MERRY THURSDAY BY PARRIS BAILEY.
Rom.8:19 “For all creation is waiting eagerly for that future day when God will reveal who his children really are. Against its will, all creation was subjected to God’s curse. But with eager hope, the creation looks forward to the day when it will join God’s children in glorious freedom from death and decay.”
There is so much beauty to behold in the creation. Have your ever snorkeled in the pacific ocean? Or hiked through the Smokies? Watched the kangaroos and koalas in Australia? Been on the African safaris? I have done all those things and keep telling about God’s unbelievable creativity with creation. In reality it is a fallen creation that has been given the same blow that man was given. Creation also waits its redemption, in fact creation is eagerly awaiting, sighing, groaning and travailing together with us. Why is that? The cosmos will meet its final purpose when we will be revealed as sons of God. One could almost imagine that it is joining with us in spiritual harmony or dance. To all the earth lovers the best thing we can do to restore our planet back to where it was is to “become sons of God”. This is when all wrong is made right once again.
Matthew Henry puts it this way, “Indeed the whole creation seems to wait with earnest expectation for the period when the children of God shall be manifested in the glory prepared for them. There is an impurity, deformity, and infirmity, which has come upon the creature by the fall of man. There is an enmity of one creature to another. And they are used, or abused rather, by men as instruments of sin. Yet this deplorable state of the creation is in hope. God will deliver it from thus being held in bondage to man’s depravity. The miseries of the human race, through their own and each other’s wickedness, declare that the world is not always to continue as it is. Our having received the first-fruits of the Spirit, quickens our desires, encourages our hopes, and raises our expectations. Sin has been, and is, the guilty cause of all the suffering that exists in the creation of God. It has brought on the woes of earth; it has kindled the flames of hell.”
MacLarens Commentary mentions the great reversal in the earth, “Earth’s judgments will be reversed by that divine voice, and the great promise, which through weary ages has shone as a far-off star,-’I will set him on high because he hath known my name’-will then be known for the sun near at hand. Many stars will be quenched, but ‘they that be wise shall shine as the brightness of the firmament.That revelation will be more surprising to no one than to those who are its subjects, when they see themselves mirrored in that glass, and so unlike what they are here. Their first impulse will be to wonder at the form they see, and to ask, almost with incredulity, ‘Lord, is it I?’”
There is so much to look forward to yet so much to experience now as we walk hand in hand with the cosmos as we eagerly await our last redemption.