makes Suffering Tolerable

Suffering made tolerable. Suffering is made tolerable by the hope of our ultimate redemption. So wait patiently, therefore. This is the answer. Wait patiently as you suffer in this world, knowing that God will do as he has promised.

Not just bear up stoically under it. Bear up. Wait patiently. Endure all things with the hope, with the sure knowledge that God's certain word says it's going to be better. It's going to be made right.

We could think of when Paul was accused of turning the world upside down. How was he turning the world upside down? By preaching the gospel. By preaching Jesus Christ and him crucified and risen again.

He wasn't turning the world upside down. He was making the world upside right. Because only the gospel can accomplish this. Our key verse was verse 18. I consider the sufferings of this present time not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us.

And there it is in a nutshell. There is our answer. Whatever we encounter in this world, no matter how bad it is, cannot be compared with what is in store for God's children. It's a matter of faith. It's part of the Holy Spirit's testimony to us.

This whole chapter 8, as we've noticed, before chapter 8 came along in Romans, the Holy Spirit himself, the second person of the Trinity, or excuse me, third person of the Trinity, was only mentioned a couple of times in the whole book.

And now all of a sudden Paul flourishes us with this testimony of the Holy Spirit's testimony to us. And how he speaks to our spirits and strengthens us in this current world. And now Paul acknowledges for us explicitly this world in which there is so much suffering.

And we get through it by looking ahead with faith to the promises of God. It's a matter of hope. It's a matter of hope. Without hope it's almost impossible, if not totally impossible, to bear up under any kind of a hardship.

Without hope one can barely live. You know one of the most effective techniques that interrogators have when they are questioning a subject is they give him no hope as to when it's going to end. Because if you tell him, well we're only going to talk to you for 37 minutes, well you can look at his watch or you can time it in your head, you can kind of count it off, there's hope it's going to end.

But they don't tell him that. He has no such hope, no such positive expectation. And so it makes them crack, if you will, all the earlier, less conceptually than that. Viktor Frankl, an Auschwitz survivor, he wrote afterwards about how he and the other prisoners there could almost always, in fact with almost unerring accuracy, tell when a man was going to not survive the night.

They could see in his body language, in his speech, in his eyes, there's just something about him that told the others this man had lost hope. He had no hope of surviving, no hope of anything better. This was it, Auschwitz.

And when a person lost their hope, they died. And Frankl said they could tell with unerring accuracy, almost prescience, though I use the word guardedly. Once they got used to it, once they saw the vacant look, the non-hope look of a person, they could tell.

We need hope. Hope is part of our nature. The desire to know that something is going to be better than what it was, that we have something to look ahead to. We live now, we live in these lives right now, in three time frames, all kind of coming in at once and defining the moment for us.

I mean, there's the present, there's a stimulus coming at us now, there are things that are happening to us now, the present realm. We analyze this according to the past, don't we? Is this good or is this bad?

Well, what was yesterday like? What was last year like? And so forth. And then there's the future. Mankind looks forward to the future. We do that by nature. God wove us together that way, where even if we're satisfied with what God has done for us today, we do, can we not admit, wonder about tomorrow?

Now, James says, Lord willing, we will do this or that tomorrow. But still, we do have that impetus to be looking ahead that way, a hope by nature, looking forward. Technically speaking, though, any prospect for tomorrow is technically a hope.

It's just an anticipation of what is to come. The way we use the word generally, though, and the way it's used here in the scripture is positive. The expected outcome will be better than how things are.

Suffering With Christ and the Christian Worldview

Now, if you look again at verse 18, and we've grown accustomed to this as we've gone through this book of Romans, there's that word again, that for, F-O-R, for, the Greek word gar, that connects one thought that is coming to the thought that just preceded.

So for, at the head of verse 18, connects us to verses 16 and 17, which is where we started our reading. The Spirit himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God. And if children, then heirs, heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ, provided we suffer with him, in order that we may also be glorified with him.

See, what is suffering about? Is it just that things are bad and it's hard? No. Suffering aligns us with Jesus Christ. Suffering aligns us with God's Son. He is the one we suffer with. He is the one we will finally be glorified with.

Now, suffering doesn't earn us anything. Jesus earned us everything, he and he alone. But suffering, here the term is very comprehensive. It includes persecution. It includes disease. It includes sin, death.

It includes conflict of all sorts. It might even include bad weather. All is from sin, and all is cause for suffering. And it aligns us with Jesus Christ and his suffering. Now, we need to take a moment and explain a bit about this.

Especially when we think of Jesus Christ and his suffering, and how we're aligned with that. We need to be sure we understand what suffering is. I said just a moment ago, it's a very comprehensive term.

It's a way to encapsulate it all would be to say, we're suffering with everything that's just not right in this world. Where right is defined with how God had originally intended it. And so, every blade of grass that is not in line with God's original creation, when he pronounced it very good, is part of that suffering.

That suffering is being able to look at it and say, we know because we're God's children that it's just not right. We suffer along with Jesus. It's not just his cross that is in view. It is there, but it's not just that.

He suffered, Jesus suffered, or he experienced all the ill effects of the world that we do. He lived as we do. God in him became flesh. And it's very important that we understand that Jesus Christ, God in the flesh, was a man.

A man who faced everything that we face, and in this world, suffered all the things that aren't right, just as we do today, some 2 ,000 years after he actually walked on this earth. If he lived today, he would with us breathe air that is less pure than it ought to be.

He would see billboards that ought not to be seen. He would hear language, even against his father's name, that no one should hear or utter. Suffering, as Paul means it here, is everything wrong with the world, everything that's just not right.

A rose less aromatic to a word less helpful, an abused animal to mass murder, all of this and more is what Paul means here by suffering. It can include persecution, but brethren, don't limit it to persecution.

Just think, in the simplest terms, everything in this world that's not right. How do we define what's right? Well, we have the description of what is to come. William read to you some of that from Isaiah 35.

Lord willing, we will read some more passages that are similar. And we have a detailed description of what it was before sin. That's what's right. And in between is the suffering. To suffer with Christ, it requires us, really, if we're going to suffer in the way that I'm describing it here, it means to have his view of things.

It's having a worldview that sees that the world is just out of kilter. It's just wrong. It's like having a sweater that's ill-made so that one sleeve is too short and the waist is too tight and the other part's flopping around.

It's just, it's a sweater, but it's not really functioning the way a sweater ought to function. Peter reminds us that this home or this world is not our home. He calls us exiles. He calls us sojourners.

David laments that he became a stranger to my brothers and alien to my mother's sons. Suffering with Christ, it proves our sonship because it comes from our having been translated from citizenship here to citizenship in heaven.

And part of that is taking Jesus' or God's worldview, if you will. How does God see things? What is God's view of this globe on which we live? Is it right? Is everything operating the way he had originally intended?

If we have God's worldview, if we have Jesus' worldview, we have to look at it and say, no, this thing is just all out of sorts. It's not working right. The hope we have of what is to come is not just better than this.

It is so fundamentally different that this whole terrestrial ball is odd, misshapen, dark, dingy, insufferably out of rhythm with God's intentions. It's disorienting the way carnival mirrors are. It's like those deep dreams that we have that even while you're in the dream, you know it's a dream, but you can't stop dreaming all the same.

It's just weird. It doesn't make sense. And you know that it's a dream. You know that this isn't reality. You can't come out of it. We suffer in this world because we just don't fit in, because we see things the way they are.

We see things through God's eyes. There was one who once did fit in. There was one who did fit this world once, and that was Adam, and that was before his sin. And after that, God's people have been sort of an odd man out.

If you trace in the early days in Genesis, once God pronounced the curse, he pronounced the difference between the seed of the serpent and the seed of the woman. And it's the seed of the woman that's always been sort of the misfit in the world, here in this world, but never quite fitting.

That suit or that sweater doesn't quite fit in one place too tight, in another place too loose. And this is God's call to God's people, to be different, to be fundamentally different in their thought process, their worldview, how we see things, how we view things, how we analyze things.

And if we see things through God's eyes, this world is a place where we suffer because it's just so not right, just so not within God's will as he had originally intended it. Israel was called to be different.

Read through the book of Leviticus sometime and see how often said that this law, this rule, this precept, this requirement upon God's covenant people is given for no other reason than you don't be like them.

And who are them at the time? We're speaking of the Philistines, the Canaanites, the people of the land as they're so often called. In the book of Joshua, those are the ones who were destroyed, the people of the land.

Did Israel suffer seeing what happened there? I believe they did as they saw the idols being worshipped, they saw children being literally sacrificed to a God called Molech. All these ungodly, pagan, awful practices is cause for suffering.

And the more they saw of them, the more they realized that they don't fit in, that they shouldn't fit in, that they're not supposed to fit in. It's a suffering to see human beings made in God's image living in that way, living in accord with the fallen world instead of discord with it.

Because the world view was that this is the way to be. Israel unfortunately too often fell in with those practices. But we're not going to go into a history of Israel this morning. The original call from God to that people was, come out of them, my people.

Be different from them. And here are the rules that will keep you different. Follow these rules and don't be like that. Too often they succumb to the world view of the others. The point is God has always called his people out.

Suffering in a World of Death, Injustice, and Moral Confusion

So we suffer. We suffer and we suffer and we suffer. We suffer in a world where mass murder is called reproductive freedom, women's health, right to choose. What is it? It's mass murder. And we look upon that and we're just aghast.

Is there anything we can do about it? We pray and we do pray in this place. But in the very practical sense and the sense of getting out there in the streets and stopping it. Now all we can do is pray and fall down our faces before a sovereign God.

Do we suffer in this world? They're murdering the innocent and celebrating it. And we suffer because of this. We suffer in a world where suicide is legislated and called death with dignity. Where men and women who put their lives as it were into becoming doctors, one of the highest and most rigorous professions.

And what are they making them do? Convincing them that they ought to do. Or in some cases, I don't think it's come to that quite yet. But in this world where we suffer, I don't think it's far off requiring them to end life.

You know, one of our couples here, their son has just graduated from medical school. Medical school. What he went and he put so much time, so much effort, incredible amount of effort in order to preserve and improve human life.

We suffer in a world that says, no, now you can use your skills to end it. All this celebrated. We just don't fit in. We shouldn't fit in. We're a bunch of Alice's trying to make sense of Wonderland. Looking at that Cheshire Cat and that crazy image and trying to figure it out.

We're Dorothy living the dream in the land of Oz where straw men come off of stakes and start dancing and singing and going along the road to Oz. It's just all wrong. It's just insufferably wrong. And the question is, how do we endure it?

Does this sound like a very negative message? Like, oh, everything's just wrong. The world's out of sorts. And we're not because we've been redeemed. Therefore, we see how bad it is. We're just going to suffer and suffer and suffer.

No, we need to endure this. And we need to endure this in a way that brings glory to the name of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, with whom we suffer. The end of the reading had this, but if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience.

The verse just before that ties us waiting to faith. For in this hope we were saved. So there's our salvation. This hope we were saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what he sees?

That's pretty easy to understand. I don't have to draw a lot of examples for that. We hope for something. When you have it, you stop hoping for it. We hope to see Jesus Christ. When we see him as he is, we stop hoping for it, because there he will be.

That's pretty easy to understand. How do we endure patiently? How do we go through this suffering world with this patience, with this endurance that Paul speaks of here? Well, we endure patiently because we have a glory yet to be revealed to us.

Some translations have in us. The preposition is a little bit indefinite. The glory to be revealed to us, the glory to be revealed in us, in either case that glory is our final redemption, our final adoption.

We live in two streams of history, if you will. In one side we have the done deal of the cross, our redemption, therefore having been justified by faith, we have peace with God, a done, completed act, and yet one that is going to be again completed.

We are adopted now. We studied that a week or so ago. We have been adopted as God's children, and yet we wait for the redemption. You have been redeemed, and yet there's a redemption to come. We endure patiently because we have this faith, because God has in us, witnessed by his spirit, shown us the promises are real.

He has kept his word, and will keep it again. We have a glory yet to be revealed in us. Think of that. If you know the Lord Jesus Christ, think of the glory that's been revealed to you. We speak of the cross where God's glory was magnified as nowhere else in all history.

We speak of the cross of Jesus Christ where he, the only sinless man to ever live, suffered for our sins. We speak of the glory of God, and the mercy of God, who by his spirit regenerates a soul, and gives you faith to repent.

And this shows you that this repentance, focused in on the cross of Jesus Christ, brings salvation, eternal life. Think of the glory you already know. And then Paul says that we can stand this world because of a glory that is yet to be revealed to us, or in us.

He speaks of our final salvation, the redemption of our bodies. You have redemption now. The Holy Spirit witnesses to you that you have redemption now. But there's going to come a time when God, for the glory of his name, is going to glorify us, our bodies.

We will be like Jesus is now. There's a glory to come that is a sustaining glory, or a sustaining hope. A glory that God has revealed to you already in the cross. And so we are sure because of what God has done in time, in space, in history, and revealed to us by his spirit, and opened our eyes to, we know that the glory yet to come will come.

And this gets us through now. It's hope. It's hope. Now we don't know when this will end. So my little analogy of the interrogation kind of falls apart pretty quickly there because we don't know when the Lord will return.

We don't know when he's going to recreate creation, but we know he will. And we know when he's done with that it will be restored to his purposes. That's our hope. People look all kinds of places for hope.

I do believe it's part of human nature to want to have hope, to know that tomorrow is going to be something we can anticipate as better than now. People look everywhere for hope, don't they? I can never quite get out of my mind the Heaven's Gate cult.

This happened many, many years ago, 1520, I can't remember exactly how long ago it was. But they had this hope. Their hope was that they committed suicide in just the right way, in just the right time, and did, oh whatever it was, they did, that they would come back to life on a comet, which I believe was Halley's Comet, and that was their hope.

That was their hope, to come back to life and have salvation eternally on this comet. It sticks in my mind because most of these people who were in that cult had that hope, were very well-educated professional people.

Hope is such a need that even people intelligent like that could fall for something like that. Most of the world's hope is what? It's a Darwinian fatalism, a fantasy really, but a fatalism that has hope only in this life, no better than Heaven's Gate.

You see, our hope is in God. Our hope is a hope that's been confirmed to us by what He has already done for us in Christ. Our hope is not some crazy notion about comets. Our hope is because we're something other than just a random collection of molecules and proteins and acids and somehow, poof, time and chance became life.

No wonder the world falls into the things that it falls into. What hope is that? They talk about the value of the human, the value of the individual, and what's your value? You're just a mass of chemicals that over gazillions of years became what you are.

Aren't you supposed to feel grand about that? That's not hope at all. That's the worst kind of Darwinian fatalism. Again, we don't want to devolve into a lecture on history, but the misuses of Darwin's theories, his ideas, the apex of their misuse and where they could lead again and again and again, in God's grace, hasn't happened here yet.

Just look at Nazi Germany and their philosophical and ethical bases. It was this Darwinian hope. No hope at all. Our hope is something different. Our hope is in a God who has confirmed his word by definite acts that we can point to in history and then by his spirit witnessing to our spirits to assure us that these things are true and real.

Not some crazy thing about comets, not some wild ideas that take millions and millions and billions of years and time and chance and all of a sudden there you are, hoping a God who spoke and when he spoke all that is became.

That's a real hope. That's a hope that gets us through. That's a hope when we look at the the mass murder occurring today and all the other things we could go on and on and on and point to all the ills of the world, but this is a hope that sustains us.

Because brethren, what's happening now is not God's eternal will. It's something different. Suffering comes to us from having the mind of Christ. He suffered the cross because of the joy set before him.

We read that in Hebrews 12 too. Have his mind. If Jesus Christ could suffer the cross because on the other side of the cross was God's promise of his resurrection, his ascension, his glorification. If we could apply that to ourselves and have his mind, then what are we trusting in?

Just as he did. The promise of God. God would not leave his son to corruption. That's what Peter preached at Pentecost from Psalm 16. He would not allow his holy one to see corruption. Christ said, therefore into your hands I commit my spirit.

And God kept his word. Have that mind that looks at the promises of God and says because God says he has better in store for me, the other side of that cross, small c, not Jesus cross, the other side of that cross that we must bear in this world.

Because I know it's going to be better, because he saw Jesus through just as he promised, because he's seen me through so many times, I know that the glory yet to come, this creation that he's going to recreate is worth waiting for and cannot be compared to what we have now.

Creation Groaning for Redemption

This is something that gets us through, is it not? Look again at verse 19. I want to speak about the creation. I want to speak about this physical world and how it's working and being worked in parallel with man's spiritual state.

Look at verse 19 again please. For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God. 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 his bondage to decay and obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God.

For we know that the whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth until now. We speak much of Adam's sin. Going back to chapter 5 of this book where Paul really had a great focus on Adam.

We've talked about it quite a lot and in general we talk about Adam's original sin and what that meant and why we inherit sin and how that became part and parcel of the human condition, all sinned in Adam.

But you know when Adam sinned, he introduced more than just sin and death into the world as if that weren't enough. As if that weren't enough, he dragged down with him all that God had made for him. We're speaking of the created order.

He subjected it to futility. Now that's God. Better said God because of Adam's sin. God subjected it to futility. Now this is back to the original creation account. If you turn back in your Bibles please to chapter 3 of Genesis.

Chapter 3 starting at verse 17. And this of course is God confronting Adam and Eve. What is this you have done? And God having heard their confession, he now pronounces judgment. And to Adam he said, because you have listened to the voice of your wife and have eaten of the tree of which I commanded you, you shall not eat of it.

Cursed is the ground because of you. 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. By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread till you return to the ground for out of it you were taken.

For you are dust and to dust you shall return. What had been pronounced very good by none other than God, what had been very good was now cursed. Where the ground had once willingly brought forth great bounty, now it was a begrudging kind of cooperation.

As though the world itself had to be forced to comply with Adam's efforts and now by extension ours. See there's a direct correspondence between earth's physical condition and man's spiritual state. As man stepped out of God's design, so also the ground followed after him.

And here we have the root cause of all suffering. Whether it is the created order that we think of or mankind, it is sin that did it. It is sin that brought it on. It is by sin that death came and it was by sin that the world was subjected to futility.

It's because of Adam's sin that the world said, I'm just not going to grow things as easily for you. It's going to be harder for you to eat. It's going to be harder for animals to grow. It's no longer what it was.

It couldn't be. How could a sinful man live in a perfect world? The world was made originally as a temple of God. What's the temple? The place where man and God meet together. And that's what the earth, the garden, first was.

But with man now unable to meet with God, with man now unable to stand before God on his own, the earth could no longer be what it was. It's more than just that Adam didn't deserve it. It's that things wouldn't correspond any longer.

You'd have sinful man gaining all the benefits of sinless man. And that could never be. Oh, Adam introduced more than sin and death. Every thistle is because of Adam. Every weed. My friend Mike Kelly and I used to backpack quite a lot.

Kevin here, we were on the great epic on the John Muir trail. There were times when we ran into mosquitoes. And my friend Mike is more radically against mosquitoes than anybody I've ever known. I don't know anybody that likes them.

He likes them less than anybody. And we'll go on and on and on about how they had to have come with Adam's sin. That's a little bit tongue-in-cheek, but the point is right. That everything in this world that is hard, that's uncooperative with us, that brings any harm at all, is because of that.

Excuse me. There's a great debate today being waged about what we now call climate change. First it was global warming, now it's climate change. I'm not going to argue for or against it at all. If we accept that climate change is having a damaging effect, that the climate is changing, and we're seeing some damage, and it even could put to risk the continued habitability of the world, which is a premise I neither agree or disagree with.

But the debate boils down to whether it is anthropocentric, meaning man-caused. We cause it, by extension we can remedy it, or if it's part of a larger and uncontrollable natural pattern in the climate.

Well the question is for the Christian, as all questions of any importance must be, it's a theological one. That's a word I throw out here quite a lot. Theological. Theo means God. Logical means study, so the study of God.

What does God say about this subject? What does God say about any question? Well Romans 8, 19 to 22 would say that everything in the world that is not good is our fault. It is anthropocentric. It's our fault when in Adam we sinned.

It is our fault. Adam brought the world into the state of sin. Well God did, but because of Adam. And we were in Adam when he sinned. In Adam all sinned. We know that from chapter 5 of Romans. So yes, global warming, if it's happening, global warming, if it's having a negative effect, it's our fault.

It is anthropocentric. But that's where my agreement with many people ends. You see all that is wrong in the world, from man's sin to the world's corruptions, is not waiting for humanity to gather together and make a solution.

Because that would just be another version of Babel in Genesis 11, wouldn't it? Where we gather together, and we're going to figure it out. We're going to build a high tower, and we're going to come up to God and do what only God can do.

What the world is waiting for, if these movements in the weather and everything else that we hear about, if they are really having that effect, if they're having that bad effect that they're saying, then what are we waiting for for that to be corrected?

We're waiting for the revealing of the sons of God. We're waiting for our final adoption and redemption. The revealing of who we are as Christ calls us back to himself. And we'll stand there revealed, and then the world can be brought back into its proper state.

It's waiting for us. We are the first fruits. It will follow after us just as it followed after Adam. Adam sinned, and the world followed. When God reveals his glory in us, and our salvation and adoption, our redemption is made final, the world will follow that as well.

You see, the whole creation groans under the weight of its unwilling enmity against its stewards, and will do so until we who are in Christ are finally redeemed. And then the pangs of childbirth, as Paul puts it, will end, and a glorious new creation will take hold.

A glorious new creation that will, as it was originally for Adam, before Genesis 3, before the tree, before the sin, before eating the fruit, before all that, when the world did what it was supposed to do.

Now man worked. It wasn't like he just walked out and got things for free. Work is a blessing from God. But the world cooperated in a way that we've never even seen in this life. What God did, he did in the hope that it would one day be set free from bondage to decay.

Now we know God doesn't hope, not the way we usually think of that word. He doesn't hope for something. He's speaking of his knowledge, his predetermined purposes. Man before sin was not subject to decay.

Decay is a consequence of sin. It's the constant incursion of sickness and death. So also the earth at first brought forth, it stood ready to correspond to mankind for whom it was intended. It was day after day pronounced good.