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§19 The Hope of Glory (Rom. 8:18–30)

As we near the conclusion of the first half of the epistle Paul summarizes a number of vintage ideas. From the immediate context he continues the themes of liberation from slavery (vv. 2, 21), resurrection (vv. 11, 23), sonship and adoption (vv. 14–17, 19, 21, 23), and the role of the Spirit. From earlier portions of Romans he reintroduces the themes of creation (1:20, 25; 8:19, 21), futility (1:21; 8:20), and likeness (1:23; 8:29). The two dominant themes, however, are suffering and glory (see v. 17). That which humanity lost through Adam’s bid to usurp God’s authority (1:22–23), and which resulted in a “depraved mind” (1:28), has been restored in Christ. The firstfruits of this restoration are already in evidence among believers, and they guarantee salvation’s glorious culmination.

It is, however, with heavy feet that Christians run the race set before them. Amid this effete and transitory age they await future glory with sighs and groans. Frustration at the incompleteness and purposeless of the present order forms the backbone of this section. In verses 19–22 Paul speaks of the whole creation groaning, in verses 23–25 of Christians groaning, and in verses 26–27 of the Spirit groaning for them. Such sighs have meaning only when seen in light of God’s eternal purpose in verses 28–30.

If in chapter 7 Paul looked inward and found a tragic conflict between his will and God’s law, here he looks outward and, with poetic sensitivity, sees the same conflict in the travail of creation. His inner wretchedness (7:24) is part of the outer world (8:20). In heartfelt empathy he speaks of creation “subjected to futility” (v. 20, RSV), in “bondage to decay” (v. 21), and “groaning as in the pains of childbirth” (v. 22). But with equal conviction he speaks of God. The Spirit is God’s “fifth column” who infiltrates this unhappy plot, creating hope between suffering and glory (vv. 20, 24, 25). Like Abraham, believers have been allotted the ground of hope as the only ground between the promise of God and the contradictory circumstances of the world. Human hopes derive from earthly resources and circumstances; the hope of the Spirit by contrast is a gift of God. Hope does not deny “our present sufferings” (v. 18), but it engenders confidence that God’s purpose is at work in all things to make believers fit partners for glory (2 Cor. 4:16–17).

8:18 / The section begins with a pronouncement: I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us. Consider (logizesthai) implies not a mere opinion but a statement of gravity, an authoritative judgment. The sufferings of the present seem slight when compared to the glory that will be revealed. Sufferings are not illusory or mere surface scratches, however. Some religions, like Hinduism, maintain that matter, including evil and suffering, is only an illusion, and that relief from the illusion can be achieved by proper mental control. The Bible’s testimony is vastly different. No one reading the story of Gethsemane (Mark 14:32ff.) or Golgotha (Mark 15) can doubt the reality of suffering. We may wish our present sufferings were bad dreams, but that is only a bad wish. Not answering the telephone does not make the call from the emergency room go away. Paul concedes that suffering is numbingly, painfully real, but in comparison with glory it looks different than when viewed alone, for it is dwarfed by the grandeur of glory awaiting believers. Moreover, it is only “for a season.” The Greek word for present, kairos, means a momentary, limited duration of time. Suffering is limited to this life and pales in comparison to God’s coming glory. The apostle is not minimizing suffering but maximizing glory.

8:19 / Verse 19 is charged with all the expectation of children on Christmas eve, and in Greek it nearly collapses under the weight of anticipation. The noun translated eager expectation, apokaradokia, appears only in the vocabulary of Christian writers and carries the sense of “craning one’s neck” or “straining for a glimpse.” Not only believers await the final revelation, but all creation—sub-human and supra-human—longs for the sons of God to be revealed, i.e., for Christians to inherit glory. According to Genesis 3:17 the ground itself was cursed because of Adam’s disobedience; and if creation suffered Adam’s defeat, the same creation must be renewed by Christ’s victory (see also Isa. 11:6ff.; 65:25). Paul’s scope of salvation far exceeds the saving of human souls, important as that is. Salvation is not like a space launch in which the booster rockets and fuel tanks are expended and then jettisoned after hurling a tiny manned capsule into orbit. Such a concept may have appealed to Gnostics who awaited the solitary heavenward flight of the soul as the evil material world around it perished, but it did not appeal to Paul. All creation longs for wholeness and freedom from pain, and all creation will also be the arena of salvation. In Gnosticism less of the world is redeemed than was created, like a germ of wheat in comparison with the full head, but for Paul the created world is the world God intends to redeem.

The focus of verse 19 concerns not the world as it is, but the world as it will be. The world may be a sorry place, and Paul would not deny it; but rather than lamenting that it is so he directs his gaze in hope toward the future. Believers groan in their creatureliness, but they also know they will not forever remain as they are. Creation is not God‘s final work. They learn to take God more seriously than their sufferings. Redemption is God’s final work, when believers will no longer be simply creatures, but sons and daughters in glory with Christ.

8:20–22 / The present condition of creation is one of futility, for creation was subjected to frustration (v. 20). The word translated frustration, mataiotēs, means the inability of something to fulfill its intended purpose, and hence it suggests “emptiness,” “futility,” or “absurdity.” How remarkably verse 20 echoes the message of Ecclesiastes, “ ‘Meaningless! Meaningless!’ says the Teacher. ‘Utterly meaningless! Everything is meaningless’ ” (Eccles. 1:2). The past tense of the verb, was subjected, probably refers to the curse of creation in Genesis 3:17–18. The voice of the same verb is again probably a divine passive, i.e., a deferential reference to God without using his name for fear of profaning it. It is sometimes thought that the creation was subjected by either Satan or Adam, but if that were so the result would hardly be hope (v. 20). God must be the one who subjected creation, though a bewildering condition results, for The creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice (v. 20). The curse of God which fell on guilty humanity extended also to guiltless creation, thus implicating creation in humanity’s fate, though without its guilt. Consequently, if creation’s curse is due to the external agency of Adam, its redemption will have to depend on the external agency of Christ.

Is not the past century a standing commentary on this verse? Our knowledge leaps exponentially and our problems no less so. Books proliferate and ignorance abounds, harvests increase and hunger spreads, production grows and poverty deepens. Mechanization makes our lives easier but threatens our worth as persons, and the time it saves us reveals only the meaninglessness of life around us. People live longer but fear growing old, they worship sex but fear getting pregnant. Counselors, clinics, and agencies abound, but the divorce rate soars and youth lose their way. Symbolic of it all is nuclear weaponry which, with each advance in technology, makes the world less secure. Human solutions, which once rose like a Phoenix from the ashes of the past, return like Harpies to prey upon us!

The truly remarkable feature in this is that the travail of creation leads not to despair but to hope! Were bondage to decay (v. 21) the only thing the world knew, or its final state, then despair would be the only possible result. But creation has been given the promise that it will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God (v. 21). The subjected world must give way to the liberated world, creaturely existence must yield to existence as heirs and children of God. The “when” of hope is not yet known because liberation from bondage lies in the future; but the “what” of hope is already known, for God wills to restore humanity to “the likeness of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brothers” (v. 29).

At present, the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth (v. 22). Both groaning and pains of childbirth are Greek syn-compounds, i.e., they bespeak the experience of suffering common to all creation. There is no thought of a dualistic escape from creation, but rather of suffering with it! Hardship is not an anomaly; it is endemic to life. The metaphor pains of childbirth pictures hope in two respects. On the one hand, pain of childbirth is a NT expression for the coming of the messianic kingdom (Matt. 24:8; Mark 13:8; Rev. 12:2). But birth pains are pains of hope; they are not death pains, but life pains that promise a new existence. Whatever the pains of the present may be, they are not in vain. Paul confirms this with a judgment similar to verse 18, We know. That the groanings of creation will one day open up to the glory of sonship is a certainty based not on rational observation but on claiming the promise of God in faith. Apart from faith, suffering and evil are infernal and meaningless. But through faith in Christ’s resurrection, “whom God raised after wiping out the birth pains of death” (Acts 2:24), our present sufferings are not the final cries in an empty universe, but the prelude of joy at the final liberation. If at the resurrection God will give believers spiritual bodies to inherit glory (1 Cor. 15:42ff.), so too will he renew the “body” of creation. “Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth” (Rev. 21:1).

8:23–25 / Paul now applies what he said of creation (vv. 19–22) to believers. Verse 23 contains two emphatic first person plural pronouns in Greek, stressing that we ourselves … groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for our adoption as sons.

Paul is found to be fighting on two fronts in verses 18–30. On the one hand, he stresses human solidarity with fallen creation, which is in “bondage to decay” (v. 21). Christians too are part of this bondage. Their bodies are susceptible to cancer, their businesses to failure, their families to brokenness. But this is not the sum of the matter (Not only so, v. 23), for the firstfruits of the Spirit guarantee their future adoption as sons and daughters and the redemption of our bodies (v. 23). This is Paul’s second front. Believers are determined not by groanings, but by the Spirit; not by the way things are, but by the way they will be. The word for firstfruits, aparchē, which originally derived from the practice of OT sacrifice, carries here a metaphoric sense of something given by God in pledge of a full gift to come, similar to the guarantee of the Spirit in 2 Corinthians 1:22 and 5:5. The Spirit is God’s firstfruits or pledge, the ground of hope for living in the tension between suffering and glory.

The theme of hope continues in the memorable phraseology of verses 24–25. The opening phrase, For in this hope we were saved, is vexingly ambiguous. In Greek, hope is thrust to the beginning of the sentence and is therefore emphatic. It is unlikely that Paul means we were saved by hope, for salvation normally comes by faith or grace, not by hope. It seems more probable, as the Greek duly allows, that we were saved to live in the condition of hope, or saved for hope. The aorist passive indicative, we were saved, would make salvation the premise upon which hope rests. As in verse 20, then, hope is the condition in which those who are saved live.

What has been done for us on the cross permits us to say, we were saved, but what remains to be done in us requires that we wait for it patiently. Hope does not belong to the empirical world. It is unseen and its goal is as yet unpossessed, and hence hope is inseparable from patience (v. 25; Heb. 6:15). The Greek word for patience, hypomonē, suggests perseverance and endurance, especially in the face of toil and suffering (cf. 5:3–5). Patience renounces the ego and its claims and submits to God’s will, way, and timing. Like patience, hope is purified through submission. Only where one has forsaken personal aspirations and agendas can one stake one’s hopes on the promises of God. Hope belongs to the One who holds the future, not in the things which occupy the present.

8:26–27 / Paul now returns to the advocacy of the Spirit, a subject broached in verses 16 and 23. The Spirit, he says, intercedes for us with groans that words cannot express. There is again no hint of dualism between the sacred and profane, for the profane, the very weakness or insufficiency that divides us from God, becomes the stage for the Spirit’s intimate and effective work. The present tense of the Greek verb translated helps (itself a syn-compound that denotes the Spirit’s identification and solidarity with weak humanity) conveys an abiding, ongoing succor in our weakness. God is not an absentee slumlord, but our active advocate through the Spirit; and nowhere is God more present than in human weakness.

The reference to prayer in the Greek of verse 26 is more pronounced than in the NIV. It might be translated, “For we do not know how we ought to pray.” God wills that believers adapt their prayers to his saving purpose in history. But in this we fail. In the parable of the Pharisee and tax collector, Jesus taught that effective prayer is based not on virtuosity and profuseness, but on sincerity (Luke 18:9–14). Paul knew firsthand that sincerity sometimes issues in weakness and speechlessness (2 Cor. 12:6–10). In prayer, as in every facet of faith, God does not command what he does not give. We noted at 8:16 that there is no precedent in Judaism for the Spirit’s intercession in prayer, and this risked limiting prayer to a human work. But the early church called on the Spirit to “translate” its feeble stammerings, appealing to the God within to intercede with the God above. In verse 27 Paul hints at this divine interplay between him who searches our hearts (= God) and the mind of the Spirit (= God’s Spirit). Even in human weakness prayer is participation in a divine conversation Prayer is not a human work, but, like all of God’s gifts and commands, it is evidence of God’s work in believers.

In a probing and daring exposition of Paul, Luther pondered why Christians often experience the opposite of what they pray for.

[God] contravenes all our conceptions … because it is his nature first to destroy and to bring to nothing whatever is in us before he gives us of his own.… When, therefore, everything about us seems to be hopeless and all that happens goes against our prayers and wishes, then those “groanings” commence “that cannot be uttered.” And then “the Spirit helps our infirmities,” for without the help of the Spirit we could not possibly bear up under God when he acts in this way to hear and fulfill our prayers (Lectures on Romans, pp. 240–41).

Luther is not accusing God of sadism. Rather, God uses human need to create receptivity, and receptivity is the prerequisite to acknowledging God’s lordship, which is active in our behalf, although not always in accordance with our expectations.

8:28 / Verse 28 is a widely quoted and often misunderstood passage. It is sometimes interpreted to mean that good fortune favors nice people, or that things are not as bad as they seem and that everything “will work out in the end.” But this is to confuse wishful thinking with Christian faith.

The first part of verse 28 was in fact an axiom in both Hellenism and Judaism. Plato says in the Republic:

This must be our notion of the just man, that even when he is in poverty or sickness, or any other seeming misfortune, all things will in the end work together for good to him in life and death: for the gods have a care for any whose desire is to become just and to be like God (Republic, 10.613).

Judaism likewise abounded with stories (e.g., Ruth, Esther, Judith) in which adverse circumstances came to a good end. A saying attributed to Rabbi Akiba (ca. A.D. 130) stressed God’s providence over all things, “Everything which the All Merciful does is done for the good of his servants” (for this and further quotations, see Str-B, vol. 3, pp. 255–56). Paul also repeats this precept, which he prefaces with a solemn affirmation, We know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him. Interestingly, Paul seldom speaks of human love for God as he does here. This is probably accounted for by the fact that he was reluctant to attribute to humans the quality of agapē which was so characteristic of God (e.g., 5:5–8). At any rate, the statement is not a general law of life. It is a theological statement valid for those who have been called according to his purpose, which is embodied in Jesus Christ. It does not mean that all things are good. They are not, and to call evil good is a grievous error under any circumstances. It means that for those who love God no evil may befall them which God cannot use for their growth and his glory. Paul includes yet another syn-compound, meaning “working together with.” God works in all things—even horrible things—to accomplish his eternal will. This verse testifies to God’s sovereignty, not to the beneficent outworking of circumstances. God does not will all things, but he is at work in all things. Similarly, Paul enjoins believers to give thanks “in all circumstances,” not for them (1 Thess. 5:18).

8:29–30 / These verses, reminiscent of 5:3–4, rise in a crescendo of inspiration, filling readers with confidence in the promise of hope. Each statement forms a link in a chain—foreknew, predestined, called, justified, glorified—which secures believers to their future glory in Christ. Salvation does not just “happen.” It is the result of God’s eternal will! God’s will is not a groping of divine benevolence. Salvation is not a matter of harps and golden streets, or the amorphous release of Nirvana. If believers want to know what God is like, and what they by his grace will become, they must look to Jesus Christ (Eph. 4:13; Phil. 3:21; Col. 1:15). Salvation is God’s personal, eternal plan to make believers conformed to the likeness of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brothers (v. 29). The NT normally refers to Christians as believers, disciples, slaves, apostles, sheep, etc., but in this rare passage they are called brothers and peers of Christ! As the firstborn among many brothers Christ desires to share his glory with believers in a sibling relationship. What is more, believers will actually be peers of God, for, as Christ is the image of God, and believers are the image of Christ, believers will one day inherit their original image restored by Christ (Gen. 1:26; also Heb. 2:6–10). Conformity to Christ will reach its final and glorious completion at the Second Coming, but even now it is taking shape in believers’ lives through faith and obedience (12:2; Col. 3:9–10). To be conformed to the likeness of God’s Son—what a breathtaking hope in a world in which the image of humanity is presently so disfigured!

The Greek vocabulary of verses 29–30 is directed emphatically and proleptically toward the future. Three words in verse 29 (foreknew, predestined, firstborn) carry the Greek prefix pro, underscoring God’s prevenience and control of the process of redemption. Foreknew refers to God’s eternal purpose, and predestined, which follows it, refers to God’s eternal power to effect that purpose. God’s purpose and power come to fruition in Jesus Christ. The NT does not dwell heavily on predestination, but whenever the idea occurs it is anchored to the person of Christ. The sacrifice of Jesus on behalf of the world is the culmination of God’s eternal will for the world, a will which is past (foreknew), present (called), and future (glorified). Predestination is a doctrine not of tyranny or terror, but of assurance that God is for us (8:31), that he ordains to bring believers to the glory of his Son.

Verses 29–30 are cast in the past tense, as though Paul were looking back on God’s will, though some of it still remains to be realized. The affirmations of these verses are therefore grounded more in experience than in reason and logic. They are a revelation from God’s perspective which sees the embroidery of human life not as we see it, from the backside of knots and tattered ends, but from the finished side of the pattern. The challenge of the present is to believe that by God’s grace the knots and rough ends are actually weaving a pattern which is already known to God, even if unclear to us. The glory of the future will be to see the completed pattern, but even now something of it is visible in hind sight. C. H. Dodd comments,

A man who is the object of grace, when he looks back upon himself, feels more and more that he has become what he is by no act or activity of his own, that grace came to him without his own will or power, that it took hold of him, drove him, led him on. Even his most intimate, his freest, acts of decision and assent become to him, without losing their quality of freedom, something that he experienced rather than did (Romans, p. 141).

On the threshold of such ineffable mysteries, however, it is the hymn writers, not theologians, who are the best commentators.