Romans 8:23-25 “Firstfruits”

Here’s my fairly literal translation of these verses:

²³but not only [them], but we ourselves, [the] very ones having the firstfruits of the Spirit, also are groaning in ourselves, ones waiting eagerly for adoption, the redemption of our body. ²⁴For we were saved in this hope, but hope being seen is not hope, for who is hoping for what he is seeing? ²⁵But, if we are hoping for what we are not seeing, we are waiting eagerly through patience.

I believe this passage answers another question that has baffled me for years. Back commenting on the end of chapter 7, I said,

“What my basic question comes down to is that I am surprised the Holy Spirit’s indwelling doesn’t do more good that it seems to. This very indwelling is at least a partial fulfilment of the New Covenant promise, ‘I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you; I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh, and I will put my Spirit in you and move you to follow my decrees…’ (Ezek. 36:26,27) … So the Messiah did come. He did win the victory over sin and death. He did send the Holy Spirit on the Day of Pentecost and now believers are indwelt by the Holy Spirit … What I don’t understand is why it doesn’t seem to do any more good than it does or has done … You’d think Christians in general would be noticeably more godly people … Why doesn’t it seem to make much difference if we in this dispensation are literally indwelt by the very Holy Spirit of God? Why is there still such a minimal level of general spiritual maturity amongst us believers? … Well, I’ll just have to wade into chapter 8 and see what I find!”

 I’ve never noticed that here in Romans 8:23, what is says we have been given is the “firstfruits of the Spirit.” Firstfruits. There is the answer to my questions. I’m so excited. All of a sudden a LOT of things make sense to me. My head feels like a pot boiling over. I will try to record what I believe I’m seeing

Practically speaking, my basic question is, “Why hasn’t Spirit-indwelt Christianity done any better than ancient Israel?” However, theologically it goes back to the New Covenant promises of the Old Testament. As quoted above, Ezekiel recorded, “I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you; I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh, and I will put my Spirit in you and move you to follow my decrees…” People today, almost universally, would teach that this passage applies directly to us and that we are, in fact, under the New Covenant. I would like to believe that, but, as Jeremiah said, “’The time is coming,’ declares the Lord, ‘when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah…’” (31:31).

Notice, the New Covenant is with “the house of Israel and the house of Judah.” That has not happened. It won’t happen until the end of Daniel’s “Seventy Weeks.” Yet, in Acts 2, on the Day of Pentecost, the Holy Spirit was poured out, and Peter said, “This is what was spoken by the prophet Joel: ‘In the last days, God says, I will pour out my Spirit on all people’ …” What Peter seems to be saying is that, in fact, on that day the New Covenant promises were being fulfilled. That is exactly what people today teach – but, what bothers me is that it was the Church, not Israel, being blessed that day.

Once again notice, what does Romans 8:23 say we’ve been given? The firstfruits of the Spirit. Aha! No wonder it all happened on the Day of Pentecost – the celebration of firstfruits! The very idea of the celebration was not of a full harvest but the firstfruits of it. However, the celebration is a celebration specifically because the firstfruits represent the hope of a full harvest. Those first bushels of wheat or ears of corn are part of the harvest, but only part. The full harvest is yet to come. Then again, it is not something different from the firstfruits – just MORE of it! So, there in Acts 2, what Peter is saying is not necessarily that this is a full and final fulfilment of the New Covenant promises, but it is the firstfruits of that fulfilment – not different in kind, but in fullness.

Obviously, the book of Romans has been filled with the “You will, but not yet.” We are adopted, yet we wait for our adoption. We are redeemed, yet we wait for our redemption. We are saved and heaven is our home, yet we’re still here in this broken world. What I’m seeing in this term “firstfruits” is that somehow the full ministry of the Holy Spirit is itself another “You will, but not yet.” We are indwelt, yet what we currently have are only the firstfruits of His ministry to us.

That answers my question theologically of what exactly happened on the Day of Pentecost if it wasn’t the full outpouring of the Holy Spirit, as prophesied in Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Joel. Jesus’ enactment of the New Covenant “with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah” is something different and still yet future. What happened on the Day of Pentecost was an outpouring of the Holy Spirit, but only the firstfruits.

That also answers my question why it hasn’t done more good than it has. Once again, you would think people indwelt by the Holy Spirit, even with the continuing struggle with the flesh, would do observably better than the people of Israel. Yet I can’t see much improvement from them to us. We have had some truly great Christians, but then they had David and Daniel and Moses. It simply is not totally fulfilled yet what God promised, “I will put My law in their minds and write it on their hearts. I will be their God and they will be My people. No longer will a man teach his neighbor, or a man his brother, saying, ‘Know the Lord,’ because they will all know Me, from the least of them to the greatest” (Jer. 31:34).

 Now we can also better understand the language in Eph. 1:13,14: “… When you believed, you were marked in Him with a seal, the promised Holy Spirit, who is a deposit guaranteeing our inheritance until the redemption of those who are God's possession—to the praise of His glory.” We have received the Holy Spirit. He is a seal of our salvation, and then He’s described as a “a deposit guaranteeing our inheritance.” Once again, we see the “you will, but not yet.” He is called there a deposit – once again the promise of something much, much more.

This helps so much. For myself, this answers a lot of questions I’ve been pondering for literally years.

Romans 8. Wow. What a chapter!

 

Romans 8:23-25 “Groaning and Joy”

Here’s my fairly literal translation of these verses:

²³but not only [them], but we ourselves, [the] very ones having the first fruits of the Spirit, also are groaning in ourselves, ones waiting eagerly for adoption, the redemption of our body. ²⁴For we were saved in this hope, but hope being seen is not hope, for who is hoping for what he is seeing? ²⁵But, if we are hoping for what we are not seeing, we are waiting eagerly through patience.

When I started on this study through Romans 8, I was quite sure it would be filled with amazing, encouraging, enlightening truth. Wow. Have I not been disappointed! I feel like I could write for weeks all the things I see even in just these three verses. I really enjoy doing this – writing out what I’ve learned after studying through a passage – but that is especially true when it seems I could write a volume on every verse! Nothing less than the Spirit of God could have inspired such encouraging truth!

Where do I begin? As Maria said, “Let’s begin at the very beginning – it’s a very good place to start!” In vv. 19-22, we learned how the very Creation itself groans and suffers under the Curse of sin. Now Paul says, “But not only them, but we ourselves … groan inwardly …” We who are born again, who have seen Jesus and known His love, you would think we would now enjoy a wonderful reprieve from the miseries of this world. I’m a Christian, now I’m “happy all the day!” – right? That certainly hasn’t been my experience, and it isn’t what we find in this passage.

The Creation groans, and so do we. But notice a significant difference – we groan inwardly. Note that the believer’s groaning is something more than a cry of pain or a sob of loss. We do suffer and express those “outward” groans just like other people and just like the rest of Creation, but there is something different. We groan “inwardly.”

Here is what I want to suggest: This is the same suffering that was spoken of in verse 17, where we saw “sharing in the sufferings of Christ.” As I said there and I’ll say again, most writers make those sufferings refer to the persecutions we might suffer on behalf of Christ. However, to do so robs us of the very help and encouragement the Lord intends. The sufferings of Christ include everything He suffered those 33 years living among us, as one of us. Just like Jesus, the born-again person finds themselves grieved not so much by the pain itself, but by the heartache of knowing how wrong it all is.

All day every day, we know in our hearts that all of this is so very wrong. Peoples’ cruelty to each other is so wrong. It’s so wrong when very talented, intelligent people waste it all just to see the bottom of a shot glass. It’s so wrong to see our friends and loved ones be sick even with a cold, or far worse to die. It’s so wrong that our government is filled with such crooks and liars, that companies care nothing for people, but only for their precious pennies. It‘s so wrong that children suffer hunger. It’s just all so wrong, it makes me groan – but not so much outwardly as inwardly. Then there is the dark side in me. I don’t like in so many ways who I have been. I don’t like what I know I’m capable of. Again, it all would make me groan, but not so much outside (like all my aching joints), but inside.

Herein I believe I learn something I have never understood before! For years, I’ve felt like one thing I seriously have lacked as a Christian was joy. I could look at the list of the fruits of the Spirit and say, yes, the Lord has definitely helped me in each one, but then joy has seemed elusive. I certainly have much to be joyful about, and yet, there has still always been this sort of underlying displeasure with life. There’s sort of a minor chord always playing somewhere deep in my soul. Realizing that, I’ve specifically prayed the Lord would help me to learn real Holy Spirit joy.

Here’s what I think. It’s not so much that I lack joy. It’s this “groaning” we see in Romans 8. How could a born-again believer live in this world and not groan? Now that I am a child of God, I long for the perfect peace of His kingdom. My soul longs for that world where there will be “no more death or mourning or crying or pain.” “Oh, that I had the wings of a dove…” “Too long have I dwelt in the tents of Meshech. I am a man of peace, but they are for war…” The Bible itself would tell me I do not belong in this world of death. Again, this takes us back to verse 17 and suffering with Jesus. He was “a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief.” Why was that? The same reason you and I are people of sorrows and acquainted with grief. We live in this world of death. Everyday we have to live dying, in one sense right along with the rest of this broken, fallen world. The difference between us and them is that we do not belong here. This world is not my home

Think about what Paul says in II Corinthians: “For we know that if the tent that is our earthly home is destroyed, we have a building from God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens. For in this tent we groan, longing to put on our heavenly dwelling, … For while we are still in this tent, we groan, being burdened—not that we would be unclothed, but that we would be further clothed, so that what is mortal may be swallowed up by life. He who has prepared us for this very thing is God, who has given us the Spirit as a guarantee” (5:1-5).

Notice here, it is the Lord Himself who says we groan. He even says why. It is this reality that you and I do not belong here. Here again is reality. I wish we all could just skip along “happy, happy, happy all the day long.” In heaven we will. Not here. How can we? Jesus didn’t. Who ever threw a party in a morgue? This is a world of sin and the wages of sin is death. Just like Jesus, to live in this world is to be grieved by the death that surrounds us. Then, unlike Jesus, we even have to groan over the death that still reigns in us.

All of this may sound dark and morose, but I find it gloriously liberating. I realize I have been mistaking that Holy Spirit groaning as a lack of joy. It isn’t that at all. It’s reality. I do have joy, and I have plenty of it! I have a wonderful Lord who only seems grow sweeter and sweeter with each passing day. I have my wonderful wife and family, a really great job the Lord gave me, and a future in heaven to boot! I do have joy. But I also groan. That’s just reality.

Here are two quotes I ran across:

Someone wrote: “The higher a nature rises, it increases in tenderness and sympathy, and while it has to maintain a conflict with evil, the heart must be the home of many great griefs…The grace of God in the heart, since it so reveals God to the soul, so brings down heaven to earth, that the possessor of it can say that his sufferings are not worthy to be compared with the glory that shall be revealed in him. This grace is the root both of the sufferings and the glory. If the two things were really opposed, then some comparison might be made; but this is not the case. Suffering is the first-fruit of grace, glory the last. The one is the fruit of grace in time, the other its fruit in eternity. To have the grace of God in the heart is to have a principle of life there that must come into bitterest conflict with evil. Jesus Christ must needs suffer to enter into His glory. As He was, so are we in this world. We have to “fill up that which is behind of the sufferings of Christ.” Dwelling in the believer Christ has still to meet the temptations of the devil and the contradictions of sinners.”

J. Vaughan said: “A man untaught might say, ‘surely those who gather firstfruits at least will have an immunity from sorrow?’ St. Paul said, ‘We which have the firstfruits of the Spirit groan within ourselves.’ I do not find that the Church has less suffering than the world without, only I find it more ‘inward.’ This ‘inward groaning,’ what is it, and whence? As soon as a man really receives one of the ‘firstfruits’ of the Holy Ghost, immediately a very great change takes place in that soul. But how with the body? Is it altered? Some little degree of physical refinement may grow out of the spiritual change; but in the main the body is the same. It prompts the same desires, it leads on to the same sins. Sometimes it inflames us, sometimes it drags us. And so it will be to death, the changed soul in the unchanged body, the redeemed in the unredeemed. Now here is all the conflict. Of all our misery this is the painful element, the inability of the body to carry out the higher aspirations of the soul. Other things may bring the sigh, the tear, but this brings the groan, ‘When shall I be holy? When will the contest cease?’ ‘O wretched man that I am,’ etc.”

Thank you once again, Lord, for showing me these things. Your truth is always so simple! And it’s never what I would have thought it might be. “For wisdom's profit is better than silver, and her gain is better than fine gold. She is more precious than rubies; And nothing you can wish for compares with her” (Prov. 3:14,15).

 

Romans 8:19-22 “Balance?”

Here’s my fairly literal translation of these verses:

¹⁹For the eager expectation of the creation is waiting for the revealing of the sons of God, ²⁰for the creation was subjected to futility (not willing[ly] but because of the one subjecting) upon hope ²¹that the creation itself will also be liberated from the bondage of decay into the freedom of the glory of the children of God, ²²for we know that the entire creation is groaning together and in agony together until the present.

I would like to record one more thought arising from this passage, and I’m not even sure where I’m going with it. Perhaps if I just start typing it will take shape. As related in the last post, it is shameful to realize just how true it is that we human beings are destroyers, that our presence in this world brings misery to the rest of creation. For me, it is grievous just to think about it. However, as we would try to honestly acknowledge that truth, I think there is some balance we should insert into the discussion.

This is where my thinking starts vacillating. Here I am, a person who loves the outdoors. On the whole I am extremely thankful that long ago we set apart state and national parks, that we have huge land areas where we’ve preserved nature in its beauty. I love to hunt and fish, but I’m glad we have laws to prevent people from driving any creature into extinction. Once again, my whole career has been about cleaning up the horrific pollution we’d caused in this world and I’m glad there was a Clean Water Act.

While all of that is true, I am thinking there needs to be a balance. For one thing, based on the Bible, and even this passage before us, we know that the entire creation, as we know it today, is completely temporary. No matter how much us humans mess it up, “the Day of the Lord will come” (II Pet. 3:10). As that passage in II Peter goes on to say, “That day will bring about the destruction of the heavens by fire, and the elements will melt in the fervent heat; but in keeping with His promise we are looking forward to a new heaven and a new earth, the home of righteousness” (3:12,13)

Somehow, even as we’re lamenting what destroyers we are, there also needs to be the realization that the entire rest of creation is, in a sense, temporary, and I’ll even be so reckless as to call it “disposable.” I said before, it is sad how, if us humans thought there was gold under a mountain, we wouldn’t hesitate to level the whole thing just to get it. That is a horrible thought to me, that where there was once a beautiful mountain, suddenly we could turn it into a plain and it would be gone forever. What I’m hesitant to say is, maybe it isn’t as big a deal as my heart makes it? Whether we do or we don’t level the beautiful mountain, the day is coming when the Lord will rebuild it – once again perfect just as it was originally created.

It is interesting to note there in II Peter, having stated that there is a new heaven and new earth coming, Peter’s application of that truth is to say, “So then, my dear friends, since you are looking forward to this, make every effort to be found spotless, blameless and at peace with Him” (v.14). He doesn’t say anything about our attitude toward nature. This transitory quality of the created universe moves us to consider our relationship with God, not our attitudes toward conservation. From an eternal perspective, we should not be surprised to find the truly important issue to be our relationship with God, not nature

Even as I’m typing, I wonder if the reason “conservation” and “Save the Earth!” and PETA and all the other modern preoccupations with nature is not, in fact, the result of our lack of concern for the things of God? Paul said we believers “… fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen. For what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal” (II Cor. 4:17). Somehow, the big concern ought to be first of all that which is eternal, and only then to consider all that around us which is not. In all of Jesus’ teaching recorded in the Gospels, there is little, if any mention of people’s relationship with nature. I believe it would be accurate to observe that Jesus’ emphasis clearly was to call us to consider first of all our relationship with God.

At the same time, if we do keep before us the priority of that which is eternal, it shouldn’t excuse our destructive presence. In other words, I want to assert it isn’t godly to be cruel. Prov. 12:10 says, “The righteous care for the needs of their animals…” When Balaam unjustly beat his donkey, the Lord finally gave her speech to call him down for it. In Hab. 2:17, the Lord says to Babylon, “The violence you have done to Lebanon will overwhelm you, and your destruction of animals will terrify you … you have destroyed lands and cities and everyone in them.” Notice the Lord accosts them for their “destruction of animals.” I’ve also always liked how the Lord said to Jonah, “… Nineveh has more than a hundred and twenty thousand people who cannot tell their right hand from their left, and many cattle. Should I not be concerned about that great city?” (4:11). Notice the “many cattle.” The Lord cares about cattle. So should we.

So these thoughts of mine can’t lead to wantonly excusing our destructive presence. On the other hand, we clearly need to keep our focus on that which is eternal. Somehow, if we could keep our focus properly balanced, I wonder if we couldn’t do an admirable job of conservation without going hog wild over snowy owls and darter snails. I wonder if real godliness wouldn’t give us the wisdom to know how to take care of people while at the same time be good stewards of this world we’ve been given as a home.

Even as I sit here, I’m not sure I know what to do with any of this, but at least I wrote it down. Sometimes, having acknowledged things like this, I find that later on, as I (hopefully) grow in my knowledge of God, it might all fall together into a much clearer understanding. Guess I’ll just shoot up a prayer and see where He takes me!