Romans
8:20-21 -
For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by
the will of the One who subjected it, in hope that the creation
itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the
glorious freedom of the children of God.
Four Questions:
What is it?
What is it subjected to?
Who is the one who subjected it?
What is the hope?
By examining the immediate context we can see that:
It refers to creation, excluding people - or at
least excluding those people who are the children of God.
Creation was subjected to frustration and
(synonymously) bondage to decay
hope involves an expectation of being liberated from
bondage to decay
To better understand
what Paul is saying in Romans
8:19-22, we must examine what is said at
the fall of man:
Genesis
3:14-20 -
So the LORD God said to the serpent, "Because you have
done this, "Cursed are you above all the livestock and all the wild
animals! You will crawl on your belly and you will eat dust all the days of your
life. And I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your
offspring and hers; he will crush your head, and you will strike his
heel."
To the woman he said, "I will greatly increase your pains in childbearing;
with pain you will give birth to children. Your desire will be for your
husband, and he will rule over you." To Adam he said, "Because you
listened to your wife and ate from the tree about which I commanded you, 'You
must not eat of it,' "Cursed is the ground because of
you;
through painful toil you will eat of it all the days of your life. It will
produce thorns and thistles for you, and you will eat the
plants of the field. By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you
return to the ground, since from it you were taken; for dust you are and to
dust you will return." Adam named his wife Eve, because
she would become the mother of all the living.
Cf. Revelation 12:9 - that ancient serpent called the devil, or Satan, who leads the whole
world astray.
All of creation
was cursed by God at the fall of man.
Man (and woman)
was cursed because of the choice he had made to disobey God.
The rest of
creation made no such choice, but was cursed in association with man.
So Paul refers in
Romans 8 to the curse and resulting corruption that God put on creation as a
result of mans fall.
But at the fall,
when God cursed man and creation, He also gave hope that the curse
would be reversed. For it was in the
mind of God, even then, that He would later redeem His creation.
This will occur
at the end of history when God glorifies His people and creates a new heaven
and a new earth:
2 Peter
Revelation 21:1 - Then I saw a new
heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away