LECTURE LVI.
ROMAN5, viii, 19 - 22.
For the earnest expectation of the creature waiteth for the
manifestation of the sons of God. For the creature was made subject to vanity,
not willingly, but by reason of him who hath subjected the same in hope;
because the creature itself also shall be delivered from the bondage of
corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God, For we know that
the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until
now,"
Ver. 19 - 21. 'For the earnest expectation of the
creature waiteth for the manifestation of the sons of God. For the, creature
was made subject to vanity, not willingly, but by reason of him who hath
sübjected the same in hope; because the creature itself also shall be
delivered from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the
children of God.'
To understand these verses let it first be adverted
to, that the term here translated creature signifieth also creation; and so
might comprehend all animate and all inanimate things. It is true, that the
inanimate are not capable of hope; and this feeling perhaps should not be
extended beyond the members of the human family - though, certain it is, that,
amongst the inferior tribes of living creatures, there is also, in some partial
degree, the same restlessness, the same dissatisfaction with present things,
the same desire of things better, and perhaps even the same tendency of wish
and expectation towards them, that are so palpably evident of ourselves and all
the fellows of our species. And then of mute and insensible things it holdeth
true, that, though they cannot hope, they at least wait a restoration. MTe
cannot ascribe to them, without an effort of poetry or of personification, the
posture of looking forward to that day of their coming enlargement, when they
shall be emancipated from the distress and imprisonment in which they are now
held - But still when we include them in the description of these verses, we
commit no greater violence upon the literalities of sober and prosaical truth
than is done in other parts of Scripture - when all nature is summoned to an
act of attendance upon God - when the voice of praise is heard by the ear of
fancy as arising to heaven from the mountains and the forests, and the valleys
are made to sing, and the little hills on every side to rejoice - when on the
approach of its Maker, the whole creation is represented as vocal - when the
fields are called upon to break forth into gladness, and the floods to clap
their hands. These all are now waiting such an advent and such a jubilee as
this; and there is no great stretch of the imagination, when the apostle
affirms that they all now hope for a futurity, at which when it becomes present
the Psalmist figures them to rejoice.
The next remark that we shall offer
for the elucidation of these verses is, that the middle clause of the 20th
verse should be thrown into a parenthesis. The main assertion of this verse is,
that the creature was made subject to vanity in hope; and we are told by the
way that it was so made subject unwillingly, or without its own consent. It was
not for example by any wilful act of theirs, that animals were made subject to
death. There could be no willingness on the part of the ground, in that act of
which its curse was one of the consequences. It could be from no fault of the
will in nature, that she was visited with that sore distemper, under which she
now labours; and whereof she giveth palpable symptom in the volcano, and the
earthquake, and the storm, and that general conspiracy of all her elements
against which man has to fight and to fatigue himself his whole life long -
that he might force out a subsistence, and keep footing through a history that
is made up of little better than to drudge and to die. It was not of its own
willingness that the creation was thus brought under the power of vanity, but
by reason of him who subjected the same. There are some who understand this of
the great tempter, who, by seducing man from his obedience, brought death into
our world and all its woe. Others understand him who yielded to that
temptation, our first parent, at whose fall a universal blight came upon nature
and she is now become a wreck of what she was - still lovely in many of her
aspects, though in sore distress - still majestic and venerable, though a
venerable ruin - appearing as if out of joint; and giving token by her extended
deserts, and the gloom of her unpeopled solitudes, and her wintry frown, and
her many fierce and fitful agitations, that some mysterious ailment hath
befallen her.
So that the whole passage may be thus
paraphrased.
The creation is now waiting, as if in
the attitude of earnest expectancy, for that era when, transformed into a new
heavens and a new earth, it shall become a suitable habitation for those who
are declared and manifested to be the Sons of God!. For creation, then to be so
gloriously restored, has for a time been made subject to vanity not willingly,
on the part at least of any who now live, but by reason of him who by his fatal
disobedience hath brought it into this bondage - yet is it a bondage that is
mingled and alleviated with hope; and that too a warranted hope, because
creation shall also be delivered from the bondage of corruption: And
emancipated from those fetters which now bind and burden and make it
impracticable and ungracious, it will come forth in smiles that shall be
perennial and immortal it will yield a grateful compliance to the wishes of its
happy inmates, and have in all its operations the beneficent flow and freedom
of God's own children.
Having rendered to you a general
exposition of this remarkable passage, let us now look a little more narrowly
into the separate clauses of it. For the earnest expectation of the creature
waiteth for the manifestation of the sons of God.' We have already hinted
at the extension of this clause even to the lower animals, and to mute
insensible things. There might be somewhat of personification and fancy in such
an application. But there is no fancy in generalising it so far, as to include
at least all the members of the great human family. There is a sort of vague
undefinable impression. we think, upon all spirits, of some great evolution of
the present system under which we live - some looking towards, as well as
longing after immortality - some mysterious but yet powerful sense within every
heart, of the present as a state of confinement and thraldom; and that yet a
day of light and largeness and liberty is coming.
We cannot imagine of
unbelievers, that they have any very precise or perhaps confident anticipation
on the subject, any more than the world at large had of the advent of our
Messiah - though a very general expectation was abroad of the approaching
arrival of some great personage upon earth. And, in like manner, there is
abroad even now the dim and the distant vision of another advent, of a brighter
and a blander period that is now obscurely seen or guessed at through the gloom
by which humanity is encompassed - a kind of floating anticipation, suggested
perhaps by the experimental feeling that there is now the straitness of an
opprest and limited condition ; and that we are still among the toils, and the
difficulties, and the struggles, of an embryo state of existence. it is
altogether worthy of remark, arid illustrative of our text, that, in like
manner as through the various countries of the world, there is a very wide
impression of a primeval condition of virtue and blessedness from which we have
fallen - so there seems a very wide expectation of the species being at length
restored to the same health and harmony and loveliness as before.
The
vision of a golden age at some remote period of antiquity, is not unaccompanied
with the vision of a yet splendid and general revival of all things. Even apart
from revelation, there floats before the world's eye the brilliant perspective
of this earth being at length covered with a righteous and regenerated family.
This is a topic on which even philosophy has its fascinating dreams; and there
are philanthropists in our day who disown Christianity, yet are urged forward
to enterprise by the power and the pleasure of an anticipation so beautiful.
They do not think of death. They only thiak of the moral and political glories
of a renovated world, and of these glories as unfading. It is an immortality
after all that they are picturing. While they look on that gospel which brought
life and immortality to light as a fable - Still they find that the whole
capacity of their spirits is not filled, unless they can regale them with the
prospect of an immortality, of their own. Nothing short of this will satisfy
them; and whether you look to those who speculate on the perfectibility of
mankind, or those who think in economic theories that they age laying the basis
on which might be reared the permanent happiness of nations - you see but the
creature spurning at the narrowness of its present condition, and waiting in
earnest expectancy for the manifestation of the sons of God. For the creature
was made subject to vanity.
We have already spoken somewhat of the
inanimate creation - of the curse under which the ground lieth, arid the
consequent toil to which man is subjected that he might live - of the visible
derangement into which nature has been thrown, so that all her elements are
impregnated with disease, and often by hurricane or pestilence or sweeping
flood become the ministers of desolation. We do not know how much lovelier the
face of creation would have stood out to the eye, had not sin entered within
its confines. We do not know what tintures of sweeter beauty had diversified
the landscape, or with what finer notes of melody and peace the purer and
fresher atmosphere had been charged. It is not for us to tell the precise
amount of deterioration, which the mute and unconscious materialism hath
sustained by the fall of Adam. But certain it is, that vanity hath thereby
obtained a sad ascendant over every thing that lives on the surface of our
lower world. It was by sin that death entered amongst us; and this stamps the
character of vanity of vanities on all who are subject to it. Through the whole
of life cloth man walk in a vain show, and he vexeth himself in vain; and even
though it had flowed in one clear and untroubled current of felicity, how
surely and how sadly it reacheth its termination.
It is this which puts
a mockery on all the splendour and stateliness of this world. The grave absorbs
all and annihilates all; and as one generation maketh room for another, and the
men of the present age are borne off the scene by the men of the age that is to
follow, we cannot regard the history of our species, and indeed of all the
living tribes that people the surface of this labouring earth - we cannot
regard it in any other light than as a series of abortions. There is so much of
the promise of immortality in the high anticipation and heyday of youth - there
is so much of the seeming power of immortality in the vigour of established
manhood - there is even so much of the character of endurance in the tenacity
wherewith age keeps itself rivetted to the pursuits and interests of the world,
to its busy schemes, and its eager prosecutions, and its castles of fame or
accumulated fortune - clinging, as it does, to these things on the very brink
of the sepulchre; and keeping the firmer hold with the hand of avarice, the
sooner that its deeds and its documents and its various parchments of security
are to be torn away from it - Why the whole picture looks so farcical if I may
be allowed the term - that surely it may well be said of life under its
happiest guise, and in midst of its greatest prosperity, that it is altogether
subject unto vanity.
'Not willingly but by reason of him who hath
subjected the same.' This as I said before is a parenthesis, by which the
main current of observation is suspended. Yet here it comes most pertinently
in. This is a condition which bath passed upon it by the sentence of the
Creator, not gone into with the consent of the creature. It is a thing
ofordination not of choice. The mute and inanimate things had no choice of that
derangement which they have been made to undergo - of that decay under which so
many of them, and these the loveliest in nature, do yearly sicken and expire;
and so exemplify a death that likens them to those who are immediately above
themselves in the scale of creation. Neither had the inferior animals any
voluntary part in that law of mortality whereunto they are subject - or in that
law of their sentient or organic nature by which, in obedience to a tyrant
appetite, they go forth upon each other in mutual fierceness to raven amid to
destroy. And even with man it is a thing of destiny, and he comes into the
world all unconscious of that which is abiding him. What does an infant know of
death? or whaat does it know of those restless passions by which, ere death
ensues, the period that intervenes is a troubled dream of vexation and vanity?
They lie un-evolved and sleep in mysterious embryo among the curious
receptacles of its little bosom.
If this subjection of our world unto
vanity is resolvable into willingness at all, it must be either the willingness
of that great adversary who plied the first and fatal temptation, or it must be
the willingness of those first parents who yielded to it. And it is indeed a
most striking demonstration of the malignity of sin, and of God's unfaltering
hostility against it - that, on its first entrance within the confines of our
planet and ever since, Nature took on a hue of sickhiness; and the very
elements were charged with disease; and even that ground, which first offered a
soft and flowery carpet for the impress of ethereal footsteps, gathered into a
more rugged and intractable temper than before; and death established its grim
relentless empire over every thing that breathes; and more especially man has
been doomed by the very nobleness of his endowmerits, by the greater reach of
his forebodings and the finer sensibilities that belong to him, to a larger
participation, to a higher pre-eminence in the general distress.
'In
hope.' Take away the parenthesis and you read 'Vanity in hope ' - or an
experience of present evil mixed with the anticipation of release from it. In
the condition of the accursed angels, there is evil umixed and unalleviated. We
can imagine it, but we do not feel it. We deem that in every clime and with
every human creature, there is, it may be dimly and faintly, but there is we
think a sort of restless aspiring towards better things, which could not exist
without a certain prospect of enlargement. There is a constitutional impulse in
the human spirit, by which it is ever stretching forward to a better and a
happier condition than the one which it now occupies; and if it can find no
earthly prospect on which to rest, still the tendency abides with us; and goads
us on as it were to unknown futurity, which we fill with wishes and
schemes and fond imaginations, rather than that a faculty within should lie
unemployed, or a feeling should continue to actuate our hearts that shall be
left without an object to exercise and entertain it. We cannot fancy a
situation of greater wretchedness, than that from which hope is excluded, and
before which there lies no open vista whatever that admits one ray of light
from the fathomless unknown; or rather perhaps when it is all known to be the
cheerless infinite of one vast and unknown desolation - when grim certainty
informs the conscience, that what the present void and the present agony are
now, such will they ever be. - when the weight that is mow upon the spirit is
surely believed by the owner of it to be irremediably there; and there is ever
ringing in his ear, the unvaried knell of a ceaseless arid changeless and
comfortless eternity.
Such may be the sad estate of those apostate
spirits that have fallen before us; but it is not ours. The vanity to which we
are subject is mingled with hope; and it bears a kind of experimental evidence
to that economy under which we live, that the prospects which it sets before us
are so adapted to principles which God hath still permitted to remain in our
nature. It shows that there is a counterpart within us to the doctrine that is
without us. It secures a more ready coalescence on our part with the revelation
of immortality. It gives to that revelation the advantage of being met with and
responded to, in a way that it could not so promptly and immediately have been,
had there not been such am adaptation between the mechanism of our spirits and
the matter that is addrest to them. It secures it, that we shall spring forth
with more alacrity and desire to that message by which our futurity is unfolded
- And however misdirected this tendency of our mature, either on the part of
those who have a false mythology and a fabled elysium, or on the part of those
who without religion at all have still a philanthropy that urges them forward
in pursuit of an earthly elysium that after the lapse of generations they
conceive to be waiting our species - still they are better subjects for being
plied with the doctrine of a true revelation, than if they had no such
tendency.
That there is this tendency, and a strong one too, even
without and beyond the limits of Christianity is quite obvious. The very thirst
after immortal fame, on the part of orators and philosophers and poets, is an
exemplification of it; and so are the magnificent sketches of a prouder and
better day for our species, that float before the eye of our sanguine
economists; and so is every effort to shake off the trammels of antiquity, and
to speed if possible with an innovator's hand, the amelioration of our race;
and so are those lovely visions of a world regenerated into benevolence and
purity and peace, that certain uninspired prophets love to gaze upon. Each has
a millennium of his own on which he doats and dwells with kindred imagination;
and whether you read of the future triumphs of virtue by the progress of light,
or are called to look upon it in the perspective of planned and regulated
villages - put it all down to the craving appetite, or even to the strong
expectancy that there is in human bosoms, for some bright and beauteous
evolution in the history of human affairs. There is a prophetic announcement of
such an era, or; what is stronger still, a habitual advertence to it, on the
part of many prophets and apostles and evangelists.
This is a topic on
which Christians feel that they have a warrant for very noble and high
anticipations. The gospel throws open to the eye of faith a vista, that
terminates in a better day of glory and of rejoicing which shall fill the whole
earth; and with this peculiarity, which is all its own, that, while it points
the eye to this moral scene, it puts into the hand that specific instrument by
which it is to be realized. It is through the ministry of that by which the
world is reconciled, that it shall at length be regenerated. It is on their
acceptance of the message, of peace, that a purifying influence is to descend
from the sanctuary; and, in very proportion as the word of faith circulates and
finds admittance with the species, will the work of renovation take effect upon
them. And, amid all the ridicule which is incurred by those who put their trust
in the operation of a preached gospel, we, at this very day, have witnessed the
samples of its efficacy.
And surely it is not for us who, know the
wonders of missionary success; who, within the compass of our own evanescent
memory, have seen the transition of a whole people from the grossness of
heathenism to the light, and love of Christianity - it is not for us to give up
as hopeless the cause of this world's amelioration.
Ver. 21. 'Because
the creature itself also shall be delivered from the bondage of corruption into
the glorious liberty of the children of God.' Because - is capable from the
original language 'of being rendered into that - in which case the passage
would run thus - ' For the creature was made subject to vanity, in hope that
the creature itself shall be delivered from the bondage of corruption.' - We
prefer however the present translation. It is not true that all have the
specific hope of a deliverance in the terms of the verse - though all I think
have a kind of longing and indefinite hope - a vague anticipation of a better
and a higher existence that awaiteth them - a fond imagining of future bliss -
'Not confined' to the mythologies or the faiths of the old world; but felt even
by the Indians of the new, - mixing itself with their feasts and their battles
and their war-songs, and descending with something like the power of
inspiration upon their hearts. We would not however just say of these wild and
untaught, children of Nature, that 'they hoped specifically for the glorious
liberty of the children of God - though we should say, that, because such a
liberty is awaiting us, therefore there is a general hopefulness of some
enlargement ol' other among all the members of the human family. There is a
marvellous adaptation between the truths f the gospel, and the constitutional
tendencies of those to whom it is addressed. There are counterparts in
revelation, to every feeling and every faculty of nature. There is something in
it suited to our fears and our wishes and also to our hopes; and in all that is
said of the millennium and the latter-day glory, do we recognise a tallying
aceordancy with an expectation, which, however it may have originated, is in
some shape or other very widely diffused throughout the world.
But let
it be your care, my brethren, to have a hope more precise and practical than
this - a hope that looks forward to the prospects, and is founded on the
promises of the gospel - a hope of enlargewent certainly, but such an
enlargement as even now it is competent for you at least to enter upon though
not fully to expatiate in it. What the liberty is, we may infer from what the
bondage is. It is the bondage of corruption from which you are to be delivered;
or in other words it is the liberty of a will set free from the tyranny of evil
desires into which you are to be translated. It is a moral and spiritual
liberty to which you look - a release from the servitude of sin, from the power
and the prevalency of' those base and earth-born affections which war against
the soul.
Now let me apprise you, that, to obtain this release, the
soul must now put forth all the energy that is in it, and forthwith embark on a
war against them. If you permit them to be your tyrants in time, they will be
your tormentors throughout eternity. Here the victory will not be complete, but
here the battle must be begun; and it is only to him who overcometh in the
conflicts of grace, that the crown of glory is given. The hope of the gospel is
not that floating and vague and aerial speculation, which is merely addressed
to the contemplative faculties, and over which a man may luxuriate in a sort of
indolent elysium of the fancy. It is a hope that turns immediately to a
practical account; 'and, if real,' will urge forward; and that immediately, in
a practical direction. The hope of unspotted holiness in heaven, leads to the
toils and the trials and the purifications of holiness upon earth. This is the
life on which a man enters, and that in good, earnest and in a real spirit of
business, on the moment that his mind is taken possession of by a true faith in
the - gospel. It is when we know the truth that the truth makes us free. It is
when we look to the fulness of that propitiation which was made for the sins
'of the world,' and feel how under its blessed operation all sense of guilt and
of reckoning is made to disappear from the conscience - it is then that we are
loosed from the bond of despair, and' can see' that there is a hope in the new
obedience of the gospel. And it is then too that we are visited with trust,
when before there was terror - that we are visited with a delight in those
ways, to which before there were distaste and antipathy - that we are visited
with gratitude to Him, who before was lightly esteemed by us - and that, under
the impulse of this gratitude, we enter with alacrity and good-will on that new
path, which, by His example and His precepts He hath pointed out to us. You
have no part nor lot in these things, if you are not so bestirring yourselves,.
Ver. 22. 'For we know that the whole creation groaneth and
travaileth in pain together until now.' It may be thought by some that
there is a little too much the character of fancy in our previous remarks, for
the solid and the simple instruction of those to whom they are addressed. And
yet you find that the evangelical Paul, he who was determined to know nothing
save Jesus Christ and Him crucified, he who gloried to preach the gospel in the
face of the oppositions of vain philosophy and of science falsely so called -
you find of him that he casts a widely speculative eye over the whole creation,
which in this verse he represents as groaning and travailing in pain. It is
quite obvious that he here extends the range of his contemplations, beyond the
limits of the Christian church properly so called. In the next verse, he
expressly singles out believers, whom he represents also as in the agony of a
yet unfulfilled expectation. Not only they - that is Nature at large - not only
they but we who have the first-fruits of the Spirit do groan inwardly. So that
in this the present verse, he is indulging himself with a very ample
perspective - he is taking a distant outlook beyond the precincts of the
consecrated territory - he is roaming abroad, as it were, and with generalised
survey over the whole expanse of animate aiid inanimate things - he counts not
this passing, but sublime and comprehensive regard, unworthy of a place in the
page of inspiration. And accordingly, set and shrined as it were in an epistle
the most replete of them all 'with the very strictest peculiarities of the
theological creed, do you find an image more striking I am sure and more
descriptive of a universal character, that takes in the whole compass of nature
in all its varieties, than any which I have ventured to bring forward - the
creation in a state of big and general distress, giving token of some pregnant
but yet undisclosed mystery wherewith it is charged, and heaving throughout all
its borders with the pains and the portents of its coming regeneration.
This is the aspect which our present system of things bore to the eyes
of the apostle, and its aspect still. The world is not at ease. The element in
which it floats is far from being of a tranquil or a rejoicing character. It
has somehow gone out of adjustment; and is evidently off the poise or the
balance of those equable movements, in which we should desire that it persisted
for ever. Like the stray member of a serene and blissful family, it has turned
into a wayward comfortless ill-conditioned thing, that still teems however with
the recollection of its high original, and wildly gleams and gladdens in the
hope of its future restoration. It hath all the character now of being in a
transition state,; and with all those symptoms of restlessness about it which
brooding insect undergoes, erc it pass into 'the death-like chrysalis, and come
forth again in some gay and beauteous expansion on the fields of our illumined
atmosphere. Meanwhile it is in sore labour; and the tempest's sigh, and the
meteor's flash, and not more the elemental war than the conflict and the agony
that are upon all spirits - the ~vexing care, and the heated enterprise, and
the fierce emulation, and the battle-cry both that rings among the inferior
tribes throughout the amplitudes of unpeopled nature and that breaks as loudly
upon the ear from the shock of civilized men - above every thing the death, the
sweeping irresistible death, which makes such havoc among all the ranks of
anilnated nature, and carries off as with a flood its successive generation.
These are the now overhanging evils of a world that has departed from its God.
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