An exposition of Romans 8 as God’s hope (the hope that God has) that exposes the escapism inherent in our dualistic understanding of humanity. Suffering has meaning not because we hope to escape the physical world, but because God is seeking to restore that world. The groaning of this world is a suffering that will “bear much fruit.”

God himself is in the place of having planted a garden and is hoping, awaiting, for the fruit of the garden to come. And so, too, history for God is unfolding. It is a real world that is coming to bear fruit in the Kingdom of God. This is a strange notion for us because in a kind of scholastic or philosophical understanding that often gets fused with the New Testament, the idea that history is real and that things are unfolding even for God himself is out of court—it just doesn’t fit with an Aristotelian notion of an“Unmoved Mover.”

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Music: Bensound