Studying His Word and His Works

Listen to the study here: Romans 8:18-27

Read here: Romans 8

Review

• Calvin on the theme of Romans: “Man’s only righteousness is the mercy of God in Christ, when it is offered by the Gospel and received by faith.” Romans 1:17 and elsewhere.
• IMPORTANT: Paul wrote the letter to the saints (1:7), and the letter is about the gospel, which is a reminder we need to preach the gospel to ourselves daily. 
• Luther: Simul iustus et peccator = At the same time, righteous and a sinner! Romans 3:23-25.
• In Ch. 1-3 Paul shows us our unrighteousness, and God’s wrath against that, and the switches to Christ’s righteousness as our covering, the propitiation of our sins (Romans 3:25) as the final sacrifice for sin, fulfilling the promise to Abraham, who had faith before any works
• Faith being “counted” or “credited to our account” as righteousness is mentioned 11 times in Chapter 4! If “none are righteous” as Paul wrote in Romans 3:10, then this saving faith must be a gift from God.
• Ch. 5, We now have peace with God, access to God, and hope, because of what Christ did for us while we were weak(v. 6), sinners (v. 8), and enemies (v. 10). Christ did this “at the right time,” (v. 6), connecting Christ’s work on the cross and God’s plan of redemption to real history (not just a myth or legend).
• Atonement(5:6-11): Jesus satisfying God’s wrath for us through His sacrificial death on the cross.
• Ch. 5 and 6 describe federalism, this idea of one man making a difference, for righteousness (Jesus) or wickedness (Adam). 
• Ch 6 ended with lots of words pointing to the new road we are now on with Christ, the sanctification road.
  • Service is the key word, “slaves” used 8 times.
  • “Present yourselves”(5), “Leads to”(5).
• Sproul: “our regeneration, our rebirth was the work of one Person, God. It was not a joint venture; but from the moment we take our first breath of regenerated spiritual life, it  becomes a joint effort.” the work of one Person is what salvation is about. The joint venture is what sanctification is about. Ch.6 ends and we continue into Ch.7 describing what this “sanctification road” looks like to walk down. We were on the sin road that leads to death, but now we are on the grace road that leads to eternal life.
• Chapter 7:13-25 has some disagreement as to whether Paul is talking about his pre-Christian life, whether the passage is describing Israel, or whether Paul is talking about his current life as a Christian. I can see how it could be describing Israel, and Paul before being a Christian, due to the “sold under sin” phrase of v. 14, which is clearly not a Christian’s life since we are free. What does match up is how the end of Ch. 7 (21-25) is similar to Galatians 5. We are born sinners, and while Christ has set us free, we have that joint effort now to let him lead us out of slavery. We are still the Romans 7:25 person, but with Christ in us. And we know He is in us because we have the ability to turn away from serving the law of sin in our flesh and serving the law of God instead.  “Paul’s Law” (v. 21) is in effect now, evil is out there, tempting us, but we are a team with the Holy Spirit in us now, and we can fight on the inside to turn and set out minds on Him instead!
• Chapter 8 begins with one of the best verses in the Bible, that, no matter how far down the sanctification road you are, there is no condemnation for those in Christ (v. 1). New believer or old, God adopted you as sons (and daughters), v. 15. Chapter 8 also clarifies some of Ch. 7, that the body is dead because of sin, but in Christ, now we have a new leader. We still have the same “sold under sin” (7:14) flesh and bones and blood and DNA. That’s all still attached until the day we die. What has changed though is Christ in us. We now have the ability in Christ to put the flesh in submission to Christ and to walk in newness of life (Romans 6:4).

Intro

• Key words: hope (5), creation (5), Spirit (5), groaning(3) (we are groaning, creation is groaning, Holy Spirit is groaning, why so much groaning haha)
• In the previous study, Paul described the incredible truth that the Creator of the universe adopts believers as sons and daughters. We are a Christian family, and as Christians we have the Holy Spirit in us, not a spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but a Spirit of adoption. God seeks a strong and growing relationship with every believer.
• The previous study ended in the context of suffering in verse 17. Christians should expect suffering, and we referenced James 1:2-3, to count our trials as joy. We begin these verses with more on how to set our minds considering suffering, and we finish with advice on praying. 
• Verse 18
  • Comparing present suffering with future glory is not a math ratio, a proportion between present suffering = 2 and future glory = 11, so there is an 11:2 ratio of future glory:present suffering haha. I mean 11:2 is pretty good, but this is more than 1 million : 1, 10 trillion : 1, Paul is saying future glory is indescribably better compared to present suffering.
  • People often say “if God is good, why is there pain and suffering?” The best answer to “why” is back in Genesis. The answer is human sin. Like it or not, we are one human family, and the originals were given only one law with a consequence (Genesis 2:17). Originally, humans weren’t designed to die! The penalty (same as today) for disobedience was death. Satan tempted, Adam and Eve gave in to temptation and fell. The ground was cursed, even childbirth for women was made harder. So whether skeptics want to believe it or not, human sin is the real reason for pain and suffering in today’s world. God warned our original parents, they ignored him, just like we do in SO MANY WAYS today.
    • Sproul writes that “why pain and suffering?” arguments against God leave out the reality of sin. “The entrance of human sin into the world plunged the whole creation into ruin.” Read Genesis if you want to learn more about that. We are supposed to steward creation, to get back to God’s original plan for us in Genesis 1:26-28.
    • The unbeliever especially, but even believers -probably because we love ourselves so much-has a hard time believing that the pain and suffering we see today is ultimately man’s fault, not God’s.
      • It’s like a championship basketball game, where, 2 minutes in, a player gets a technical foul for punching the ref and gets thrown out of the game, and the other team gets two freethrows and the ball back, and they end up winning 102-101. So that “original sin” of the technical foul impacted the entire game, down to the very end. The whole team was taken down, and all the fans with them, which doesn’t seem fair for everybody to be impacted negatively by one man’s technical foul. The only difference in this illustration and humanity is that ALL OF US ARE THAT MAN who got the technical foul!
      • That is just how it is, like it or not. We are all sinners, none are righteous (Romans 3:10). We can spend our lives complaining about how God made us and how sin infects us all, or we can trust Him.  
    • In Mere Christianity, Lewis wrote that when he was an atheist: “My argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust. But how had I got this idea of just and unjust? A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line.”
      • It may seem “unjust” that we have inherited Adam’s sin nature, but this is part of being human just as much as having giant pectoral flippers is part of being a humpback whale. God put two “straight lines” on Earth, put on this earth without a sin nature. Adam and Jesus. Adam was tempted and fell to sin, Jesus was tempted and persevered. Adam was a temporary straight line, Jesus is the permanent straight line. Because of Adam, we are born a crooked line, one that God could just discard like an artist discards a bad painting. But He doesn’t do it that way, otherwise there would be no more humans, we would be extinct. We are here, doing a Bible study, because His kindness led us to repentance, just like Romans 2:4 says is the reason we don’t just die instantly because of our inherited sin nature.
      • God also has a point where his kindness ends for some, even while they are alive, so they are still alive but 100% destined to Hell, which is what Romans 1 says. God is just, and also the justifier (Romans 3:26). Think about the Flood, Genesis 6-8, where God almost DID drive humans to extinction, leaving 8 people to repopulate the planet. Think about Sodom and Gomorrah (Genesis 18-19), that God did not delay his wrath until they died of natural causes, but destroyed largely for their gayness, for rejecting God’s design for them and acting just like Romans 1 describes. It’s almost like God was saying “y’all want to behave in unnatural ways? Okay, then I will destroy you in an unnatural way.” That He chose to justify believers through Christ, adopt us as sons (8:15) instead of unleashing His fully justified wrath, is a humbling cause of celebration. 
      •  Christ’s righteousness is the straight line, everything else is wicked, the crooked line. Paraphrasing Romans 8:3-4 we might say: For God has done what the righteous law, weakened by the crooked line of our sin nature, could not do. By sending his own Son in the likeness of the crooked line and for sin, he condemned the crooked line, in order that the straight line might be fulfilled in us, who walk not according to the crooked line but according to the straight line. 
• Verses 19-22
  • Human sin affected creation, too. But like us, creation awaits a future restoration, a time when “the wolf shall dwell with the lamb,” as Isaiah prophesied about Christ’s future reign (Isaiah 11). Right now, most animals run from us, but there will be a time when we hang out together. God gives us glimpses of this with our pets, but pretty much everything else flees from us. Just go jump in the ocean if you don’t believe me, go see how many animals will let you swim up to them and pet them!
  • For the creation was subjected to futility sounds like the total opposite of the standard model of jellyfish-to-Jesus evolutionism! Look around, about the only thing we see “evolving” are bacteria and viruses, which are actually designed to mutate within limits. They don’t turn into anything new, like ever, yet evolutionists tell us this is just because “it takes time.”
    • What we do see though is something called genetic entropy, the accumulation of mutations. We are devolving in other words, and things don’t work as perfectly as they did back in Adam’s day.
      • A good book on this is Genetic Entropy and the Mystery of the Genome by John Sanford, inventor of the “gene gun” for creating genetically modified organisms or GMO’s, which is what most Hawaii-grown papayas have (Rainbow papayas). Just like all technology though, GMOs can be good or bad and we have to be super careful with how we use this technology.
  • Regarding the word futility in verse 20, Sproul says this “is one of the ugliest words in the English language.”
    • futility: pointlessness or uselessness.
    • Contrast futility with 1 Cor 15:58, that in Christ, your labor is not in vain, but outside of Christ, it most definitely is. All your striving, all your eating, all your labor, all your surfing. In the end, outside of Christ you die and go to Hell, ouch! 
    • But in Christ, we can count our trials as joy (James 1:2-3), not as futility!
    • Verse 22 uses a childbirth analogy, the current creation has been groaning like a woman in painful labor. But, at Christ’s return even creation itself will rejoice with the joy that follows when the child is born. From pain to joy, that is what eternity will be like!
    • And, as a side note, some of this suggests the “all dogs go to heaven” idea, that we will see our pets again. It doesn’t prove it (we can hope), but the text certainly leans more in that direction. 
• Verses 23-25
  • There is an “already but not yet” aspect to our salvation. A current salvation, and a future redemption of our bodies at Christ’s return. Our soul is saved but if we die before Christ’s return, our body stays in the grave until that moment. Phil Robertson of Duck Dynasty fame, described it like being put under for surgery. You go to sleep and wake up as if no time had passed. The Bible even describes our death as “falling asleep.” (I Thess 4:13-18). We really don’t know what is going to happen in Heaven though, and it is interesting how we also talk about how, “so and so is up there looking down right now, so and so is up there surfing, etc.” We have eternal life, so I don’t think time is going to work like we are used to here. I think it will probably be like that surgery analogy, we wake up with a glorified body, whether it’s been 1 year or 1,000 years.
    • Maybe Phil Robertson was thinking of I Cor 15:50-55 when he made his surgery analogy. Take some time to read it.
  • Henry Morris, founder of the Institute for Creation Research, wrote that the law of increasing entropy (disorder, disorganization, unusable forms of energy) is one of the “best proved scientific laws.” The fact is, we ARE devolving, the land is eroding, the Earth’s magnetic field is decaying. But in Christ we have HOPE. Christ defeated death, which means He also absolutely violated the law of increasing entropy, going from disorder to order.
    • Using another analogy, I designed surfboard fins that improve the flow control over the fin. The fins organize turbulent, futile water and giving it a purpose, but only for a moment while it passes over the fin. When Christ returns, at that “last trumpet,” we will go, in a moment, from permanent disorder to permanent order! 
    • Here are two things to consider. 1) Evolution says things are going from disorder to order, so a reduction in entropy, which is impossible according ot the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics. 2) The Bible says God’s original creation was “perfect.” But human sin brought death in, suggesting that the 2nd Law was part of the Fall. Before the fall, entropy changes may have equaled zero, but not >0. Today, everything, like ALL the scientific evidence says, entropy is increasing. But evolutionism claims entropy is decreasing, which is impossible. That’s one of many reasons why evolutionism is ultimately not scientific but is a weak interpretation of history.
  • Verses 23-25 remind us of the hope Christ gives believers. Recall Romans 5, that as Christians, now we have peace, access and hope. We won’t see 100% of what God has for us on this side of His return. The hope described here is part of the “not yet” aspect of salvation that all of creation waits for, too. 
    • Sproul reminds this hope is not just like a “I hope it doesn’t rain today” kind of thing, where it could or it couldn’t happen. It’s an absolute certainty of a future redemption. It’s that kind of absolute certainty that allowed Paul and other apostles to stand against persecution, for early Christians to be “willing to go up against the lions in the arena and to be human torches in the garden of Nero.” 
    • Hoping in what we do not see in this way is what James referred to in 1:2-3, on counting trials as joy, because you know the testing of faith develops perseverance, or steadfastness, and let steadfastness have it’s full effect, making you mature and complete, lacking nothing. 
    • Waiting with patience. Perseverance. Steadfastness. Those are all things we CAN do now that Christ is in us. Developing those character traits is part of what sanctification looks like.
• Verses 26-27
  • Remember, the Christian walk is a team effort, but “help” only goes in one direction, from Christ to us. The Spirit helps us in our weakness. We don’t “help God”, we aren’t doing God a favor by being obedient, as if someday God is going to say, “hey thanks for talking to that one guy about Jesus, that really helped me out, I was super busy that day and couldn’t get to him, thanks!”
  • What it really is is just what v. 26 says, the Spirit helps us in our weakness. He shows us how to pray, how to dig down deep and really connect to God through prayer.
  • There is only one mediator, one intercessor between us and God, and that is Jesus, and that is why we end prayers “in Jesus name,” and not in the name of Mary or any other saint. Jesus intercedes for us. 
  • He who searches hearts is an incredible statement, because it is revealing God’s triune nature at work. This mysterious Father/Son/Spirit trinity, this word that is not in the Bible specifically, but whose unity and diversity is displayed in so many ways in Chapter 8. The Christ in us of verse 1. He who searches is God. The Spirit intercedes for us. The Holy Spirit’s mind is known by God, the Father’s presence is evident too in v. 23 regarding adoption as sons. I think this is one way we can tell Paul’s words are God-inspired, not man-inspired, because they move from one Person to the Other without definition, without any disclaimers, this is just how the world works and it’s part of God’s nature. The triune character of God should be no more surprising to us than gills on a fish. That’s just what fish have, gills. That’s just who God is, Father/Son/Spirit, three in 1. The Holy Trinity. 
  • Verses 26-27 are also a great reminder to not take prayer lightly. We may not even know what to pray, but remember believer, the Spirit helps us in our weakness! When we pray, we are coming before God the Father, our Creator, and the only way we can do that is because we are covered in Christ’s righteousness. Don’t know how to pray? Jesus taught us to pray in Luke 11, so at the very least we can pray that:
    • “Our Father, who art in Heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done, on earth as it is in Heaven. Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us. Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. For thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever, Amen.”
    • Some people frown on written prayers, making false claims that they are not Holy Spirit inspired. That all prayer should be spontaneous. But what is wrong with thoughtfully considering what you want to talk to God about? Nothing at all. With that, we will end with a prayer prayed by early Christians in America, the Puritans, called The Deeps:
      • “Lord Jesus, give me a deeper repentance, a horror of sin, a dread of its approach. Help me chastely to flee it and jealously to resolve that my heart shall be Thine alone. Give me a deeper trust, that I may lose myself to find myself in Thee, the ground of my rest, the spring of my being. Give me a deeper knowledge of Thyself as saviour, master, lord, and king. Give me deeper power in private prayer, more sweetness in Thy Word, more steadfast grip on its truth. Give me deeper holiness in speech, thought, action, and let me not seek moral virtue apart from Thee. Plough deep in me, great Lord, heavenly husbandman, that my being may be a tilled field, the roots of grace spreading far and wide, until Thou alone art seen in me, Thy beauty golden like summer harvest, Thy fruitfulness as autumn plenty. I have no master but Thee, no law but Thy will, no delight but Thyself, no wealth but that Thou givest, no good but that Thou blessest, no peace but that Thou bestowest. I am nothing but that Thou makest me. I have nothing but that I receive from Thee. I can be nothing but that grace adorns me. Quarry me deep, dear Lord, and then fill me to overflowing with living water.”
• Amen! Up next: Romans 8:28-30.