Suffering, Sonship, and the Glory of God

Romans 8:16–24 ESV

The Spirit himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, then heirs—heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ, provided we suffer with him in order that we may also be glorified with him. For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us. For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God. For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of him who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to corruption and obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God. For we know that the whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth until now. And not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies. For in this hope we were saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what he sees?

Romans 8:16–26 ESV

The Spirit himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, then heirs—heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ, provided we suffer with him in order that we may also be glorified with him. For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us. For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God. For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of him who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to corruption and obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God. For we know that the whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth until now. And not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies. For in this hope we were saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what he sees? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience. Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness. For we do not know what to pray for as we ought, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words.

Romans 8:16–18 ESV

The Spirit himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, then heirs—heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ, provided we suffer with him in order that we may also be glorified with him. For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us.

Romans 8:16–27 ESV

The Spirit himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, then heirs—heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ, provided we suffer with him in order that we may also be glorified with him. For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us. For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God. For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of him who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to corruption and obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God. For we know that the whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth until now. And not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies. For in this hope we were saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what he sees? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience. Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness. For we do not know what to pray for as we ought, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words. And he who searches hearts knows what is the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God.

Last week Pastor Andy did a wonderful job of breaking down the blessings of being adopted as God’s sons and daughters. I want to elaborate just a bit more on the concept of adoption from the perspective of the ancient Roman audience that this letter was addressed to. In our society, blood relationships are deemed far more binding than relationships formed through the legal process of adoption. But for the Romans, blood relationships were not as important as they are for us today. The practice of disowning children and even abandoning unwanted babies after birth was a culturally accepted norm. The main rationale was that the parents had no control, no way of knowing what kind of child that they were going to get. In a time before ultrasounds and modern medical technology, everyone was in for a surprise on the day of birth. And if you were not happy with your child because of their gender, health, physical deformity, an unsightly birthmark, you were free without fear of penalty to abandon that child. I know that sounds incredibly cold and heartless but in a culture that deified strength, you could not risk investing your time and resources into the weak, even if it was your blood related child. (If you have ever watched movies like 300 or Gladiator, you know what I mean.)

And although for us its counterintuitive, Roman laws protected adopted children far more than natural children because you could not disown them without a legal reason. Again the rationale was this was the child that the parents desired because there is no random chance in adoption. You know exactly what you are getting and so that decision has to be binding. Obviously this has very important theological ramifications for us as believers because instead of lessening our relationship with God, it’s actually an amplification. In the mind of Paul, as he is contextualizing the Gospel to the Roman Christians, he is giving all of us the assurance of our salvation, that God will never disown or abandon those whom He has adopted.

But there is even more significance to Paul’s use of the analogy of Roman adoption. The most celebrated and famous case of adoption was that of Julius Caesaer adopting a relatively obscure young man by the name of Gaius Octavius, who would later become Augustus, arguably the greatest leader of the Roman empire and the ruler at the time of Jesus’ birth. Among the politically powerful in Rome, adoption became a way of guaranteeing the smooth succession of power. Augustus would go on to adopt Tiberius, his next successor, and this would become a general tradition. Understanding the idea of adoption from the Roman perspective negates this sense of being inferior to a natural born child but instead highlights the honor that God wants to bestow upon us. So when we read that we are the children of God and fellow heirs with Christ, the apostle Paul cannot contain his excitement about the glory that we will one day inherit as the adopted sons and daughters of God.

There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations - these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub and exploit - immortal horrors or everlasting splendors. CS Lewis

In effect, what God is doing is He is restoring us to our rightful place in creation and the role of the Holy Spirit is to prepare us to take that place of honor. If you remember from the very beginning of the Bible, in the book of Genesis, humanity was given dominion over creation, to take care of it, as a wise and benevolent ruler.

Genesis 1:28 ESV

And God blessed them. And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.”

Genesis 2

But once sin entered into the human heart, our right to rule over creation was lost and we now find ourselves in a constant struggle against the forces of nature, the very forces that we were meant to subdue are now ruling over us. All of human suffering can be traced back to our sin and the loss of our dominion over creation. The irony shouldn’t be lost on us that even when men think that they have harnessed the power of nature, that power now threatens to destroy us in the form of global warming, mass extinction, natural disasters, and nuclear war. There is a video that I want to share that captures eloquently the current state of planet earth. (www.youtube.com/watch?v=VrzbRZn5Ed4)

George Whitefield, the famous Puritan preacher, once asked in a sermon, "Do you know why the dogs bark at you, why the birds screech at you, and why the reptiles hiss at you?" It's because they know that your sin is the source of all of creation's problems." I don't know if that is true or not but Whitefield's point is that all of God's creatures fulfilled their original design to glorify Him but along came man who decided that living for God's glory was simply not good enough for us and so now we are reaping the consequences of our sin. It is utterly amazing to me that Paul wrote these things 2000 years ago when there was very little evidence of humanity’s negative impact on creation yet through the Spirit, he saw what was happening: that this beautiful world that was created for us has been subjected to futility and is under the bondage of corruption. And I don’t want to seem like that doomsday preacher that tells you that the world is going to come to an end but I don’t think that the destruction of the world as we know it is a matter of if, it’s simply a question of when.

This shouldn’t be shocking to us as Christians since this is what Jesus said would happen but what is astonishing is that scientists would now agree that the earth simply cannot support human civilization as it develops at this pace for any prolonged period of time. Even the most modest estimations give us a few thousand years more at best and that is not taking into account the rapid speed of industrialization in countries like China, India, Brazil, Southeast Asia, and parts of Africa where the majority of the world’s population lives andalso ignoring the possibility of nuclear war. (I was talking with a brother about the fate of the world and too be honest, it doesn’t look that great. Then I asked if he would give up the internet and modern technology to save the planet and he said no!)

If humanity is the source of all these problems, as it would seem, it makes sense that the renewal of creation has to be begin with the renewal of mankind. And the first step in the renewal of all creation is the witness of the Spirit into our spirit that we are the children of God. If you are wondering about being a follower of Jesus and being environmentally conscious, Jesus had an incredibly low carbon footprint. He fed 5000 men with 5 loaves of bread and 2 fish. He didn’t need to make a boat because He could just walk on water. And talk about living minimally, Jesus told his disciples take nothing with you for the journey, no bag, no bread, no extra clothes. Today’s disciples need to wear their Patagonia and all this gear from REI. I am joking to some degree but i am dead serious about the fact that God originally created man to live in perfect peace with His creation and one day this will be a reality. CS Lewis describes our relationship to creation in this way:

If we are immortal, and if she is doomed (as the scientists tell us) to run down and die, we shall miss this half-shy, and half-flamboyant creature…But the theologians tell us that she, like ourselves, is to be redeemed. The vanity to which she was subjected was her disease, not her essence.

In the meantime, we still deal with all of the suffering that is a consequence of sin and the subsequent forces of a fallen world. And this is the exactly the point where we run into one of the main objections against Christianity: “How can a loving God allow his children to suffer?” The answer that the apostle Paul gives us is that suffering is the way that God produces an eternal weight of glory in his children. Now notice I didn’t say that He allows us to suffer just so that we can grow in our character. Suffering does indirectly produces character in us and we see that in .

Romans 5:3–4 ESV

Not only that, but we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope,

Romans 5:

Character development is not the end goal of our suffering because that would trivialize who God is. When you see your child pass away, or a loved one suffering from cancer, or a life being tragically cut short by an accident and we say that God did this to grow our character, it is only a partial truth. The full truth is that the ultimate purpose of suffering is to produce hope in the glory of God that will one day be revealed at the resurrection.

The story of Lazarus in the gospel of John highlights this point perfectly. When Jesus finds out that his good friend, Lazarus, has become sick, instead of rushing over to heal him, he waits two days and allows Lazarus to die.

John 11:5–6 ESV

Now Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus. So, when he heard that Lazarus was ill, he stayed two days longer in the place where he was.

In this account, we see Jesus allowing not only Lazarus to suffer but also his two sisters Martha and Mary. From the human perspective, these two sentences seem to be a complete contradiction. How can you love someone and purposefully allow that person to suffer? But that is exactly what we see Jesus doing and this story answers one of the strongest objections against Christianity. Here we see that an all-loving, all powerful God can and does allow the suffering of those whom He loves.

There are a number of reasons that we can give for this seeming contradiction but let me give the argument that William Lane Craig, the famous Christian apologist develops. In his argument against atheism, he writes this:

God could not have created another world with as much good as, but less suffering than, this world, and God has good reasons for permitting the suffering that exists.

If we accept the fact that God is all-knowing, all-loving, and all powerful but yet at the same time he restricts himself to allow for the freedom of human will, this then becomes a plausible explanation. There is an old movie back in the late nineties with Gweneth Paltrow called Sliding Doors. The movie begins with a women missing a subway in London because the sliding door closes on her. From that point on the movie follows the two different paths of her life, the Helen that gets through the sliding door and the other that has to take a taxi home. The first Helen falls in love and find the happy life while the other one encounters failure, misery, and unhappiness. The irony of the story is that the Helen 1 that has the happy and successful life dies suddenly in an accident as a young woman. On the other hand Helen 2 turns her life of hardship and suffering around and lives to enjoy the rest of her life.

This isn’t to say that everything in life will turn out for the better. The point that I’m trying to make is that from a purely human perspective, we don’t know the greater good that is being accomplished or the greater evil that is being avoided because of an instance of suffering that seems needless and pointless. I realize that I have probably just opened Pandora’s box for our cg leaders but I trust that you can answer all the questions that this bring up. What is important for us to remember as we go through this subject is that these philosophical answers may not be all that comforting for those who are going through a deep period of personal grief and sorrow. What brings us comfort is knowing that all of our earthly suffering will seem light and momentary (as momentary as a sliding door) in comparison to the glory that will be revealed in us. In light of that fact, Paul encourages us with these words:

2 Corinthians 4:16–18 ESV

So we do not lose heart. Though our outer self is wasting away, our inner self is being renewed day by day. For this light momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison, as we look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen. For the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal.

:16

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In effect, what God is doing is He is restoring us to our rightful place in creation and the role of the Holy Spirit is to prepare us to take that place of honor. If you remember from the very beginning of the Bible, in the book of Genesis, humanity was given dominion over creation, to take care of it, and to rule over it. But once sin entered into the human heart, our right to rule over creation was lost and we now find ourselves in a constant struggle against the forces of nature, the very forces that we were meant to subdue are now ruling over us. All of human suffering can be traced back to our sin and the loss of our dominion over creation. The irony shouldn’t be lost on us that even when men think that they have harnessed the power of nature, that power now threatens to destroy us in the form of global warming, mass extinction, natural disasters, and nuclear war. There is a video that I want to share that captures eloquently the current state of planet earth.

George Whitefield, the famous Puritan preacher, once asked in a sermon, "Do you know why the dogs bark at you, why the birds screech at you, and why the reptiles hiss at you?" It's because they know that your sin is the source of all of creation's problems." I don't know if that is true or not but Whitefield's point is that all of God's creatures fulfilled their original design to glorify Him but along came man who decided that living for God's glory was simply not good enough for us and so now we are reaping the consequences of our sin. It is utterly amazing to me that Paul wrote these things 2000 years ago when there was very little evidence of humanity’s negative impact on creation yet through the Spirit, he saw what was happening: that this beautiful world that was created for us has been subjected to futility and is under the bondage of corruption. And I don’t want to seem like that doomsday preacher that tells you that the world is going to come to an end but I don’t think that the destruction of the world as we know it is a matter of if, it’s simply a question of when.

This shouldn’t be shocking to us as Christians since this is what Jesus said would happen but what is astonishing is that scientists would now agree that the earth simply cannot support human civilization as it develops at this pace for any prolonged period of time. Even the most modest estimations give us a few thousand years more at best and that is not taking into account the rapid speed of industrialization in countries like China, India, Brazil, Southeast Asia, and parts of Africa where the majority of the world’s population lives and ignoring the possibility of nuclear war.

And the beginning of the restoration of creation is the restoration of mankind. And the first step in our restoration is the witness of the Spirit into our spirit that we are the children of God.

In the gospels there is only one place that Jesus calls the Father by the Aramaic word “Abba” that we often translate as daddy. Everywhere else Jesus refers to the Father the way that and adult would formally address his or her own father.

For if God allowed his only begotten Son to suffer so that the world might be saved through His pain, so we too can rejoice even in our suffering because our pain points to a better world, one without tears, without sorrow, and without death.

Suffering, Sonship, and the Glory of God

Adoption and God’s Glory

Sonship and God’s Glory

Sonship and the Renewal of Creation

Sonship and Suffering

Abba, Father