Limapela Education Project
Faith in Action
This project aims to provide quality education to children in Zambia's Copperbelt Province.
Many Christians today trivialise the Christian message, reducing its scope to petty personal concerns. But God is the Creator and sole sovereign power in the universe, so the activity of God’s Spirit in our lives is far from trivial. In this wonderful passage of Romans Paul shows that the Holy Spirit is God’s agent for initiating us into the grandeur and glory of God’s purpose to renew the entire universe. Rob Yule preached this message — on one of his favourite Bible passages — at Greyfriars’ Classical Service on 15 July 2007.
Paul uses the word ‘flesh’ to describe our sinful, egocentric nature. The word ‘flesh’ drops out at verse 13. From now on the constraint or leading of the Spirit becomes the predominant theme. The Spirit exerts a pull on our lives, moves us out of our present sinful state and petty personal preoccupations towards God’s destined future.
The first thing the Holy Spirit does in our lives is to make us aware that we are God’s children. ‘Those who are led by the Spirit of God are children of God…. The Spirit himself testifies with our spirit that we are God’s children.’ (8:14, 16). I can endorse this from personal experience. When I had a profound experience of the Holy Spirit in October 1981, the sense of God’s acceptance of me as his child was overwhelmingly real and reassuring.
This new status we enter into as believers is distinguished from Jesus’ divine sonship by the concept of adoption. Jesus was God’s Son by nature. We become God’s children by adoption.
Jews were aware that God had adopted Israel when he redeemed them from slavery in Egypt (Hosea 11:1), but surprisingly adoption was rare among the Jews. So Paul illustrates the new status of the Christian with reference to the Roman institution of adoption (adoptio). Roman adoption was a public institution, carried out in the late teens, when a son and heir to the family estate was chosen from among a Roman citizen’s own or someone else’s sons. Only then could a son inherit the father’s estate and use the father’s name.
Three aspects of our status as believers are illustrated by the concept of adoption:
Paul writes, ‘For you did not receive a spirit that makes you a slave again to fear, but you received the Spirit of adoption.’ (8:15). A Roman boy until adoption was under the tutelage of a slave, a pedagogue, who would stand behind the pupil with a cane. Such education was supervised and enforced — something to ‘fear’. By contrast, the Holy Spirit’s leading is free not forced, an inner motivation rather than an external supervision. With the Spirit leading, reading God’s word, learning God’s will, becomes a joyous, spontaneous experience.
Paul says that is it by the Holy Spirit that ‘we cry, “Abba, Father.” The Spirit himself testifies with our spirit that we are God’s children.’ (8:15b-16). The Spirit brings assurance of our new identity as a child of God the Father. When we become a Christian our relationship to God changes from the fear or respect of a formal relationship to someone in authority, to the trust and intimacy of a child with a father. This intimacy is emphasised by Paul’s use of the affectionate term Abba, used by a young Jewish child of their ‘Daddy’.
When we become a Christian we inherit what belongs to our heavenly Father. ‘Now if we are children, then we are heirs — heirs of God and co-heirs with Christ, if indeed we share in his sufferings in order that we may also share in his glory.’ (8:17).
In Roman law, it was only after the adoption ceremony that a son could use his father’s name and inherit his father’s estate. Similarly, when we become children of God we enter our inheritance, which is not just God’s blessings but God himself and what uniquely belongs to God — the glory and splendour of his own life. As Christians we have a hope transcending anything the world can offer: a share in God’s divine nature and glory, an inheritance into which Christ has already entered.
Reference to this wonderful glory that is our future destiny leads Paul to reflect on its contrast with our present state. He makes a comparison, like an accountant balancing the two sides of a ledger: ‘I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us.’ (8:18).
What we suffer now is far outweighed by what we’ll inherit later. Here is the distinctively Christian approach to the problem of suffering. Present pain will be more than compensated by future gain. Our present self-denial will be ultimately worthwhile.
The film Shadowlands shows C. S. Lewis’s famous lectures on the problem of pain. It then shows how Lewis’s views were tested in real life by the death of his feisty Jewish wife Joy Davidman from cancer. It was a devastating loss to Lewis after the unexpected joy of a romance later in life.
As Lewis found, the problem of pain and suffering is no pushover. But, Paul writes in 2 Corinthians 4:17, ‘Our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all.’ We will one day look back and marvel at the pressure that providentially turned our mortal dust into immortal diamond.
Contrary to our individualistic thinking, Paul says that our destiny as human beings is bound up with the destiny of all creation. ‘The creation waits in eager expectation for the children of God to be revealed.’ (8:19). No man, no woman, is an island. The reconstituting of our lives beyond death requires a renewal of the physical universe which our bodies are intrinsically a part of.
‘If you know God as your Creator,’ says theologian Austin Farrer, ‘you know him as the creator of everything in which your being is rooted. To make you or me, God must make half a universe.’ (Saving Belief [London, Hodder & Stoughton, 1964], p. 30). In fact, we now know from astrophysics and chemistry that God had to make an entire universe to cook the elements that make up you and me. What is true of our creation is no less true of our redemption. To redeem you or me, God must renew the entire universe.
By our creation human beings and the physical world share a common nature: we are made of the same ‘dust’ (Genesis 2:7, 3:19, Psalm 104:29), and share the same atoms and biochemical processes.
Because of sin we share a common fate: ‘the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it.’ What Paul describes as being ‘subjected to futility’ or being in ‘bondage to decay’ (8:20-21), we would today describe in terms of the Second Law of Thermodynamics as ‘entropy’ — the way everything is irreversibly aging or running down.
Through Jesus Christ we are promised a common future: the hope that ‘the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God’, an event which will be accompanied by ‘the redemption of our bodies’ (8:21, 23). Our pet cat, who died on Good Friday, is waiting for Christene and me to experience our glorious redemption. Presumably, so too are extinct species, whose demise I sometimes find myself weeping about.
The entire creation awaits the glorious liberation of the children of God. And the reverse is true too — we human beings cannot achieve the full identity and freedom we long for until the whole creation is made perfect. Our personal redemption awaits the ‘rebirth’ (Matthew 19:28) or ‘restoration’ of all things (Acts 3:21) — the coming renewal of all creation foretold by the Jewish prophets (e.g. Isaiah 11:6-9, 65:17-25, Micah 4:1-5, Amos 9:13-15).
Our greatest suffering as believers arises not from physical pain but from the tension in Christian experience between what we are at present and what we long to become in the future.
According to Paul, we are in a ‘half-saved’ state. We experience a tension between ‘already’ and ‘not yet’. We already have the ‘first-fruits’ of the new order, but the full harvest has not yet ripened and been gathered in (8:23-25). Through the Spirit we already share in God’s new order of resurrection life, but our bodies are still part of the old order of frustration and decay, of sickness, aging, mortality and death, brought about by sin (cf. 8:11).
This clarifies perplexities in our Christian experience, for example, in the healing ministry — why some are healed and some not, why some are completely healed and others only partially. The new order is present through the Holy Spirit — but we don’t yet experience the full resurrection of our bodies. There is some healing, there are partial victories; but healing is not yet complete, unambiguous and permanent. Even Lazarus, raised from the dead, had to face death a second time.
Our hearts are like a fault line between two tectonic plates, present experience and future hope. Prayer is the tension between plates. Paul says that ‘the Spirit helps us in our weakness. We do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groans that words cannot express. And he who searches our hearts knows the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints in accordance with God’s will.’ (8:26-27).
A great anguish and yearning is awakened in our hearts by the Holy Spirit, through whom we participate in the future world even though we have not yet been released from the present one.
Anyone acquainted with prayer knows that this anguish of heart is sometimes almost impossible to bear. ‘We ourselves, who have the first-fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for… the redemption of our bodies.’ (8:23). Paul’s reference to ‘groans that words cannot express’ (8:26) could be referring to speaking in tongues, a prayer language inspired by the Spirit. But I see it rather as referring to wordless or voiceless prayer: the prayers of longing, weeping and travail that comprise our intercession for God’s new age to be revealed. In anguish we cry for God’s kingdom to come, for God’s will to be done on earth as it already is in heaven.
New Zealand poet and Christian James K. Baxter expressed this profoundly in his last publication, Autumn Testament (1972):
To pray for an easy heart is no prayer at all,
for the heart itself is the creaking bridge
on which we cross these Himalayan gorges
from bluff to bluff.
Rob Yule, 15 July 2007
© 2007, Greyfriars Presbyterian Church
