Imagine an end-of-year financial statement laid out on the table, two columns side by side. In the first column: every expense the household has racked up over twelve months. It runs into millions. The accountant feels his stomach tighten as he tallies it. Then he turns to the second column, the income, and his face changes. The income is not in the millions. It is not in the billions or even the trillions. It is in the hundreds of trillions of trillions of trillions. The expense column is real. It is not a small number. It is a colossal number. But against the income, it is, in Paul's careful word, not worth comparing.
That is the picture Paul reaches for in Romans 8:18 — not to soften the cost of Christian suffering, but to put it in a bigger frame. "I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us." The word translated consider is an accountant's word. It means to reckon, to calculate. Paul has done the maths. The pain of the present is real, and the joy of what is coming is so vast that the calculation simply collapses on one side.
The pain is not minimised
Anyone tempted to read Paul's calculation as a quick brush-off — chin up, it could be worse — should read 2 Corinthians 11 alongside it. The same apostle who wrote these words had been beaten with rods three times, stoned once, given the thirty-nine lashes five times, shipwrecked three times, left to drift in the open sea for a night and a day. He carried a thorn in the flesh he describes as a messenger of Satan. He knew suffering personally, intimately, in his bones.
His readers in Rome knew it too. Within a few short years of receiving this letter, many of them would be made scapegoats for the great fire of Rome under Nero. The Roman historian Tacitus tells us what happened next: Christians were dressed in animal skins and sent into the arena to be torn apart by dogs; others were tied to posts along Nero's driveway and set alight as human torches to light his evening rides. This is the audience Paul writes to. He is not minimising their pain. He is not minimising yours either — the cruel mockery at work, the slander from family, the relentless temptation, the long ache of ill health, the worry over the next bill. Every gram of it is real.
And yet — and this is the staggering claim — every gram of it, gathered up into a single weight of suffering, would still not balance the scales against the glory to come. Paul says something similar in 2 Corinthians 4:17: a light and momentary affliction is achieving for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison. A few grams of pain now will be repaid with a million tons of glory then.
Notice too the small phrase that lifts the promise even higher. The glory will not merely be revealed to us, as if we were spectators at a show. It will be revealed in us. Every redeemed person will radiate the glory of God like a window catching the morning sun. We will not watch the glory from a distance. We will become participants in it.
Three groaning witnesses
To press the promise home, Paul gives three witnesses, three case studies of present suffering that is overshadowed by future glory. Creation groans. The church groans. And the Spirit himself groans alongside us.
Creation groans — but in childbirth, not in death
The whole physical universe, Paul says, was subjected to frustration (Romans 8:20). The word means emptiness, futility — things not working the way they were meant to. Anyone who has watched a device die for no apparent reason knows the small version of that frustration. The cosmic version is everywhere we look. "The whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time."
This is the world Adam's fall unleashed. The good world of Genesis 1, where everything worked exactly as God spoke it into being, has become a world where the second law of thermodynamics holds sway. Things move from order to disorder. Leave your house or your garden untouched for a year and it will not be tidier when you come back. Forests burn. Reefs bleach. Earthquakes flatten cities. Diseases ravage bodies. Alfred, Lord Tennyson called it nature red in tooth and claw, and he was right. It is a beautiful world, and it is a vicious one.
But — and here Paul's hopeful imagery takes over — the cries of the planet are not the rattle of a dying patient. They are the groans of a woman in labour. Read verses 19 to 22 again and listen for the verbs: the creation waits in eager expectation. The Greek picture is of someone standing on tiptoe, craning their neck, straining to see something coming around the corner. Think of a family at the airport arrivals gate, leaning, peering, looking past the heads in front of them, longing for the first glimpse of the loved one they have not seen in a year. That is what the universe is doing. It is straining to see the day when the sons of God are revealed, when the curse is lifted, when the lion will lie down with the lamb, when the desert will bloom, when the second law of thermodynamics will be repealed.
Every climate headline, every story of mass extinction or melting ice, ought to grieve us. As image-bearers commissioned to steward the earth, we are not indifferent to its suffering. But we are not in despair either. The planet is in labour, not in its death throes. There is a child on the way.
The church groans — under the work of the Spirit
The second witness is the people of God themselves. "Not only so, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for our adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies." The verse reads almost like a contradiction. How can people who have the Spirit of God also be groaning inwardly? Some Christian teaching insists this cannot be — that any sorrow, any struggle, any spiritual pain is a sign of weak faith and unclaimed blessing. That teaching is a cruelty dressed up as good news. It is not what the apostle says here.
The Holy Spirit, among his many works, opens the eyes of the believer to see sin clearly. He convicts. He shows us how far we still are from what we were made to be. And that does make us groan — not the groan of a slave with no hope of release, but the groan of a son who longs to be at last fully like his Father. The struggle of the Christian against remaining sin is real and exhausting (Paul has just spent the back half of Romans 7 describing it). But it is not pointless.
And then Paul drops the phrase that turns the whole groan into hope: the firstfruits of the Spirit. In an agricultural society, the firstfruits were the very first sheaves of the harvest brought in from the field. They were not the harvest itself. They were a foretaste of it — and, crucially, a guarantee. Where firstfruits had come in, the rest of the harvest was certain to follow. To the farmer they said: more is coming, plenty more, exactly like this.
The Spirit is the firstfruits. The harvest is what Paul calls our adoption as sons and the redemption of our bodies. We have already been adopted in legal terms — the paperwork is signed, the status is granted, the inheritance is named in our favour. But the adopted son has not yet walked through the door of the Father's house. He still lives at a distance. He still groans for the day when he sees his Father face to face.
The redemption of our bodies
The other thing the harvest brings is the redemption of our bodies. Read that phrase slowly. Paul has already called these bodies bodies of death in Romans 7:24, and he has said in Romans 8:10 that the body is dead because of sin. The body we live in now is groaning. It tires, it aches, it forgets, it betrays us with small middle-aged complaints and great life-shortening illnesses. It is, like the planet, in bondage to decay.
And then, one day — Paul promises — we will be given new bodies. Resurrection bodies. Imperishable, incorruptible, full of glory, perfectly in harmony with sinless souls. On that day you will never again know what it feels like to be in pain. You will never again be tired. You will never get sick. You will never be confused or forgetful. Your motives will be pure. Your affections will be undivided. You will be, at last, fully and unmistakably what God made you to be.
This is not wishful thinking. The New Testament uses the word hope in a particular way. When we say I hope it doesn't rain tomorrow, we mean we wish it wouldn't, but we don't actually know. The Bible's hope is not uncertainty. It is something future, not something doubtful. The reason it is hope is simply that we do not yet have it — but we will. "For in this hope we were saved. But hope that is seen is no hope at all. Who hopes for what they already have? But if we hope for what we do not yet have, we wait for it patiently."
Hope makes you bearable to live with
Doctors will tell you that hope makes a measurable difference in how a patient endures pain. When hope drains away, even mild discomfort becomes unbearable; when hope is strong, even severe pain can be borne. The same is true spiritually. If you intend to suffer well — and every Christian will suffer, whether through persecution, illness, loss, temptation, or the long dull ache of living in a fallen body — you will need hope. Not vague optimism. Not denial. The settled, future-tense confidence that what is coming will make the present pain look small.
C.S. Lewis, near the close of The Last Battle, has the Pevensie children walk into the true Narnia — the real one of which everything they had ever known was only a shadow. They look around and find that the mountains stretch further, the colours are deeper, the air is sharper, everything is more real than they had ever realised was possible. That is the country we are walking toward. This world, lovely and broken in equal measure, is the shadowland. The country to come is the deeper, truer one.
A word to the one not yet persuaded
If everything written above sounds attractive but at arm's length — a beautiful idea that has not yet become a personal one — Paul's logic in this chapter is gently relentless. Every benefit he describes belongs to those who are in Christ Jesus. To refuse Christ is, in the end, to refuse a perfect universe, a perfect body, a perfect soul, and a blissful eternity. It is to choose, instead, to remain under the weight of the present sufferings with no glory at the end of them. The good news — the actual gospel — is that Christ has already done what was needed to swing this calculation in your favour. The income column has been filled in for you by another. You only need to receive it.
For those who have received it — who belong to the Lord — the apostle's words land with their full force. Whatever you are carrying this week, whatever groan is rising from your body or your circumstances or your inner battle with sin, gather it all up. Place the whole great weight of it on one side of the scales. And then look at what God has put on the other side: a glory so heavy, so radiant, so eternal, that the suffering side of the scales lifts as if it were nothing at all. Our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us.
"I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us." — Romans 8:18
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