The Creation Groans
18 For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory which will be revealed toward us. 19 For the creation waits with eager expectation for the children of God to be revealed. 20 For the creation was subjected to vanity, not of its own will, but because of him who subjected it, in hope 21 that the creation itself also will be delivered from the bondage of decay into the liberty of the glory of the children of God. 22 For we know that the whole creation groans and travails in pain together until now.
The sufferings are weighed and found light, and the whole creation is described as subjected in hope and groaning toward delivery.
For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory which will be revealed toward us.
The verb is the accountant's again — I consider, I have done the reckoning Romans 6:11 — and the ledger is the one a suffering church needs audited: sufferings on one side, coming glory on the other. The finding is not that the sufferings are small; the writer of this sentence carried a list that no one would call small Romans 8:35. The finding is that the two quantities are incommensurable — not worthy to be compared — the way a night's lodging is not worthy to be compared with the estate one wakes to inherit.
Then the frame widens beyond anything the letter has yet attempted: for the creation waits with eager expectation for the children of God to be revealed Romans 8:19.
The word for eager expectation pictures a watcher craning the neck toward the horizon. The non-human creation — fields, seas, creatures, the whole made order — is personified as standing on tiptoe, watching for one event: the unveiling of God's children, who walk the present world incognito.
Verses 20 and 21 explain the waiting with a compressed theology of the fall's collateral damage: for the creation was subjected to vanity, not of its own will, but because of him who subjected it, in hope.
Subjected to vanity — the futility-word, the vapor over everything: a world of decay, friction, and frustration that does not work as made. Not by its own fault — creation committed nothing — but by the will of the one who subjected it: God's own judicial act at Eden, cursing the ground for the man's sake. And the decisive phrase is the last one: in hope. The sentence of futility was passed with a future attached — the subjection was never intended as permanent, and its terms included its reversal: the creation itself also will be delivered from the bondage of decay into the liberty of the glory of the children of God Romans 8:21.
Creation's destiny is bound to the children's: when they are glorified, it is freed — redemption at cosmic scale, not evacuation from the world but the world itself unshackled.
And verse 22 gives the present its sound: the whole creation groans and travails in pain together until now — travail, the labor-room word. The groan of the world is not a death rattle. It is contractions.
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