Romans 8:20,21 - Subject to frustration

8:20

“Creation was subjected to frustration”. There is some debate about who subjected it, God, man or Satan. Given that it this was done “in hope” it seems that Paul must be talking about God subjecting it to frustration, and this seems consistent with Gen 3:17,18. When we look at creation we see a mixture of beauty, wonder and disaster. Creation is not the way it is meant to be, and the reason for this is that we sinned against God, we rebelled against Him. But this was done in hope, ie it is not the final state. We can also apply this principle to our own lives. Sometimes progress in our own lives will be held up not because of own failings (though of course there are numerous times when our own failings are the cause!) but because God is waiting to complete his plans in somebody else’s life. We need to realise that “no man is an island”, God looks at us, and works in our lives, both as individuals and at a corporate level.

8:21

So what is the hope which God has for creation? It is that it will be liberated from its bondage to decay. We see decay in nature at all levels, we see death reigning, there is the infamous second law of thermodynamics. This is not the state that nature is meant to be in. The best way to be a true “friend of the earth” is to end your rebellion against God, to repent and believe! Nature is not the way it is meant to be because of our sin. Now this raises questions about the age of the earth and the fall. The young earth creationist view is that creation is less than about ten thousand years old and that everything changed after Adam’s sin. This of course presents various problems, both scientifically and with the text of Genesis 1-3. However, the old earth creationist view has problems with this as well. For death has certainly been around long before Adam sinned, as has all decay in nature. One approach to the “death problem” is to say there is a distinction between animal death and human death, and there is some merit in this, though it certainly does not deal with the whole problem. An interesting approach advanced by William Dembski in “The End of Christianity” is that God pre-emptively subjected the world to decay, ie in the foreknowledge that man would sin. Something of a parallel can be drawn with people in the Old Testament being saved by Christ before the cross had actually happened.

Only when we receive the full freedom and glory of being God’s children will creation become all that it was meant to be.