Romans 8:22

22. For This is true of us Christians, in a measure, not only as human creatures, but as part of the whole creation, so that 22 and 23 are a more explicit statement of the unity herein of the Christian with the creation.

Whole creation Individual suffering is in unison with universal suffering. All animated nature is groaning. All physical nature is scarred with past convulsions, and puts forth its thorny luxuriance as if groaning under the primeval curse.

Travaileth Its pains are, however, not merely of death, but also of birth. It is as if nature were a mother struggling to bring forth a fresh and new creation. This is, however, the only intimation that the passage contains of any renovation beyond that of the sons of God. It intimates nothing of an immortality or resurrection of beasts. Of such a renovation of the world, not only the Jews, but other oriental nations, cherished an expectation. Nor does geology, as some suppose, exclude the supposition. That science discloses wondrous revolutions and stages through which the earth has passed in past ages. The most wonderful, surpassing in some respects most of the miracles of Scripture, was the introduction of animal life. And geology reveals some great changes as sudden. Of life it may be said that it was a suspension of all previous laws, by the interposition of a new power in the world. When life forms or enters an organism, the ordinary course of chemical affinities is arrested; when that interposition is withdrawn, “the lower law by which the particles of matter seek their natural affinity resumes its reign.” This seems a shadow of the interposition in nature of the still higher Power by which still higher arrangements will be established, which, though miracles to our present order, will be natural to the new state, and natural as accordant with the laws of God’s universe.