The second part of this paper has to do with the our theology of the present creation, particularly as it relates to the phrase ‘new creation’ and that key word that defines the purpose of Christ’s body the church, that being – ‘fullness’. As we move away from an ecclesiology drawn from Plato we cannot enter a vacuum. To replace our long-standing platonic addiction to future-placed idealism, centrist leadership and biblical rationalism, operating in a divided world from a mediatorial church, we will need something of quite some substance to replace it. Enter the creation… the present one.
In Ephesians, Paul tells us that our calling as saints is to realise creation’s fullness. Is this work something to that will happen at a future time when Christ comes again? Or, is this eternal purpose to be substantially accomplished in the here and now? We might tend to offer the quick and easy answer – ‘now and not yet’; but this phrase too easily consigns the matter to the present status quo. We still tend here to emphasise the ‘not yet’ at the expense of the ‘now’. Hence the need to dig deeper, endeavouring to discover more about the way in which the ‘now’ works to create the elusive ‘not yet’.
Now that we have located Christ as one who stands in his body throughout the creation, we have a clearer sight of both who and where he is and also who and where we are as his body the church. What naturally emerges from such sight is the need to grasp the third element in regards the eternal purpose, that of the creation context in which both Christ and his body are presently situated. What does the present creation mean to us and what do we mean to this creation? What does ‘fullness’ mean in regards our relationship to the creation and God’s eternal purpose for our lives? Ephesians has described that amazing journey towards the ‘fullness’, but I believe that Romans in particular describes the strategy, the how of getting there.
Let’s start with that most unusual phrase of Paul’s in Romans 8:17. He said there we are ‘heirs of the Father and joint heirs with the Son, if indeed we suffer with him’. Note the positioning of this verse. It comes just after our cry of sonship to Abba, Father and just before the cry of the present creation calling our name as sons and daughters. The reason it is placed here is simply because the creation that cries is our inheritance. The eternal Father gave it to the Son of God made man and all of those who are in him. If we are to welcome that inheritance into our lives, it appears that we must suffer.
Many commentators, even those who place greater stock in the continuity between the Garden, the incarnation and the age to come, still tend, I believe, to join that rather mad rush towards the eschaton at this moment in Romans. The tendency is to see creation as fallen and consigned to futility; left to wait in the mess for a future time when Christ comes with a new creation to, as it were, replace it. Along with this perspective, that key phrase ‘suffer with him’ is thought to simply refer to our own pain in sharing a common fallen fate, consigning us to the same waiting game as creation.
For years, I found it very hard to accept what I felt was quite a lame strategy. Leon Morris, in his commentary on Romans, encouraged me to suffer and wait, but I got bored. If there was no other scriptural evidence to the contrary, I suppose I would have gradually resigned myself to my decreed position as patient sufferer. But I lost my patience, and my mind began to wander into more of that rich and textured literature of Romans 8.
Speaking to Paul, as evangelicals do, I said: ‘The key factor, Paul, in gaining our inheritance in Christ is that we suffer with him. You don’t mention prayer, justification, holiness, not any or all of the list of other great things Jesus has done for us, just … suffering.’ Paul never directly answers evangelicals, so I continued without him. I read on in verse 17, about this entire creation suffering the pangs of childbirth. I turned to Genesis and read of the woman suffering the pangs of childbirth. Back in Romans I located the phrase, ‘we also…groan within ourselves, waiting eagerly for our… redemption as sons’ (8:23). And I reasoned that perhaps the suffering Paul referred to is much more like a travail, a labour within that is meant to give birth to something that must, by logic, be located, not outside of us, but within us; and in particular, not outside of creation, but within it. Did this mean that the new creation is now in the womb of the present creation, and is wanting to be ‘delivered’ now by we who are the sons and daughters of God?
Waiting in heaven
I carry this, perhaps to some, fragile link and begin to believe that somehow we as saints are meant to do something more than wait and witness until heaven decides to descend to earth and interrupt our long-suffering march. I link this idea with the call in Ephesians to grow up, in this present life, in all things towards the head, even Christ. I remember that this growth has every thing to do with the fullness of ‘all things’ somehow being realised. I read about the manifold wisdom that God wants to ‘now’ make known ‘through the church to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly places’ (Eph.3:10). Then I think of Christ, who is apparently meant to wait in the heaven overhead until the ‘period of the restoration of all things’ (Acts 3:21).
I realise that this fullness, this answer the sons give to creation, does not wait for the end of the age to come; this must be a present work we are called to decidedly engage in. If this is so, then our sufferings must needs be seen in different light; they must be understood in a different way; they must somehow contain an essence or a quality, like the pangs of child birth, that are meant to help direct our journey into a new creation that is right now residing and waiting in the womb of the present one.
I am briefly stopped in my tracks as I recall the number of ‘future’ words and phrases in the text I have just mined: ‘is to be revealed’, ‘waits eagerly’, ‘subjected… in hope that the creation will’, ‘waiting eagerly for our adoption’, ‘hope that is seen is not hope; for why does one also hope for what he sees’, not to mention verse 25. I return briefly to my suffering waiting room. Then I pay a visit to a meeting that exists, it says, to bear witness to the world to come, but during the sermon my mind begins to stray and I wonder: Our future fixation in the West, is it playing with this passage? Are we not gathering fruit right now unto eternal life? The harvest of the end of the age, is it not growing now? Did not Jesus say, ‘My Father works until now and I work’?
Then a flood of verses hit my mind, each one indicating to me that between the present and the future there is only ‘present’. That is, everything that God purposes to do he is at work in us to do ‘now’. Does not creation cry to us right now, and if so, should there not be some element in the eternal purpose that enables us to respond – now? Does not Ephesians suggest this present growth towards a progressively emerging fullness? I cannot return to the waiting room. A door is open; I can no longer shut it. I come to believe that the way to heaven is not in the forsaking of the present creation, the way to the heavens is through that creation.
No rushdooney
Here I am not advocating a triumphalism or a reconstructionism this side of the age to come. However, I will not run in fear from these polar positions and hide in passivity, consoling myself with character development and singing. Of course the end of the age is in view here in Romans, not as a tool to make us passive, but as a guarantee that the first fruits we gather to bring in that fullness will be carried into, kept and physically expressed in the new creation. There is no good reason for God to whisk us away to the heaven of elsewhere if little or none of his ‘eternal purpose’ has been achieved. God wants sons and daughters who will rule over the works of his hands, not infants who have never grown up in all things.
I believe we need to slow down the rush to the age to come, and see the essential link Paul is establishing here in Romans eight between these two. Ironically, this ‘slowing down’ will, I believe, actually hasten the return of Christ. The severing of this link has created an immense identity crises in the church; the reason being that this body of people, who were made for Christ and for the creation in which he presently stands, finds itself still, for the most part, defined by the congregation and the construct that houses it.
The present creation does not wait for annihilation; it ‘waits for its liberation from bondage to decay’. If then this new creation is to emerge from the present creation, like the child of promise from the womb of a travailing woman, what then do we need to do to expedite that? If then there is ‘now’ work to be done in regards our giving an answer to the cry of creation, then again this ‘suffering’ word – the one so critical to our coming into the inheritance – has to mean more, so much more. I find Paul much more talkative now, as he encourages me to press on to the summit of Romans.
The big verse
How might we possibly answer this immense cry of creation? Paul says in 26 and 27 that the Holy Spirit responds to our weakness in this regard by searching out an answer from the depths of God. The answer comes as a sound, a groaning ‘too deep for words’. It is verse 28 that follows which speaks to us of the nature and purpose of this amazing sound. Travelling with the momentum of all that went before, the sound that first touches the creation in suffering (vs. 17), now moves towards its fullest expression in the proclamation – ‘We know that God causes all things to work together for good, to those who love God and are called according to his purpose.’
The verb ‘we know’ found in verse 28 is in the perfect tense. This tense speaks of a present state arriving as a result of past actions. Hence we could render verse 28 in this way: ‘As a result (of the Spirit’s searching out the will of God) we now know that for the ones loving God he continually goes on working all things into (eis) the good.’ Here we discover critical wisdom concerning the sound of the Father coming through the Spirit to the sons. As a result of the Spirit’s search, we now know that the eternal purpose for the ‘new man’ is that he works all things in creation together in such a way as to bring about the ultimate good. There exists, in line with the ‘purpose’ of God, a powerful and strategic relationship between ‘work’, the ‘all things’ of creation and the quality or substance named the ‘good’.
By way of clarification here, I note two statements by Christ: ‘I must work the works of him who sent me’ and ‘My Father is working until now and I myself am working’ (John 9:4, 5:17). Also I draw attention to Paul’s words: ‘For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them.’ (Eph. 2:10). The focus of all of the works of God is humanity. Hence, God’s purpose to work ‘all things together for good’ must refer to our work in him, rather than some separate work of God apart from Christ or the new humanity in him. Paul brings this relationship into focus when he states, ‘It is God who is at work in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure’ (Phil. 2:13).
The phrase ‘God works all things together for good’ is, I believe, the single most strategic verse found in Scripture. It brings together all the key elements of the creation reality we have looked at. This placement of the saints’ good works at the heart of the divine strategy arises naturally from the creation reality God established in the beginning. Man and creation are mutually dependent, unable to come into their created purpose apart from each other. Creation needs man’s work to come into its fulfilment and man needs to steward the creation through his work to come into his inheritance. It follows from this that, if God declared the creation to be ‘good’ and if man is called to work the creation, then by this work he must be able to bring forth, or realise, that ‘good’. The goodness of creation is another way of expressing its ‘fullness’. ‘The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof’ (Psalm 24:1 (KJB)). The goodness of the earth is to be brought forth, made manifest and enjoyed through all of the saints’ works in every sphere of creation – in marriage, family, in health, business, government, education, in ‘all in all’.
Our calling to ‘good work’ the earth is in fact God’s way of uniting us to all of creation. It is the God-given means through which we can fully answer creation’s cry and thereby come into our inheritance in and over all things in Christ. This is why the creation to this day looks forward, waiting in eager anticipation for the time when it will enjoy the fullest measure of the ‘freedom of the glory of the children of God’ (Rom. 8:21). A life lived ‘good working’ all things of creation towards the good is a life most definitely lived ‘according to his purpose’. This is what the sound from the Father comes to accomplish. It is this sound, Jesus said, which we can hear and must follow (Jn. 3:8). It is any wonder this answer from the depths of God is too deep for words to encompass!
Suffering… one last time
Again, why is the suffering issue so critical to all of this? Creation was made in the beginning both as our inheritance and as our counterpoint. We made in innocence, it wild and in need of our stewardship. Our maturity marked by the bringing of this creation into our heart and under our hand. So, does it not stand to reason that when we fell into sin, it too would fall, under God’s design and decree, into futility to mark that fall? From a Hebrew perspective, I believe we can see that, rather than completely setting aside the initial creation reality, God only removed the full inheritance within creation out of the reach of fallen man and wicked angels.
It was only the coming of the Son that could put an end to the dead end God had placed in the all things of creation. So how did the Son of God as man relate and respond to the darkness, futility and death in creation? The answer is that he came to encompass, fill and fulfil each of them. The Son came into all of mankind’s fallen experience. He suffered his way through every judgement arising from the Fall. He entered into the fullness of sin, which is death. All of the darkness, futility and death that were brought in by God at the time of the Fall were taken on by God-made-man to begin the time of restoration. And then, after judgement was complete, the Son came out and into resurrection life. He now calls us to follow him in that same journey, reaching from and uniting earth to heaven.
This is a telling area for consideration, particularly regarding developments in our understanding of the relationship between creation theology and the atonement of Christ. The results of the first Adam’s sin in effect ‘closed down’ the creation via a series of divine judgements. From a Hebrew perspective, we can begin to see the last Adam, Jesus Christ, coming to ‘open up’ that creation once again. To accomplish this Jesus Christ had to firstly engage and then travel though, as it were, the consequences of Adam’s sin; he had to go through the judgement barriers put in place at the time of the Fall – thorns, futility, suffering and ultimately death. The word ‘consequence’ used here, suggests a judicial component, but contains a whole lot more than that. This way of seeing, can, I believe, give us a more rounded perspective on the atonement; one that aligns God’s work in Christ as the Last Adam to what has happened to humanity in its relationship to the present created order.
Creation then is our ultimate reality sign; it is the greatest measure of who we are and where we are in life. When we sinned, pain was multiplied as a sign to us of our dislocation from our inheritance in creation. To this day, our pain still stands as a major reality sign to indicate the state of our mind/body in its relationship to the creation. When we seek to engage creation through the good works we do, we come up against the thorns and futility placed there by God (and of course intensified by the activity of fallen men and angels). Our good work, directed by good desire (2 Thess. 1:11f), is designed to locate and seek after the good – the attributes, nature and power of God in all things – that resides in/through creation. However, when we endeavour to access that good, we come up against strongholds in our own lives. Here the dysfunction in (and desire for liberation by) creation meets with the dysfunction (and desire for fullness) in us, and we begin to ‘travail’. We enter into ‘his sufferings’ (Phil. 3:10).
To go through to the inheritance held in this area of life, we need to take the journey of divine suffering into oneness with ‘his death’ (3:10). For only in this place of divine dying can we leave behind ways of thinking and living conformed to the present world system. Only from this place can we emerge into the ‘the out-resurrection (ekanastasis) from the dead’ (3:11). It is in this new standing, this place of ‘newness of life’, that we find creation, in that particular area of God’s dealings with us, now so much the more ‘open’ before us. We have travelled through the thorns, through the sweat and through the death and have emerged to answer the cry and embrace the fullness. Yes, this is still in part, but this is that which touches and realises more of creation’s fullness; tasting more of its fruit, experiencing more of its goodness, and thereby growing up more in both all things and thus growing ‘in the knowledge of God’ himself (Col. 1:9,10).
This is what it means to ‘suffer with him’. It’s a unique kind of suffering for the good; a suffering that progressively gives rise to the fullness, one that will ultimately give birth to a new creation now expectantly growing unseen in the womb of the present one. Jesus Christ will come to effect this birth and the unseen we are now engaging and embracing will be seen in, through and over all things. Too brief I know, more in ‘Church Beyond the Congregation’. However, it serves to indicate that an understanding of our suffering – for the good – is critical to our ability to locate ourselves in the journey into and through the created order. If we do not suffer, we are not going anywhere. If we cannot and do not read our suffering, we will never know where we are situated in regards ourselves, our work, our inheritance and for that matter, our God.
Jesus the Hebrew man, said, in a statement that constitutes the clearest expression of his strategy of engaging the world with the good news of the Kingdom, ‘Let your light shine before men in such a way that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father who is in heaven’ (Matt. 5:16). Seen in a christological and creation light, this verse makes a whole lot of ‘new’ sense. Our works in every sphere of creation as Christ’s body the church are critical to the divine purpose. Our work and the suffering it occasions are the heartbeat of the divine strategy and eternal purpose. The church is made for Christ and made for the present creation. The new creation emerges not from heaven, but from the womb of the present creation. We are called to gather our eternal inheritance now, this by good-working the creation towards the fullness. The gathering is not the centre of God’s purposes, the saints in all of life and work are. If these things are true then certain things need to change in regards the present status quo of ‘church’. Where have we begun that change and how might it continue? And where might we begin again?
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