Creation’s Groaning and the Spiritual Body

…“he has been compared to the senseless beasts and has become like them” (Psalm 49:12). For the life of such people is truly vanity.

To them creation is subjected, and certainly not willingly (Romans 8:20)—how could it be?

But in what sense do we say even this? The creation that is perceived and seen knows nothing at all of our affairs, for it is not rational.

Yet even if one were to grant that it could understand something, it would not, he says, have endured so shameful a slavery, nor would it have wished to be subjected to and to serve those who have chosen to spend their lives on nothing needful, that is, on nothing good.

Rather, he says, it has been subjected for the time being in hope (Romans 8:20-21), the hope of those who will be saved and of the saints and elect of every age. God yokes it and, as it were, keeps it for the freedom it will have under the saints and those who love him, so that it may serve his children alone and be at hand for the needs of the chosen.

For it is all but distraught, in labor and in pain (Romans 8:22); and if it could know anything of our affairs, it would perhaps even be wailing aloud.

Yet yielding to the divine will, it waits in its own way for “the revealing,” as I said, “of the sons of God” (Romans 8:19).

And not only so, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, we ourselves also groan within ourselves (Romans 8:23).

He takes as proof of what has been said what naturally happens within us.

For we ourselves, he says, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan within ourselves, weighed down, as we wait for adoption, the redemption of our body (Romans 8:23).

For it is true that “a perishable body weighs down the soul, and this earthly tent burdens the mind with its many cares” (Wisdom of Solomon 9:15).

But once the Spirit has come to be in us and is remaking us toward a longing for virtue, love of the flesh, as it were, leads out its forces against us, and the law that has fastened on our members (Romans 7:23), ever goading us toward unseemly pleasures, rises up against us without mercy.

That is why we groan, counting the redemption of our body as our adoption.

For what we thirst for is not to lay our bodies aside, nor do we say that this is the redemption. Rather, we expect the body to become spiritual (1 Corinthians 15:44), that is, to have cast off entirely the fleshly and earthly mind, and the sting of sin (1 Corinthians 15:56). This is what we call the spiritual body.

If the grace of adoption includes the redemption of our body, then let no one distort the resurrection for us in any way. Nor let anyone come to such folly as to treat the flesh as something to be thrown away, and to say that once it has fallen into the earth it will vanish entirely, while something else rises in its place, something spiritual—thin, I mean, and airy. For that is how they understand “spiritual.”

For in hope we were saved (Romans 8:24).

We believe that our bodies too will come to be beyond corruption and death. This is laid up for us in hope, not as something already present, but as something that will certainly come to be in every way; and we wait for it with patience (Romans 8:25), enduring hardship, so that we may obtain so holy a gift.

Likewise the Spirit also helps… (Romans 8:26).