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Sixth Sunday after Pentecost
St. Stephen’s Anglican Church
The Rev. Jeffrey O. Cerar, July 20, 2014


The Fall and Redemption of the Natural World


Text: Romans 8:18-25

It has been a week of bad news. Thursday afternoon, we heard almost simultaneously from the Holy Land and from the Ukraine. A jumbo jet, operated by Malaysia Airlines, was shot down in Ukrainian airspace by a missile, killing all 298 people on board. And at the same hour, ground troops were advancing into Gaza in the continuingly escalating conflict between Israel and Hamas. Cease-fire talks had failed. Hamas continued its barrage of thousands of missile strikes into Israel, and Israel responded with tanks, artillery and ground troops, moving on this intensely populated area of Palestinians.

Shocked as we are, we understand why these things happen. They are symptoms of, and the result of, the universal human problem called sin. Human wickedness has been so rampant for all of history that we are hardly surprised anymore.

But it has also been a week of bad news in the natural world. Floods, super-cell thunderstorms, tornadoes and typhoons have been intense and destructive. Droughts have ravaged a large section of our country, and wildfires have been raging in wide portions of the west. What is wrong with our angry planet, many people ask? We heard the answer today in our reading from Paul’s letter to the Romans. In this segment of Chapter 8, God reminds us that when mankind fell from grace, the entire creation was damaged. Their sin not only cursed mankind, but it also brought disaster on the natural world.

It comes as a surprise to many people to think that the natural order is affected in any way by human sin. Many Christians who have read the Bible for years fail to make that connection. Let’s linger this morning over these verses from Romans 8 and get some Biblical grounding. We will look at what the Bible tells us of the connection between Adam and Eve’s sin and the futility of the natural world. There are some key words in this passage that we will want to explore, like bondage, decay and frustration. And we will look at the place of the children of God in His plan to turn it all around. So we will also explore three other key words, freedom, hope and glory.

Romans 8:20-21 tells us:

...the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the freedom and glory of the children of God. [emphasis added]

God subjected the creation to frustration. That’s a pretty straightforward statement. We see it in Genesis 3, where God announced the penalty for the sin of Adam and Eve. In verses 14-16, God cursed the serpent and promised Eve would suffer pain in giving birth to children. And, God said to Adam,

“Because you listened to your wife and ate fruit from the tree about which I commanded you, ‘You must not eat from it,’ Cursed is the ground because of you; through painful toil you will eat food from it all the days all your life. It will produce thorns and thistles for you, and you will eat the plants of the field. [Genesis 3:17]

Now Genesis doesn’t give us a theological treatise on the natural world and the impacts of these few curses. But as we look through the Bible, we see some of the things that will be healed when the Day of the Lord comes:

There is a reality about the natural world that everyone knows: everything eventually runs down. All living things die. What dies decays. What is orderly devolves into chaos. What has energy loses its energy over time. The psalmist noted it many millennia ago when he said,

In the beginning you laid the foundations of the earth, and the heavens are the work of your hands. They will perish, but you remain; they will all wear out like a garment. (Psalm 102:25-26)

Modern science has enshrined this observation as a law of nature. It is called the Second Law of Thermodynamics. It tells us that over time, everything runs down. Warmth becomes cold. Energy dissipates. Life runs out. Order becomes chaos. This is what verse 20 of Romans Chapter 8 is referring to when it says that God subjected the creation to frustration. It is what the scripture means by the bondage to decay.

I had a poignant moment of awareness of nature’s frustration many years ago when I was watching a nature film on TV with my children. It was showing the lifecycle of some particular insect that hatches in the mud of a swamp. As they emerge from the mud, they float to the surface where they will open their wings and take to flight. As we watched the part where they float up from the mud, we saw one that just made it to the surface, and before it could even spread its wings, a fish scooped it up and ate it. My little daughter, who must have been about 5 at the time, started to cry at the unfairness and tragedy of such a thing.

It is tragic. It ought to make us cry. The beauty and grandeur of this world, this universe, fill us with awe. We can see the glory of our awesome God reflected in the majestic mountains and the magnificent sunsets and the beautiful creatures and the rivers, bays and oceans. Those things give us a lot of joy. And at the same time, it pains us that it is all spoiled by disease and violence and death. But of course, the point of the passage, and the point of so many places in the Bible where this is acknowledged, is that God doesn’t plan for things to stay that way. For God is in the business of redeeming the world. He’s redeeming it one sinner at a time. He is restoring the entire creation to the perfection for which He intended all things. And He is doing it through the redemption of His beloved human beings, whom He created in His image,

You know, human beings have tried so hard to overcome the frustration of the creation by their own efforts. We believe in our time that there is a technological solution for everything. We’re trying to make it so that we won’t be affected by the running down of all things.

But all that misses the boat. Let’s look again at Romans 8.

That pain that we feel over the frustration of the created order is a part of the birth pangs of God’s renewed heavens and renewed earth. And God is not going to renew the earth through scientific breakthroughs and technological marvels. He’s going to do it by remaking us one by one as we hear the Gospel and submit ourselves to Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior.

The times in which we are living are the times when all this is in process. As our passage from Romans says, for us it is still a hope. And, it says, “Hope that is seen is no hope at all.” “Who hopes for what they already have?” the scripture asks us.” (Romans 8:24) We, too, the children of God, are in-process. We have our moments when the love of God shines in us like the brightness of the sun—

And we also have our moments when you can’t distinguish us from the people who are capable of shooting down an airliner, or lobbing missiles into the neighborhoods of their enemies. You will object to that statement. But it is the same fears and hatred that can raise their ugly head in the life of a Christian or a terrorist. We still have a long way to go, even as we do God’s work.

So what is God demanding of us in this complex interim time?

One of those demands is in today’s text, where it says, in verse 25, “...if we hope for what we do not yet have, we wait for it patiently.” Patient waiting is one thing God demands of us. It is not easy. We don’t enjoy having to go on waiting for things to become perfect. But God calls us to wait in the same way He refers in verse 19 to the creation’s eager expectation as it waits for the children of God to be revealed. We ought to wait patiently, in that we trust in God’s sovereign timetable. But we ought to wait eagerly. We ought to want with all our hearts the fulfillment of God’s plan. We ought to want with all our heart for those who don’t know Jesus to hear the Gospel.

And we ought to wait “expectantly.” Expectantly means to trust that God is going to do it, and to be ready at any moment for Him to make it so. Jesus said many times that we do not know the day or hour that the Son of Man will return, but we ought to be awake and we ought to be ready. In our Church life, we devote the entire season of Advent to that kind of eager expectation and preparation for the coming of Christ.

A second thing God demands of us in this time of waiting is to live as children of the light. Verse 19 says the creation is waiting for the children of God to be revealed. We can and should be recognizable as God’s children. Ephesians tells us,

...you were once darkness, but now you are light in the Lord. Live as children of light (for the fruit of the light consists in all goodness, righteousness and truth) and find out what pleases the Lord. [Ephesians 5:8-10]

We have already been adopted as the children of God. We have been brought out of the darkness that characterizes the unredeemed world. We ought to make every effort to live in goodness, righteousness and truth, because that is what it means to be in the light of Christ. Yes, we have our darker moments. But we dare not take them as a given. We dare not surrender to them. We are called to make it our goal to please the Lord, and to be like Him in every way possible. Not only will it make our life together wonderful, but it will make our witness more credible, and it will do the work of God’s plan.

God’s plan, as articulated by this passage from Romans, is to liberate the creation from its bondage to decay and “[bring it] into the freedom and glory of the children of God.” (Romans 8:21) What is that freedom of the children of God?

We have been freed from all those things and brought into a realm where:

And God’s Word tells us that when that freedom prevails in the world, the created order will be redeemed.

The passage also speaks of the “glory” of the children of God. The glory of which it speaks is not the glory of the technological marvels I mentioned earlier. It isn’t the glory of instant global communication, or re-engineered wheat stalks, or inoculations against disease or rocket ships that can fly to the galaxies. It is the glory of God reflected in His children, who live to please Him. This whole creation exists to display God’s glory.

God’s glory is the aura of His power, His creativeness, His wisdom, His love, His goodness and His beauty. And as we see His reflected glory in this world, it fills us with unspeakable joy. Just imagine what it will be like when the job is done. We will live continually in our resurrected bodies in God’s presence. No longer will His glory be reflected, but we will behold Him face to face.

In the mean time, we must live with both the suffering and the glory. Our passage this morning began by saying: “I consider our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us.” (Romans 8:18) Whatever we must suffer in this interim time when God’s plan is in process, it is trivial, it is minuscule, it is microscopic in comparison to what awaits us.

May the grace of God empower us, so that we may:

 

Jeffrey O. Cerar, 2014

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