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).
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