Romans 8:20

THE VANITY OF CREATION

‘For the creature was made subject to vanity.’

Romans 8:20

It is hardly necessary to say that the creature is creation, as indeed the Revised Version puts it—this world in which man lives out his little life; and when St. Paul says the creation was made subject to vanity, he implies that to the reverent mind or heart there is in creation a certain element of failure, there is a streak of evil in the face of the good.

I. It is just that sense of failure, of something which might have been, and yet is not, that creates for man his peculiar relation to the world in which he is situated. For indeed it might have happened that man would not be conscious of anything which binds him to the world at large. He might not have found outside in the world any reflection of the character which he discerns in himself, and yet the very expressions which we use of nature and of life are witnesses to the essential sympathy which is itself, we may reverently suppose, the evidence of the one Divine authorship. There is in life the brightness and the shadow, the calm and the storm, as there is in nature. The life of man, as the life of natural objects, passes from birth to maturity, to decay and death. The seasons of the natural world—spring, summer, autumn, winter—find their correspondence in the experiences of human life, but all these would not of themselves, as I think, create that peculiar sympathy of which the highest minds and the best are conscious in their relations to nature. There is in nature something which St. Paul calls vanity, something of failure, something of falling below the ideal which seems set before it.

II. ‘So good and so bad.’—What is strange in human nature is not that it is so good or so bad, but that it is so good and so bad, capable of an elevation so sublime and a degradation so abject. Nature seems to speak, however silently, of something which has defeated her natural God-given object. The reason why the discords of creation touch us so powerfully is, that we feel them to be images of our moral condition. A great theologian of our own time has said that when he looks upon human nature in its height and in its depth he feels just as if he saw a boy of noble ancestry being brought up in surroundings which lowered him far below his natural level. Something has gone wrong with that boy. There is a flaw which has occurred in his life’s story, and the flaw and that defect are the inherent sympathy between man and his environment. So St. Paul uses the very same language about human nature and the natural world. But it all is waiting for the restitution of all things, for the redemption which shall unite it to the sons of God.

III. Is it not a fact that the meanest of mankind exercises wellnigh unlimited sovereignty over the noblest of the animals, and yet the wisest of men have seemed to come hardly nearer to them in understanding of their nature than the veriest child. What do we know of their language, their means of communication, so much stronger than is ordinarily recognised; what of their conscience, for the germ of conscience beyond doubt lies within them; what of their future, whether they, like ourselves, shall be inheritors of the immortality which God reserves for His creatures? There is no doubt we owe them a vast responsibility. There is hardly any higher test of the dignity, the elevation of a people, than its attitude towards the animal creation.

IV. It is the safe and sacred rule of life, as far as may be, ‘Never to blend our pleasure or our pride with sorrow of the meanest thing that feels.’ I think it is strange that the men who have realised, as was never realised before, the nearness of man’s relation to the animal world, have not always been distinguished by the most loving and penetrating sympathy with those animals themselves. After all, the view of nature which sanctifies the relation of man to his own environment is that it is all the work of God. For some reason, mysterious indeed, it is subject now to vanity, but it is reserved to a glorious future. The teaching of St. Paul (and St. Paul saw further into life and destiny than most of his interpreters) looks forward to the time when the whole creation, animate and inanimate, shall be redeemed by the efficacious sacrifice of the Son of God. In this faith we shall go our way. We shall not be guilty of any of that want of thought which does more harm than deliberate evil purpose if we realise that all nature is the expression of the Divine Almighty Mind.

Bishop Welldon.