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Biblion Bible Commentary

Read the introduction to Romans · About this commentary

Saved in Hope

Romans 8:23-25

23 Not only so, but ourselves also, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, even we ourselves groan within ourselves, waiting for adoption, the redemption of our body. · WEB

Believers groan with the creation, the awaited adoption is defined as the body's redemption, and hope's grammar requires the unseen.

Not only so, but ourselves also, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, even we ourselves groan within ourselves, waiting for adoption, the redemption of our body.

The groaning is not only outside. Believers — precisely as possessors of the first fruits of the Spirit — groan too, and the possession explains the groaning rather than exempting from it. First fruits are the opening sheaf of a harvest, the taste that certifies the field: what the Spirit gives now is real and it is partial, and the partial awakens the appetite it partly satisfies. The most Spirit-filled life in this letter is a groaning one — not despite the Spirit but because of him.

And what is awaited is named with precision that corrects centuries of vaguer hope: waiting for adoption, the redemption of our body.

The adoption is already real Romans 8:15 and its public completion is bodily. Not release from the body, not a spirit's flight — the redemption of our body: the slave-market word Romans 3:24 applied to the flesh and bone that still dies Romans 8:10, bought back and made alive by the indwelling Spirit Romans 8:11. The letter's hope is not that believers leave the creation but that they are raised within it as it is itself set free Romans 8:21 — one liberation, theirs and the world's, on one day.

Verses 24 and 25 then defend the waiting by the grammar of hope itself: for we were saved in hope, but hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for that which he sees? But if we hope for that which we don't see, we wait for it with patience.

Saved in hope — salvation's tense in this letter is past, present, and future at once, and here its future face is showing. And the argument is almost a definition: seen hope is a contradiction; nobody hopes for what is in hand. The unseenness of the promised glory is not a weakness in the promise — it is the necessary condition of hope existing at all, the same structure Abraham lived in Romans 4:18 and the catalogue of the faithful walked by. What the unseen requires is named in the last word: patience — the endurance the letter has already traced from suffering to hope Romans 5:3–4, now waiting with the whole groaning world for a delivery already in labor Romans 8:22.

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