The Glory and Deliverance of the Animal Nature

“Waiting for the adoption, to wit, the redemption of our body.”—Romans viii. 23.

The passage: We are waiting for our adoption, which is the redemption of our body.

Few would deny that the passage chosen for today’s Epistle is magnificent. Our likely complaint is that it is too magnificent. It lifts us out of ordinary life into an atmosphere that only a Saint or Apostle could be expected to breathe. We would prefer a divinity more level with our wants and sins. We think we need help against the petty temptations of each day, not grand anticipations of a future for mankind and the earth.

Those are the first impressions St. Paul’s words are likely to give. Look again, and the man who wrote them was more familiar than we are with the sufferings of common men. He had shut himself in no cloister, and he did not banish images that might disturb his temper or his devotion. He feels an incubus sitting heavily on himself and on the Universe. What he hears rising from all creation is not a hosanna of rapture but a groan for deliverance. That groan is no vague aspiration after some possible happiness. It comes from actual misery, from the separate cries of millions of beings of his own flesh and blood. Whatever else may call forth those cries, physical anguish is, in the Apostle’s judgment, a main cause and justification of them. Men’s bodies are subject to a torment and bondage they cannot accept. He believes they want redemption from it, and he encourages them to hope for it.

May it not be a complete mistake, then, to think we need other circumstances than our own to feel the force of these sentences? May not the fullest interpretation be found in our daily walks, so that the streets of London tell us more of their sense than all the commentators’ folios?

I. One word in the text, on which all the rest depend, St. Paul himself must explain before we ask what ordinary experience adds to it. He tells the Roman Church that he and they were waiting for their adoption, their full recognition as sons of God. He had said that his message to the world concerned One who was made of the seed of David according to the flesh, and declared to be the Son of God with power, according to the Spirit of Holiness, by the resurrection of the dead. In the rest of the letter he had shown how announcing such a Person was good news to Gentile as much as to Jew. The Gentile could not do what his conscience bade him do or be what it told him he was meant to be. The Jew’s written law only showed him the same inability and made him aware of a deeper sin. God sent His Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and condemned sin in the flesh, doing for men what they could never do for themselves. He justified both halves of the race alike by raising from the dead His Son, who had taken the nature of all. And He gave them His Spirit, so that they might call Him Father and live new, free lives, willing and doing what He was working in them to will and do.

This is the doctrine of all his Epistles, Galatians, Ephesians and Colossians no less than Romans. It lies at the foundation of the Christian Church throughout the world. So far as there has been such a Church, there has been a proclamation that God has claimed men, whatever their race or circumstances, as His children in His only-begotten Son. There has also been an exhortation not to refuse that dignity, but to take up their position as spiritual beings, redeemed out of the service of false gods, of visible things, of their own lusts, and devoted to a service which is freedom. I think any message that is less than this, or takes another form, has been powerless to satisfy human needs and has had no lasting moral effect. If we use every argument of fear and every art of rhetoric to convince beggars or princes that they ought to care for their souls, a few may be startled out of a sleep they will fall back into. Most will feel that they are being set a task they cannot perform. They are told to think about a mysterious something in them which is itself what does the thinking, and to forget the real earth for a heaven they can only dream of. But suppose we set aside these metaphysics about the soul and return to the old, simple scriptural language of the hearth and home. Suppose we tell men of a Father who has sent the elder Brother of the household to bring them in, restore them as sons and daughters, and give them the highest rights of children. I believe we shall find that this old language is not obsolete. Many in England may despise it, as many in Italy or Asia Minor did, but it has a power that time and place have not touched. It can draw as clear a response from the peasant and mechanic of the nineteenth century as from those of the first. The strength is in the tidings, not in the person who delivers them. No gift that St. Paul or any Apostle had could have overcome the palpable evidence which, in his age, seemed to refute his doctrine of the glory Christ had given our race. If we deal as honestly as he did with that evidence, and are as resolved as he was not to hide any fact that leads men to think basely and despairingly of themselves, we shall find a witness mightier than human for our words, as he did for his.

II. Those who believed the Son of God to be the man of sorrows could answer without hesitation how sonship to God fits with the bitter sorrow men must endure. In the light of Christ’s passion all suffering was transfigured into the mark of a son, and to be exempt from it was perilous. “If ye be without chastisement, whereof all are partakers, then are ye bastards, and not sons” became the Christian maxim. Strange as it sounded, the conscience of mankind confirmed it. The undisciplined did not learn the secret of their parentage, while those who smarted under the scourge slowly discovered whose hand was guiding it.

But St. Paul did not want them to be content with this discovery. He did not intend them to hug pain and sickness because a deep truth can be learnt from them. He admits that in themselves they are discords and anomalies in creation. He could not bear to contemplate them unless he were sure they were no part of creation’s original order and so were to cease. The Son of God, revealed in weakness, pain and death, had vindicated the title of sons of God for creatures who endure weakness, pain and death. His revelation in the glory of His Father would reveal them in the glory for which they were created.

III. “I reckon,” he says, “that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory that shall be revealed in us.” We might take him to mean that none of his own sufferings for Christ and the Gospel can compare with the rewards God will give him hereafter. But he does not say this, and in connection with the words that follow, the sense is quite different. The sufferings of the present time are not Paul’s but those of the creature Man on earth, of the whole creation of which man is head. He shares in those sufferings and claims the right to. To be excluded from them would be to be cut off from human sympathy, from fellowship with the Son of Man, the great Sufferer, and from what the sufferings lead to. For they are leading, he declares, to an issue. They are travail-pangs, prophetic of a second and nobler birth. Wherever he turns, he meets the sounds and proofs of anguish. He feels it keenly himself, and far from being exempt, he knows more of it than almost anyone. His blessing, what he calls the firstfruits of the Spirit, is a clearer, stronger hope than others have, grounded on a Revelation of God. That hope is not for himself but for his kind. The Revelation is of God’s purpose, not concerning him or the few believers gathered about him, but concerning the whole travailing world in which he lives.

IV. “For the creature,” he continues, “was made subject to vanity, not willingly, but by reason of Him Who subjected the same.” Here is the Apostle’s answer to the puzzle that has tormented men ever since physical and moral evil entered a Universe made perfectly good. We have said that the punishment of the guilty is reasonable, and our consciences accept it. But part of Creation is involuntary and cannot possibly be charged with guilt, and yet it too endures misery and is subject to death. What does that mean? How can it be just? The usual way of dealing with this is to plead ignorance: men cannot judge what is righteous in God, and His justice may be quite different from ours. St. Paul does not take that way, and could not without overturning the argument of his Epistle, whose aim is to show that God has made known His Righteousness to man, that man has none of his own, and that he obtains it by trusting the righteous God. So the Apostle’s method is the opposite. He feels the difficulty others feel and must find a refuge from it for himself as well as for them. He confesses that the Creation has been made subject to vanity. I take this to be a fitting phrase for the apparent frustration of the end for which it was called into being, the feebleness, failure and mortality that have plainly come upon it. He frankly admits the distinction between voluntary and involuntary creatures. He declares that the bondage the mere animal endures is not its own fault, and he does not shrink from tracing it to a Divine origin. But in doing so he affirms two mighty propositions. First, the innocent, involuntary creature is made the victim of vanity and death for the sake of the higher being whose will has gone astray and broken loose from the will it was created to serve. Second, this subjection is temporary and holds the promise of future emancipation, once the end for which it was ordained has been accomplished. “For the creature was made subject to vanity, not willingly, but by reason of Him Who subjected the same in hope, because (or that) the creature itself also shall be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God.”

I dare not limit this language by any poor, beggarly interpretation of mine. It may mean immeasurably more than I can think. But it cannot mean less than this. All the sufferings to which the earth and its inhabitants are liable are permitted and designed for the education of those who bear the nature the Son of God bore. The redemption of the will, the restoration of God’s children to their true position and inheritance, was what He sought by His death and resurrection. This is the highest and grandest of results, which no force but only the mightiest Love can achieve. No trial or suffering that contributes to it is, in the judgment of the All-good and All-wise, excessive or wasted, not even the sufferings and death of the innocent, the Holy One. When this end is attained, the Son of God will have won His final victory, and the sons of God will have triumphed through Him over the moral evil that separated them from God and degraded them into animals, though they could never reach the unconsciousness of animals. Then all forms of physical evil will be overcome too. The involuntary creation will be freed from its fetters and shame, and the whole regenerated world, in its primal order and harmony, will offer its sacrifices through its High-priest and Restorer to His Father.

V. I have said I can put no restriction on the language of an inspired Apostle. If you ask whether his teaching, taken fully and literally, involves a renewal of the whole animal creation and its redemption from vanity and death, I answer that it certainly appears to contain that assurance. To exclude it makes the passage hard to construe and, I think, impoverishes its sense. If there is to be a restitution of all things, such as God, who cannot lie, has promised by His holy Prophets since the world began, I cannot see how this element could be missing. And I am sure it would greatly console many humble and meek spirits, the sort the Kingdom of Heaven is said to consist of, if they need not suppose that the creatures that served man’s needs and delights must lose for ever the perfection of their natures. Those creatures have had a certain fellowship with him and reflected some of his qualities. They have been deeply affected by his degeneracy, and they should not be shut out from the renovation of our race.

Other thoughts nearly inseparable from these concern the order and beauty of the external world. The idea of a Redemption of Nature following a Redemption of Man has often dawned on the man of Science and on the Artist. The one has seen that the laws of the Universe can be fully vindicated only when the self-will that has defied them is rooted out. The other, from his deep sense of the sympathy between man and the forms he contemplates, has been certain that a purified vision awaits a revelation of loveliness beyond what the highest Prophet has only guessed. Both should rejoice that the wayfarer will share in such a manifestation with them. Once vanity and self-glorification are gone, the commonest things will seem the most wonderful, and the glory will be about all and for all.

VI. The Redemption of the body that St. Paul waited for must, I think, include the removal of whatever keeps the senses from receiving clear and satisfactory impressions of the world they are meant to converse with, and has made them feeble or rebellious servants of the spirit. But, as I have hinted, the expression has a more obvious force. The body is enslaved to disease and pain. These may be caused by a more terrible slavery of the man himself to his appetites and lusts, or traced to a multitude of circumstances beyond his control: climate, ancestors, education, poverty. However they arise, they are signs that Death has rights over the body and will assert them. St. Paul says another has an elder and stronger right over it. Christ, by going into the grave and rising out of it, has asserted and made good that right. He will fully exert it, declaring that the powers of man’s body, like those of his spirit, derive from Him, and He will quicken that body by His Spirit.

St. Paul felt sent to proclaim this Redemption because he was sent to proclaim men’s sonship to God. He was to declare that this was no idle, nominal title but one that would be proved real at the appearing of Jesus Christ. So even when his teaching rose highest above ordinary aspirations, it remained profoundly practical. Believing fully in this redemption, men can never give in to what is called Fate or Necessity. They must never confess Death as master or give up the battle with all that leads to death. Our homage to Christ and our faith in our Divine sonship imply that we expect a victory for the wasted, enfeebled, degraded body. It was not made so fearfully and wonderfully for nothing. God will preserve all the powers He has given it, and it shall at last be made like the glorious body of Him who will subdue all things to Himself. It can safely be trusted to Him on the sick-bed, on the battle-field, at the stake. So we know that those who minister to the body, curing or warding off its diseases, are ministers of Jesus Christ and testify by deeds, not words, to the work He came to earth and ascended on high to accomplish.

VII. I end with this lesson from the Epistle because I wanted you to think more of its use in daily life than of its sublimity. Or rather, I wanted you to see that the sublimest teaching may be the most homely, and that the grandest expectations of the future may most cheer us for the toils and sufferings of the present. Our expectations of the future divide us from the present when they are selfish. We are less fit to bear common griefs or ease the griefs of others when we desire blessings our fellow-men will not share. Nothing can brace us so much for painful effort and continual patience as the hope of a revelation of the Universal Deliverer, the Emancipator of the whole Creation.