Romans 8:20-21 “For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God.”

The whole world around us is broken, just like we are, and it doesn’t like it. It is a kind of slavery, a kind of bondage, in which it has been forced to live. The storm clouds don’t want to dump a foot of rain on some unsuspecting town and destroy thousands of homes with flooding. They don’t want to keep running over Moore, Oklahoma with tornadoes and wiping out the place. The earth’s mantle, its crust, doesn’t want to scrape and grind against itself until the earth quakes, homes collapse, and hundreds of people die in the rubble. It’s not what the created world was made to do.

All of this has been imposed upon the world and the people who live in it by our Creator in response to our sin. It is a severe mercy. Once we became estranged from him by our sin, separated by our self-willed rebellion, he couldn’t let us go on thinking everything was okay in this new state of affairs, not if he loved us. He couldn’t let us comfortably walk down the wide road of life as though our selfish choices and godless habits were just a happy alternative, until we were so far down that road that there was no coming home, and hell was the final destination.

So he messed with the universe. He tinkered with his creation. The story of the fall in Genesis 3 warns of painful childbirth, loveless marriages, and frustrated farming, but you know that it goes far beyond that. Literally nothing in all the universe works the way it is supposed to. It may work well enough to get buy. Sometimes it may perform admirably by our current standards. But it all fails eventually, much of it sooner than later. It is all subject to decay.

And God is saying, “Hello! Something is wrong! Something should be telling you this is not the way it is supposed to be! You’re having a hard time getting through all this by yourself, aren’t you? You are having to see that your way isn’t working. This mess is bigger than you can fix yourselves. Why don’t you turn around and come home? Why don’t you come back to me?”

And once he has gotten his last son or daughter home, then his purpose for having a broken world held together by celestial duct tape and bailor twine will be over. Things like pain and tragedy, failure and frustration, decay and death will have completed their work. Then our Lord will be able to release the universe from its bondage.

A new era of freedom will begin. An eternal age of liberty, an endless day of love will be all we know. We will serve, not like slaves, but like free men and women: unafraid of death, untempted by sin, fully living out the gifts and purpose for which we were made.

And the creation in which we live will serve us, not like a slave, but like an artist finally given brushes and a canvas, like craftsmen finally given tools, set free to do what they are able to do, because they have been “brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God.”

This world in which we live is broken. We are living among the ruins of a once great universe. But still hope for freedom, because Christ is the hope of a broken world.