The Whole World Is Waiting

Back in Corinth, years before that chain and that road, Paul was still walking up and down the room, and Tertius was still writing as fast as his pen would go.

(Paul did the talking and Tertius did the writing, which is why Tertius's hand was always the tired one.)

The letter was going to the believers in Rome, many days away across the sea. A few years before, the emperor Claudius had thrown every Jew out of Rome, even the ones who believed in Jesus, like Priscilla and Aquila. Paul himself had been whipped.

"What we suffer now," he said, "is not worth comparing with the glory God is going to show in us."

Set every hurt beside what God has ready, and the hurts look like a pebble next to a mountain.

Then Paul looked past the people to the world itself. Ever since Adam and Eve turned from God, everything has been wearing out. Iron rusts. Bread goes green and fuzzy. Flowers droop, dogs grow old, and people die.

"The whole creation is waiting," Paul said, "up on its toes, stretching its neck to see God's children shown for who they really are. All of it has been groaning together, like a mother about to give birth."

A mother's groan hurts, but it means a baby is nearly here. One day, Paul said, the world would be set free from rot and rust and death.

"And we groan too," he went on, "we who have the first fruits of the Spirit, while we wait for God to make our bodies new."

(At harvest time, God's people brought him the first bundle of grain from their fields, a promise that the rest was ripening.) God's Spirit, already living inside the believers, was that first bundle. The harvest had begun!

"Who hopes for what he can already see?" Paul said. "We hope for what we cannot see yet, so we wait for it patiently."

Then Paul said something for the nights when a person is too sad to find any words. "We do not know what to pray, but the Spirit himself prays for us, with groans too deep for words." And God, who looks into every heart, understands what the Spirit is praying.

"We know," Paul said, "that God works all things together for good for those who love him." A whipping is not good, and neither is being thrown out of your own city. But God was using all of it to make his children like his Son, so that Jesus would be the firstborn of a huge family of brothers and sisters.

God chose them, called them, made them right with himself, and gave them glory. (Paul said that last one as if it had already happened. When God starts something, it is as good as done.)

Even after those words reached Rome, the believers' bread still went green, their old people still grew weak, and some of them still died. The world kept waiting, up on its toes.

Yet one man had already gone all the way through death and come out alive, in a body that would never wear out again. Paul had met him alive, years before, on the road to Damascus. He was the firstborn Paul had written about, the oldest brother of a brand-new world, with brothers and sisters still to come.

Jesus went first. When he comes again, the whole waiting world will see God's children shown for who they really are, with their oldest brother at the front.