Let’s imagine being in a situation where we’re eagerly waiting for somebody to bring us something really good. You know the holidays are coming up pretty soon – before you know it Halloween will be here and then Thanksgiving and then Christmas and then the pinnacle of it all: that great American holiday Super Bowl Sunday.
I remember when I was a kid about this time of year I would start to get anxious about Christmas. My dad had a kind of a weird sense of humor and every year we would go through a ritual of expectation management. It would start with my dad solemnly announcing that we were broke and there wasn’t going to be any Christmas this year. There would be no presents. He would keep this up over the weeks and days leading up to Christmas, and then on Christmas Eve there would be one final push to convince us all that there would be no presents. And then all of a sudden we would find a pile of presents under the tree and we would go through the whole ritual of eagerly ripping open gifts and feeling the excitement of having a lot of new things. Granted, probably very few of these things had much very much value, we were not a wealthy family, but what was missed in quality was made up for in quantity.
Of course this puts forward a vision of Christmas that is essentially materialistic. I’m sure that now I don’t approve of that outlook, in fact I am repelled by it; opposed to it. Because, as you will find as we get closer to it I am sure, I believe that what our material culture celebrates as “Christmas” in fact has almost nothing to do with the gift of God in Jesus Christ. But you can imagine that this whole scenario I just painted for you would lead to a lot of anxiety in us kids. Not that we ever believed there would be no presents. None of us ever thought for a moment that he would actually go through with his threat. We had history as our guide. There always were presents. But we were anxious because of eager expectation. We couldn’t wait for Christmas to come so that we could dig into that pile of toys.
Can you imagine what that feels like? That eager expectation? Have you ever felt like that?
In today’s reading in Romans the apostle Paul brings up that idea in terms of the whole of creation eagerly awaiting something. Let’s go ahead and read the passage and then we’ll look at how Paul uses this idea.
18 I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us. 19 For the creation waits in eager expectation for the children of God to be revealed. 20 For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope 21 that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the freedom and glory of the children of God.
22 We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time. 23 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. 24 For in this hope we were saved. But hope that is seen is no hope at all. Who hopes for what they already have? 25 But if we hope for what we do not yet have, we wait for it patiently.
26 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. 27 And 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 8:18-27 NIV).
Expecting
Now let’s look at verse 19 where Paul writes “For the creation waits in eager expectation for the children of God to be revealed” That phrase “waits in eager expectation” is one word in the Greek: apokaradokia. Apokaradokia. Let’s say it together: “apo-kara-dokia.” It is a compound word that literally means to lift the head and look into the distance. Like standing on tippy toes and looking for something to be coming. To look anxiously for something good to come into view. Like waiting for Christmas.
But in this passage Paul is telling us that the creation has been doing this. Eagerly expecting … something? What? Verse 20 tells us that the creation is eagerly waiting to be “liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the freedom and glory of the children of God.” (Romans 8:21 NIV) What does this mean?
Groaning
Now we have to consider this within the context of the overall argument of Paul’s letter to the Romans up to this point. We will recall that the first three chapters of Romans essentially laid out the dilemma of both the Jewish and the Gentile Christians in the Roman Church. The dilemma was that “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:23). No one is able to live in right relationship with God because of sin, and therefore all are subject to God’s wrath. What is God’s wrath? It’s not God up in heaven throwing rocks at us, it is God letting us do as we please, and suffer the destructive consequences of that. The consequences are corruption and death. What does Paul say in today’s scripture? “Frustration.” “Bondage to decay.” All of this as the result of the sin of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden.
What we have not yet considered but nevertheless follows naturally is the idea that not only was mankind corrupted by that sin; all of creation was made subject to frustration and decay. In God’s judgment on that sin we read in Genesis Chapter 3,
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.’ (Genesis 3:17-18 ESV).
So Paul talks about groaning. He says that all of creation has been groaning under the weight of that sin. We see that creation became corrupted between the Garden where God’s first children could have whatever they needed without effort, to the exile where man has to work hard to eke out an existence from the hard ground under the big hard sun. Even worse than that, we see that as mankind became more efficient at extracting resources from the earth there reached a tipping point where now instead of man using the earth for sustenance and caring for the earth as stewards of God’s creation, mankind is destroying the earth out of his own carelessness and greed.
This is kind of a little detour from my main point but relevant nonetheless as an example of how creation groans under the weight of mankind’s sin. How many of you have heard of the “Great Pacific Garbage Patch?” It is an enormous area of the Pacific Ocean where the garbage that is allowed to go out to sea has gathered. You can see here in this picture how large it is and it’s approximate location.
This is what it looks like. It is a huge deposit particularly of plastic waste. Plastic doesn’t biodegrade quickly, so it just floats around in the middle of the ocean. But it’s not harmless. Because it is shiny and colorful it is attractive to birds and other sea life. Often birds will try to feed it to their children.
So aside from being ugly, it’s destructive. And of course this flies in the face of God’s command to mankind to be stewards of the earth. So here I think we see a pretty effective illustration of creation groaning under the weight of mankind’s sin. If you were under this kind of stress and you knew there was relief coming, you would be on your tippy toes waiting for it, wouldn’t you?
Paul says that we also groan under the weight of sin. It doesn’t take much insight to realize this is true. Think about the last time you did something you knew you were not supposed to do. Even if you didn’t get caught, it weighed you down, didn’t it? Sin puts a shadow on your heart. If we did something and got away with it we might feel a sense of relief at getting away with it. But deeper than that there will be the weight of guilt. And if we do get caught, then all of that weight comes into sharp focus. And don’t tell me you don’t know what it feels like to groan under that weight. Again, when you are weighted down by guilt, if you knew that relief was coming, you would be on your toes eagerly searching for it. You couldn’t wait for it to get here.
And finally Paul says that the Spirit also groans. So there’s a lot of groaning going on. But the Spirit’s groaning is different from the creation’s groaning, and ours. Our groaning is suffering under the weight of sin; the Spirit’s groaning is lifting us up out of our sin to give us the ability to conform to God’s will. Paul writes that the Spirit helps us, and that the Spirit intercedes for us. These are two different things, so we’re going to spend a little time thinking about each: helping, and interceding.
Helping
Here’s another fun word that Paul uses. In verse 26 Paul writes that “the Spirit helps us in our weakness.” But the word in the original Greek is συναντιλαμβάνεται (sun-anti-lambanetai). Let’s say it. “Soon – anti – lambanetai.” This is another compound word that when you take it apart has the meaning of someone coming along with us and working with us to carry a weight. So when we think of the Spirit helping us, we might think of the Spirit working side by side with us. But it’s really more intimate than that. It’s more like the Spirit filling us up and giving us power. In a way we can imagine ourselves as machines that are empty of fuel, and so stuck, or dead. “And you were dead in the trespasses and sins in which you once walked…” Paul tells us elsewhere. (Ephesians 2:1-2 ESV). The Spirit is the fuel that we are filled with that allows us to move again. He is the life that allows us to live again.
Now, please be patient with me as I try to connect this with the bigger story of salvation. Big picture. God has a plan to bring the creation back into right relationship with himself. He starts with Abraham and tells Abraham that he will bless all of the peoples of the earth through him. The promise of restoration is through Abraham’s chosen heir. This is first Isaac, and then Jacob (Israel), and then through his twelve sons, from which we get the Twelve Tribes of Israel. The descendants of the twelve sons (the Patriarchs), find refuge in Egypt, but eventually become enslaved there, and groan for relief.
It is Moses who is chosen to lead the people of Israel out of Egypt, but it is not by the power of Moses that the Israelites are able to escape Pharaoh’s armies, but by God’s power. You will recall that the Israelites were led by a pillar of fire, which we understand is the Lord God Almighty himself.
After the escape from Egypt, the pillar of fire leads the people through the desert of Sinai. God gives Moses the Ten Commandments and the Law, and the people entered into covenant with the Lord. A covenant is a deal. In this case, the deal was that the Israelites agreed to live out the law and in return they would be blessed in the land of promise.
So the Israelites thought of themselves as and were God’s chosen people. But we must never forget what they were chosen for. They were never chosen just so that they could be blessed, they were blessed so that they could be “a light to the nations.” (Is. 49:6). By living the law, they would present such a compelling picture of the characteristics of God, righteousness, justice, and love, that they would draw all people of all nations to Him. And thus God’s promise to Abraham would be fulfilled. All nations would be blessed through him.
Now, it was never expected that the people of Israel would be able to accomplish this restoration by themselves. Even as the Israelites wandered in the desert waiting to be led to the Promised Land, God gave them instructions for building the Tabernacle that would give him a place to live in the midst of his people. So you can see in this illustration a model of what the tabernacle would have looked like based on the descriptions found in the Book of Exodus.
You can see that God has created a place for himself where he could live in the midst of his people and not be defiled buy the sin of the people in the Holy of Holies. The Holy of Holies was a place that only the High Priest could enter, and only once a year. And, interestingly, when the High Priest entered the Holy of Holies he had a rope tied to his ankle. This was in case he died while in there, he could be pulled out by the rope, because no one else was allowed to go in.
So God remained untouchable, out of the reach of people because of the sins of the people. God said to Moses, “you cannot see my face, for man shall not see me and live.” (Exodus 33:20 ESV) And yet God still wanted to live in the midst of his people and to guide his people. So he had to erect a barrier. Still, you can see that God’s plan was to be in the midst of his people. Emmanuel: “God with us.”
The temple in Jerusalem built by Solomon had essentially the same layout as the tabernacle. So you can see in this illustration that the floor plan for Solomon’s temple contained a place called the Holy of Holies which was where God’s presence was. The curtain between the Holy Place and the Most Holy place was the barrier between man and God created by sin.
In the book of Matthew we read the death of Jesus on the cross recorded this way, “And Jesus cried out again with a loud voice and yielded up his spirit. And behold, the curtain of the temple was torn in two, from top to bottom….” (Matthew 27:50-51 ESV) That curtain was the curtain that guarded the Holy of Holies, signifying that the sin of man had been paid for by the death of Jesus and there was no longer a barrier between man and God.
Now we need to be really clear that the Holy of Holies was not just symbolic. God’s presence actually was in the tabernacle and the temple. We read in Exodus where God’s glory enters the Holy of Holies at the dedication of the tabernacle, and we read in 2 Kings where God’s glory enters the Holy of Holies in the temple. God does not want to live symbolically in the midst of his people. He wants to live physically in the midst of his people. He wants to live with us in history.
Well, we all know that the Israelites did enter the Promised Land but that they never were able to live up to the covenant. From the very beginning it was impossible to tell the difference between the so-called chosen people and the pagans who surrounded them. And eventually, after sending a number of prophets to warn them, God revoked the covenant, scattered the people of Israel, sacked Jerusalem, destroyed the temple, and sent the people of Judah into exile in Babylon. The people were eventually able to return and rebuild the temple, but there is no record of God’s glory entering the new temple. In the book of the prophet Ezekiel we see the glory leaving the temple that was destroyed, but we never see the glory of God returning to the new temple in the Old Testament, either the one that was rebuilt, or the expanded and completely remodeled temple of Jesus’ day.
When do we see the glory of God returning? Does God no longer want to live with his people? The answer is that God yearns to be with us so much that he himself came to do what we could not do in the person of Jesus Christ. When we hear of Jesus walking the earth as God incarnate (in the flesh), we are hearing of God living in the midst of his people, elbow to elbow, as he has always wanted to do; as he did in the Garden of Eden, in the tabernacle, in the temple, and now in the person of Jesus Christ.
That’s mind blowing. That the creator of the universe wants to hang out with a bunch of misfits like us. But here’s something even more mind-blowing than that. In the gospel according to John, as Jesus is telling his disciples that he’s about to be killed, he tells them that this is actually to their advantage. He says, “But very truly I tell you, it is for your good that I am going away. Unless I go away, the Advocate will not come to you; but if I go, I will send him to you.” (John 16:7) Jesus is talking about the Holy Spirit, sometimes called the Paraclete. In some translations it’s Advocate, like, here, in others it’s “helper.” But the Greek word is another compound word παράκλητος consisting of two words: para, which means alongside, and kaleo, which means called. Called alongside. The Holy Spirit is the one who is called alongside, to help and guide us.
Now let’s look at Acts chapter two at an event that we call Pentecost. It’s after the crucifixion and the resurrection and Jesus has returned to heaven and told his followers to wait. So they’re sitting around in a room in Jerusalem filled with fear and agony, groaning, you might say, and then all of a sudden this happens:
2 Suddenly a sound like the blowing of a violent wind came from heaven and filled the whole house where they were sitting. 3 They saw what seemed to be tongues of fire that separated and came to rest on each of them. 4 All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues x as the Spirit enabled them. (Acts 2:2-4 NIV).
This, my friends, is the glory of God returning to the temple. Only now the temple is not a tent in the desert or a building in Jerusalem, it’s the followers of Jesus. And everyone who is baptized into Jesus receives the Holy Spirit. It may not seem as dramatic as the account we read in Acts, but it has the same dramatic effect. And that is exactly what Paul is writing about when he writes “the Spirit helps us in our weakness.” (Ro. 8:26 NIV). συναντιλαμβάνομαι (sun-anti-lambanomai). Someone coming along with us and working with us to carry a weight. What weight? The weight of bringing the world to glory. Because now we are God’s chosen people.
Interceding
Before we became followers of Jesus, we were dead in our sins, and we did not have the power even to live, let alone to live for God’s glory. But, being baptized, we have received the Holy Spirit, and now we have power. And beyond that, we have direction. That’s the last thing that Paul writes about in this section. He says that the Spirit intercedes for us so that we, who don’t even know what to pray for, will offer prayers that are in accordance with the will of God.
Now this is a big topic, and we’re not going to be able to cover it all today, but we have to ask, what is the will of God? I think each of us will have to experience that in a different way. In other words I think that God’s will is expressed differently in each of our lives according to our own characteristics and inclinations.
But I know that God has a plan for his Church and he has made that plan very clear. God wants his Church, which is his physical presence on earth, to demonstrate his characteristics, which I think can at least begin to be summed up in the concepts righteousness, justice, and love, and to be coworkers with him in bringing about the restoration of creation. This is God’s will: that all of creation will be restored to right relationship with him. That all of the sin and errors and suffering and tragedy of the past will all be forgotten in the new reign of glory.
We have a lot of work to do. If you want to know how much, think of the last time you watched the news on TV and compare what you saw to God’s vision for his kingdom. This is one bit of scripture that I really love so I hope you don’t get tired of hearing it because you are likely to hear it a lot. It is near the end of the book of Revelation and it describes the consummation of God’s kingdom on earth, the completion of his plan for restoration:
21 Then I saw “a new heaven and a new earth,” for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and there was no longer any sea. 2 I saw the Holy City, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride beautifully dressed for her husband. 3 And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Look! God’s dwelling place is now among the people, and he will dwell with them. They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God. 4 ‘He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death’ or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.”
5 He who was seated on the throne said, “I am making everything new!” Then he said, “Write this down, for these words are trustworthy and true.” (Rev. 21:1-5 NIV)
So the Holy Spirit gives us the power to move, and then, if we allow him, moves us in this direction. If someone looks at your life, is this what they see? Do they see you acting against cultural norms and worldly instincts and in accordance with the character of God? When people look at you, do they see someone whose behavior does not conform to the self-centered materialism of our age? Do they see someone who stands up for justice even when it’s not popular to do it, even when it’s hard to do, even when it costs? Do they see someone who is willing to sacrifice themselves for the welfare of others, even those who hate them? These are the signs of life in the Spirit. This is what the world ought to see when it sees the Church, the body of Jesus Christ.
None of us are expected to be perfect at this all of the time. But all of us are expected to move in this direction. If you think that you are having trouble doing this let me offer an experiment that you might try to help you cooperate with the Holy Spirit. For the next few days, spend five or ten minutes every morning praying the Lord ’s Prayer. It is located in Matthew Chapter 6 verses 9-13. Don’t just say the words over and over; consider what each phrase means. Think about what you are actually praying for. See if that doesn’t have some impact on the way you go about your day-to-day life. See if it doesn’t help you to move your own concerns aside in favor of what God wants for you and for all of us. See if it doesn’t help you to “let go and let God,” in the person of the Holy Spirit.
Let us close by reciting the Lord’s Prayer.
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