are quite inconsiderable by comparison with the heavenly glory which is
destined to be disclosed and to include us. The sense of this glorious
future pervades the whole creation. Nature is like some on-looker at a
spectacle craning the neck to see what is coming. She is waiting for
the final disclosure of the children of God in their true position;
knowing that she too--as a new heaven and a new earth--will share that
glorious future. At present her powers are continually frustrated;
failure is everywhere; the law of corruption is upon her like a
bondage. This curse she was subjected to, through no will of her own,
by the simple fiat of her Creator--but not for ever: she was left to
hope for deliverance from this bondage into a state of freedom--a
share, that is, in the freedom which is to belong to the final glory of
the children of God. With this in mind we can bear the universal
spectacle of pain. What we have always heard hitherto, wherever we
have lent our ear all through nature, has been groans; but they are the
groans as of a woman in travail: and in these groans we, God's chosen
people, though we already possess the first instalment of the divine
Spirit, {300} the pledge of what is yet to come--in these groans we
bear our part, and also in the hope that accompanies the groaning. We
groan expecting to realize our sonship, as that can only be realized
when body as well as soul is redeemed from all evil. Hope is thus the
very condition on which we received our spiritual deliverance when we
became Christ's. And hope means nothing else than a condition of
expecting good things not yet in sight. It means the readiness to
endure till they come.
And there is another reason why we should be glad to bear our present
sufferings. It is because, though we are weak in ourselves, we are not
left alone. Of ourselves we should be bewildered and not know even
what we ought to ask God to give us. But we have in the Spirit who
dwells in us a divine advocate and intercessor. His intercession makes
itself perceptible to us in groaning desires after a better condition,
desires which cannot be put into words, but which are intelligible
enough to God. He who searches the hearts interprets the longings we
cannot express--understands, that is, the Spirit's meaning; for He is
God's own Spirit, and the intercessions He makes for us, the
consecrated people, express God's own {301} intention. And what that
intention is towards us we know. We know that it is an intention of
good which cannot fail for those who love God; or, in other words, for
those who are the subjects of the divine purpose and call--an intention
of good to which everything, even seeming evils, must minister. For
God's purpose reaches from eternity to eternity, and cannot be baffled
from without or fail by the way. Those whom in eternity He designated
beforehand as instruments of His will, those He also eternally destined
for the highest human perfection--for the blessed lot of being made
like His own Son, as He should be hereafter incarnate, so that He might
be an elder brother in a great human family: and those who were thus
appointed beforehand for this high destiny, in due course He called
into the elect body. And those whom He thus called He acquitted and
accepted for righteous: and whom He thus accepted He crowned with glory.
For I reckon that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to
be compared with the glory which shall be revealed to us-ward. For the
earnest expectation of the creation waiteth for the revealing of the
sons of God. For the creation was subjected to vanity, not of its own
will, but by reason of him who subjected it, in hope that the creation
itself also shall be delivered from the bondage {302} of corruption
into the liberty of the glory of the children of God. For we know that
the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now.
And not only so, but ourselves also, which have the firstfruits of the
Spirit, even we ourselves groan within ourselves, waiting for _our_
adoption, _to wit_, the redemption of our body. For by hope were we
saved: but hope that is seen is not hope: for who hopeth for that which
he seeth? But if we hope for that which we see not, _then_ do we with
patience wait for it.
And in like manner the Spirit also helpeth our infirmity: for we know
not how to pray as we ought; but the Spirit himself maketh intercession
for us with groanings which cannot be uttered; and he that searcheth
the hearts knoweth what is the mind of the Spirit, because he maketh
intercession for the saints according to _the will of_ God. And we
know that to them that love God all things work together for good,
_even_ to them that are called according to _his_ purpose. For whom he
foreknew, he also foreordained _to be_ conformed to the image of his
Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brethren: and whom he
foreordained, them he also called: and whom he called, them he also
justified: and whom he justified, them he also glorified.
i.
There are passages in the New Testament which are unique. Such is the
passage in St. Peter's epistle about Christ preaching in His
disembodied human spirit to other spirits in Hades--a passage vaguely
suggestive of wide thoughts and hopes, and leading us to suppose {303}
that the ideas which it contained were familiar in the apostolic
circle, but standing alone, with practically nothing to elucidate it
from outside. And the passage just read about the groaning of creation
in travail-pains is unique, not because there is not a good deal to
elucidate it in other parts of the Bible, but because St. Paul in his
treatment of common material strikes a note of sympathy with nature
from nature's point of view, which is heard nowhere else in the Bible.
In Genesis we read that 'the ground was cursed[1]' because of man's
sin, in the sense apparently that, as the penalty of his sin, nature
was to be made a rougher home for him, and he was to extract his food
from it only with pain and sweat. Isaiah is perhaps interpreting this
primitive lesson in more modern tones when he cries that 'the earth is
polluted under the inhabitants thereof; because they have transgressed
the laws, changed the ordinance, broken the ever-lasting covenant.
Therefore hath the curse devoured the earth, and they that dwell
therein are found guilty: therefore the inhabitants of the earth are
burned, and few men left. The new wine mourneth, the vine
languisheth[2].' In this sense certainly, if not in some more
recondite {304} sense also, the ground is stricken with a curse as a
result of human sin. And there are parts of the world where no lesson
seems more patent. At any rate, whatever be the interpretation given
to it, it was part of the common Jewish teaching that 'though all
things were made very good, yet when the first man sinned they were
corrupted, and shall return no more to their proper state until the son
of Pherez[3] shall come[4].' For the curse was not to be for ever.
There was a good time to come--a new heaven, a new earth, wherein
righteousness should dwell--'A restoration of all things,' and not
merely of man[5], which should accompany the coming of the Messiah.
This was a most popular idea in Jewish hearts. 'I will transform the
heaven and make it an eternal blessing and light. And I will transform
the earth and make it a blessing and cause mine elect ones to dwell
upon it: but the sinners and evil-doers shall not set foot thereon[6].'
Here then we have the common belief which St. Paul inherits and uses.
He lays indeed very little stress upon the connexion of the earth's
present condition with human sin, if he {305} even alludes to it. He
only says it was 'subjected to vanity' by the decree of the Creator,
and that with a glorious prospect. It is upon the present aspect of
the creation and its great prospect that his eyes are set. And his
superiority to contemporary Jewish thought is shown by the fact that in
his vision of the future he is catholic and cosmic. What he is
contemplating is not a world renovated in order that one chosen race
may be happy and glorious, but a renovated world for a perfected
humanity. And in his representation of the present aspects of nature
he strikes an extraordinarily modern note by exhibiting, as it were
unintentionally, a deep and real sympathy with nature in her pain from
her own point of view. The Psalms can supply examples of a real
sympathetic fellowship in the happiness of creation--a happiness which
modern pessimists strangely ignore. But here we have, as nowhere else
in the Bible--perhaps nowhere in ancient literature--a man who feels
with the pain of creation[7]. He notes how much 'vanity' there is in
nature--how much that is ineffective and disappointing, how much waste
and sadness--by reason of the omnipresent law of corruption, {306}
dissolution and decay under which she is laid. He feels this as from
nature's own heart. And he has an ear for the universal cry of
positive pain, pain as of a woman in travail, which is one at least of
the most unmistakeable voices of nature. But he has got an explanation
of this universal pain which makes it tolerable to him. It is the pain
which accompanies a birth. The pain, as in the case of the woman, is
to be justified by the issue. Nature 'eagerly expects' as well as
'groans': and will doubtless 'remember no more the anguish, for joy' of
that which is the fruit of her agony. For there is a destiny for the
whole material world which includes man. As man is to be perfected and
spiritualized in body no less than in mind; so the whole man, perfected
in glory, is to have his place in a world emancipated in like manner
from failure and pain.
Perhaps the most important consideration to be derived from this
passage is that St. Paul's thought is equally alien to a one-sided
spiritualism and a one-sided materialism. A one-sided spiritualism,
such as is represented to-day by (most falsely-called) 'Christian
Science,' either disbelieves in the reality of matter altogether, or
regards it with its attendant qualities of weakness and pain as evil
and a thing to be ignored. The religion of {307} the Incarnation, on
the other hand, as represented by St. Paul, recognizes it as God's
creation and the temple of His presence. In our manhood, as scientific
investigation assures us, we can exercise no activity of spirit except
as parts of a material world, through the senses and by the
instrumentality of the bodily organs. Spirit and matter are in us so
linked together that the real difficulty to a thinking Christian is to
conceive at all of a 'disembodied' state of the personal human spirit
after death which is in any sense a living state. But such a
'disembodied' state--if the word really represents the truth--is
unnatural and temporary. The perfected human spirit is to have an
embodiment which is to be material, as being truly a body, but also
spiritual, because it is to be the fitting organ of the perfected
spirit, in no way embarrassing or clogging its activity by any
grossness or corruption. This is the Christian hope, definite in
principle, if quite unaccompanied by any anticipated knowledge of
method or details. And this destiny of the human body cannot be
separated from the destiny of the material universe as a whole. Matter
as a whole is to have an unending development like spirit, and a
development with a justifying purpose of glory in it.
{308}
And St. Paul is equally opposed to the materialism which gives to
matter a substantive existence apart from spirit. Metaphysical inquiry
assures us that we can have no conception of a material object, or of
matter in general, except as related to a consciousness or spirit; or,
in other words, except as an adjunct to some sort of personality. Such
metaphysical inquiry did not lie in St. Paul's way. But he is in
harmony with its results when he contemplates a glorified nature as
still relative to glorified personalities. Nature is to share the
revelation of the glory of the _sons_ of God.
We cannot help wondering, as we read these verses, whether St. Paul had
in mind that occasion when, before the chosen witnesses, Christ was
bodily transfigured on the holy mount by an anticipation of the glory
destined for His sonship; and the apostles felt their hearts thereby
encouraged to believe more surely in the teaching of the prophets about
the general glory that was to accompany the final manifestation of the
Christ[8].
When St. Paul talks of nature 'groaning' and (still more) 'eagerly
expecting,' is it merely a poetical personification, as Chrysostom and
most {309} commentators suppose, like that of the Psalmist when he
makes 'the floods clap their hands'? It may be so. George Crabbe, in
his _Delay is Dangerous_, draws a singularly beautiful picture of a
late autumn morning as it appeared to a dejected man, and he ends the
description with the lines:--
These things were sad in nature, or they took
Sadness from him, the likeness of his look.
Is the latter the true explanation? Is there no sadness or eager
desire in nature independently--I will not say of spirit, but of the
human spirit? It is sometimes very difficult to believe this. And may
not the Christian belief about angels make the fancy legitimate, that
every created thing has some accompanying intelligence--higher or
lower--which consciously realizes its beauty and its joy, and also its
pain and its hope? If this be so, then there is not merely deficiency
and pain, but the consciousness of this deficiency and pain, a real
groaning and a real expectation, in the great fabric of nature. We may
legitimately imagine this; but we have probably no right to attribute
such an imperfectly-based speculation to St. Paul[9].
{310}
ii.
It is very interesting to notice the various points of view from which
St. Paul contemplates the great ideas of 'redemption,' 'adoption,'
'salvation.' Christ redeemed us by the shedding of His blood, and we
entered into the redeemed state individually and were adopted as sons
when we became Christians. This is, beyond all question, St. Paul's
belief. But when he contemplates the outward conditions of the
redeemed man, and finds them quite incongruous with freedom and
sonship, so wholly unashamed is he to require that these outward
conditions shall be transformed, and body as well as spirit shall be
redeemed, that he speaks as if the great hope were still unrealized and
we were still only expecting to be redeemed and adopted--'waiting for
our adoption, to wit, the redemption of our body.' He thus retains the
intensely Jewish language of what we may call Christ's own Apocalypse,
when He bids His disciples, as the Day of the Lord approaches, to 'look
up and lift up their heads: because their redemption draweth nigh.'
The uses of the words 'saved' and 'salvation' are still more
remarkable. If we are {311} contemplating the finished work of Christ,
we are led to say, 'By grace have we been saved[10].' If we are
considering our own individual entrances into this great salvation at
the time of our believing or becoming Christians in baptism, we say,
'It was upon a basis of hope that we were saved[11].' If we are
considering the progressive life of the believer, we say, 'He is being
saved[12].' If we are looking to the great and final hope, we say, 'We
shall be saved.' 'Our salvation is nearer than when we became
believers[13].' This simple set of facts about New Testament language
throws a great light on the popular revivalist question--'Are you
saved?'
iii.
Our Lord once asked one who came to Him to be healed--'What wilt thou
that I should do unto thee?' and a very devout modern writer[14] builds
upon this an argument that we ought to learn continually to pray with
more definiteness and detail. Probably it is true to say {312} that
the advanced Christian learns to pray more definitely for spiritual
things, as he grows in spiritual discernment and sees more distinctly
what God's moral will is for himself and others. But there is no
similar growth to be expected in the knowledge of what outward gifts
will really help or hinder us and others. And it is with his eye
chiefly on the outward conditions of the Christian's life that St. Paul
here says--'We know not what we should pray for as we ought'; and
teaches us that 'The Spirit makes intercession for the saints according
to God.' We must be content to recognize, even while we
half-ignorantly pray for what we think we need, that '_all_ (outward)
things work together for good to them that love God.' St. Paul had
learnt that lesson when he himself 'besought the Lord thrice' that his
great physical trouble might be removed from him, and was refused[15].
The Son of Man Himself prayed only 'Father, _if it be possible_, let
this cup pass from me,' and learned in experience that it was not
possible. These lessons may suffice to humble any one who grows
over-confident that he knows what outward circumstances are best for
himself or his friends or the Church.
{313}
We all feel deeply the imperfection of our prayers: how weak, how
ignorant they are! And St. Paul consoles us with the belief in an
intercession--perfect, all-knowing, divine--which supports and sustains
and, we may say, includes ours. The 'intercession of the Spirit' in
our behalf, carried on, it is implied, 'in the hearts' of the saints
which only God searches, is mentioned nowhere in the New Testament but
here. But it is not to be separated from the intercession of Christ
which is mentioned just below[16]. Christ's intercession is 'at the
right hand of God,' but also He has by the Spirit taken us up into His
own life. He dwells in us by His Spirit. By His Spirit we are knit
into one and made His body. Doubtless, then, dwelling thus by the
Spirit in the body, Christ intercedes for us. This is the intercession
of the Spirit, which is also the intercession of Christ--an
intercession gathering up into one, and sustaining and connecting and
perfecting, all the imperfect prayers of all the saints.
This interceding Spirit is in Himself perfectly conscious of God's mind
and purpose, and God is perfectly conscious of His. He intercedes
'according to God.' This intercession {314} is but a form of the
perfect divine life. But in the heart of the Church this desire of the
Spirit can make itself felt only in groanings for the divine
manifestations which, like the aspirations which music suggests or
expresses, are too deep to admit of articulate utterance. St. Paul,
when he speaks of groanings which cannot be put into words, is perhaps
thinking of the 'tongues' in which the spiritual emotion of the first
Christian churches found expression. And we should think of some
earnest act of corporate Christian worship when, under the workings of
the one Spirit, the strong desire after what is holiest and highest
possesses men, and binds them together with a sense of longing for the
divine manifestation which could not be put into definite words.
St. Paul speaks of the groaning of suffering nature (ver. 22), and the
groaning of the individual Christians (ver. 23), and also the groaning
of the divine Spirit in the Church (ver. 26). No word could express
more powerfully the intense desire after the manifestation of the
divine kingdom which, in St. Paul's mind, should lie at the heart of
true Christian prayer.
And the true prayer of the Spirit--the prayer which is according to
God--is described (ver. 27) {315} as 'on behalf of saints[17]'--on
behalf of a separated and consecrated body. It follows, that is to
say, the lines of Christ's own prayer--'I pray not for the world, but
for those whom thou hast given me.' It is through the sanctified life
that the divine influences are to spread over the world: and by praying
for the consecrated body we are praying that that life may be exhibited
more and more perfectly amongst men so as to strike their consciences
and move them to conversion; that through our good works which they now
behold they may glorify God in the day when they themselves are
visited. The New Testament method of praying for the world is thus in
great part indirect. But the direct method is also enjoined. We are
also to pray directly 'for all men[18].'
iv.
There is, I think, no point on which St. Paul has been more
misrepresented than on his teaching about predestination. He teaches
plainly that it is God's purpose to 'have mercy upon all': that He
'willeth that all men should be saved and come to the knowledge of the
{316} truth[19].' But He works towards this universal end through a
method of selected human instruments--through an elect body. Such an
elect body had been the Jewish nation--selected, we cannot tell why,
but very possibly in part because of its capacity for coherence and
toughness, coupled with a singular aptitude for simple religious
ideas--qualities which in themselves of course were the gift of God.
This nation might have expanded, as was intended, into a catholic
church. But, as it refused to correspond with its vocation in this
respect, in fact the catholic Church appears in history as taking its
place, even while it was developed out of it--an elect body gathered
out of 'every nation and all tribes and peoples and tongues.' The
election of this catholic body to be the heirs of salvation and to bear
the name of God in the world was, it would have been held, a
self-evident fact. St. Paul reasons not up to this fact but from it.
He uses the admitted fact to strengthen its individual members under
stress of trial. They must bear earthly troubles because they form the
appointed discipline for the individuals who form the select body. Let
men but love God, and then all outward things {317} whatsoever work
together for good for them. The fact that they love God is the
sufficient evidence of their election. Those who love God are also
those who are 'called according to His purpose.' But, we ask, Have
none received the call and rejected it? were none called, who do not
love God? is it not true, that 'Many are called and few chosen'? St.
Paul says not a word to the contrary. But that is not the question he
is considering. The members of the Christian Church, devoted to God,
to whom he is writing _have_ been called. This call of which they have
become the subject is, St. Paul assures them, no afterthought, no
momentary act of God, which as it came into being in a moment so may
pass away. It is not a being taken up by God and then perhaps dropped
again. His gifts and calling are without repentance on His side,
because they represent an eternal will. In the eternal mind God
'foreknew' this chosen body. To 'know' as used of God (in contexts
where it is implied that others are not 'known') means to 'take
knowledge of or mark out for a divine purpose, as God said of the Jews,
'You only have I known of all the families of the earth[20],' that is,
your {318} nation only have I singled out or designated[21]. This
divine marking out then was an eternal act. God eternally marked out
certain persons, those presumably whom a certain preparatory discipline
and moral education, Jewish or heathen, should have made apt for His
purpose, such aptitude being of course again His gift. Anyway, for
reasons which we cannot probe, God did eternally foreknow or mark out
beforehand a body of men to be His catholic church. And those so
marked out were in the eternal counsels appointed for a high spiritual
vocation, to be made like the divine Son, who was to be made man, so
that, with Christ as heir and elder brother, they together might
represent in the world the divine ideal for man. And upon those so
marked out and foreordained, in due time the divine call came by the
apostolic preaching. And, at the first movement of corresponsive
faith, they had been acquitted of all their old sins and planted all at
once upon a new basis in Christ Jesus. And those thus set upon the new
basis God also had already in His divine counsels clothed with glory,
their share in the glory of the divine Son which is only waiting to be
fully manifested. Every {319} Christian therefore who has felt a
movement of God in his heart, under which he has become a Christian,
knows that he is in God's keeping. God will not fail him. He who has
begun the good work will perform it. Trouble and anxiety within or
without need not alarm him. He has but to keep himself, joyful and
confident, in God's hands. The movement of God upon him and within
him, as it proceeds out of the eternal mind, so it passes securely on
into the eternal issue. No doubt St. Paul would say they might tear
themselves by utter wilfulness out of the divine hand, as for the time
at least the Jews had mostly done. But short of that they are safe.
The movement of God, the protection of God, the purpose of God, is upon
them and around them, and goes before them preparing their way,
individually and corporately.