The Doctrine of Groaning and Intercession
Romans 8:18–26
We're in Romans 8. We are in a fabulous section dealing with future things. Sometimes you work your way through a passage in your reading and you're studying, and sometimes in English you can actually pick out the key word because there's really very little way to translate it in the way it is being translated. Often times in English, though, you find translators follow a rather artificial English style rule, which is don't use the same word very often within the same paragraph. The rule says to try to have stylistic variations in vocabulary but sometimes the Holy Spirit didn't quite read the English rulebook and so He uses the same word three or four times in two or three sentences. He's making a point.
We're going to start in verse 18. We've studied some part of 18-21 last time but this time we're going to make it down to about verse 27 just before we get to a well-known promise in Romans 8:28. The key word that we see in this section is a word that shows up first in verse 22. "For we know that the whole creation groans." In verse 23, "Not only that but also we ourselves having the first fruits of the Spirit, even as ourselves groan within ourselves…" So we've got the creation groaning and we're groaning and then further down when it talks about prayer in verse 26, "In the same way the Spirit helps [assists] us in our weaknesses for we do not know how to pray as we should, but the Spirit Himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words." These are unutterable groans so there's no audible sound. So three times we've got groaning going on.
Now you always thought as a Christian you're supposed to have happiness and joy of the Lord in your heart and always be happy and joyful about everything. As the song says, "I have the joy, joy, joy down in my heart." But here we have one of the central chapters on the spiritual life in the whole Bible that almost every knowledgeable Christian recognizes as one of the greatest chapters in Scripture. It focuses on our phase 2, Christian life experience as what? Groaning. Any of us who have been around for very long should recognize how true that is. On the one hand, we have a great joy and happiness because we know what our eternal destiny is. We have stability in our soul in the midst of crises, but there are difficulties, there are challenges. Health challenges, emotional challenges, physical, monetary challenges; there's challenges that we face dealing with people. We have all kinds of systems testing in terms of our employment and employers. We have people testing in terms of the same kind of things.
It goes on and on and on because as we studied in the last two lessons, in dealing with the reasons and categories for suffering, we live in the fallen world so the world is corrupt and all of the systems are corrupt. There's no ideal form of government until Jesus returns. When Jesus returns, because He is the God-man and He is absolute perfection and He will be the head of the Kingdom, there will be a perfect government and perfect politics. But even in a world with a perfect government, with a perfect governor, who will be the King of Kings and the Lord of Lords and a perfect system of laws, there will be an untold number of people who at the end of a thousand years will reject all that, will claim that it is all wrong, that Jesus Christ is just out of destroy all the poor people and to take advantage of all the old people, to take away all of their Medicare and all of their Medicaid and everything else. The same thing we hear today is going to be leveled against the perfect rule of the Lord Jesus Christ. That is because of the corruption of the sin nature on all those who are born during the one thousand year period of the Millennial Kingdom.
So this is a time of corruption, even though there's a partial reversal of the curse when it's rolled back some during the Millennial but the curse does not end until we get to the destruction of the present heavens and earth and God creates a new heavens and a new earth. There is not going to be a perfect world until we get to that time. Until then, if you're a human being and you're fallen and you're living with a corrupt body and you're living with corrupt sinners and you're living with corrupt systems and working in corrupt systems, you're going to groan. And that groaning is creation itself groaning because it's under corruption and we're going to groan and it's not wrong to admit it.
There are a lot of Christians who think it's wrong for them to complain. Yes, complaining is wrong but you can complain to God. "Oh, no, no, no. I don't want to tell God how hard it is." Don't you think he knows? He's omniscient. If you're not telling Him, you're not being honest with yourself. That's one problem Christians have. You can't face and handle the problems you're facing if you're not willing to admit what those problems are. And you're not willing to admit the fact that your faith wavers at times. Read the Psalms. Read all of those lament psalms when David is groaning and it's the same word as used here. The word that's used for groaning here means to mourn or to lament something. Read through the Psalms and read all of these passages where David is groaning about his circumstances, the people that are opposed to him, and the enemies that he has, the situations he's going through and he's always going back to the Lord. But before he gets focused on the Lord and gets his mental attitude straight and moves forward, he's always honest with God about the negatives of his situation. He doesn't try to gloss over it.
We can't get anywhere if we're not dealing with reality as it is and think, "Oh, I shouldn't feel this way because I'm a Christian. I shouldn't have these thoughts because I'm a Christian. I shouldn't hate my job because I'm a Christian. I shouldn't have trouble and have anxiety over going to work with the people I'm going to work with because I'm a Christian. Yeah, you're a Christian and you're a fallen sinner and you have to go through that; we all have to go through that and until we face it and be honest with ourselves and with God we're not really going to be able to maximize the solutions that God has for us. So I'm calling this The Doctrine of Groaning and Intercession. Romans 8:17–26.
Let's just do a little review. We touched on this last time, "If, and we are children…" Every believer is a child of God teknon [teknon], "heirs also, heirs of God." That describes every believer at the moment of salvation, we are regenerate, born again, born into the family of God. We are adopted into the family of God so that we are going to be trained as children of God. We're heirs of God. But the next category is distinct. It's "fellow heirs, joint heirs with Christ, if we suffer with Him, in order that we may also be glorified with Him."
Now the next verse, the one I talked about considerably in the last couple of weeks, verse 18, "For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory that is to be revealed to us." Now I went back and took a look at this verse a little more because I've just had trouble understanding this concept of how this glory is revealed in us. It's not the preposition en which can also be instrumental. It's eis which can have a nuance of within but this preposition in the Greek usually indicates movement and many times it's the preposition that's used if you're going somewhere. You say, "I'm going to go to Dallas" and you would use the preposition eis [e)ij] to indicate direction and movement toward a goal. That's how this is used.
It's a preposition that suggests some kind of movement and direction so what is being moved here toward us is glory. Now isn't that an interesting concept? The context we're talking about here is suffering. Every believer is going to engage in some sort of suffering. It may be mild. It may be maximized. It depends on the circumstances but if you're a believer in the Lord Jesus Christ and at any level trying to apply doctrine in the world you're going to face opposition and hostility at one level. That's what this suffering is. It's not necessarily overt persecution. It's just facing adversity and difficulty in life related to your obedience to the Word of God. "For I consider that the suffering [whatever adversity or difficulty or challenges I face today in terms of applying the Word], they're really not worthy to be compared to the glory that shall be revealed toward us."
What Paul is saying is that if you or I are growing to spiritual maturity and we are applying the Word then God is doing something in our life in terms of bringing glory to Himself. That's accomplished by conforming us to the image of His Son. He mentions this in verse 29, so look at that verse. We'll get into this more next time as we examine all those words that Calvinists believe mean we actually have a fatalistic God but that's because they distorted the terms. The verse says, "For those He foreknew, He also predestined..." Predestined simply means to set a goal ahead of time, to set a destination beforehand. If I get up in the morning and decide I need to take a trip to Austin, I am going to predestine Austin. I am setting Austin as my destination ahead of time so the prefix "pre" means before or ahead of time so I set that destiny.
Jesus Christ's character is our destiny. He is conforming us to that goal. That's the direction God is moving us. How do be conformed to His character?
One of the ways God uses is suffering. We studied in Hebrews, chapter 2, where even the Son of God had to learn obedience by the things that He suffered. It's not that He was disobedient but He had to go through that process. As He suffered, He grew and matured spiritually in His humanity. And so, what Paul is articulating here in verse 18 is that the sufferings are not that important. Get your eyes off of yourself, quit being self-absorbed with the people who don't like you, with the difficulty of the job, with the fact that you're getting older and it's more difficult to read the fine print you need to read when you're trying to go through things or whatever else it is. We all go through these changes. Life gets difficult. Work in this fallen world gets difficult. We sometimes have overt spiritual opposition from people who know we're Christians and they're just out to get us.
But that difficulty that we go through is nothing compared to what God is producing in us. That's essentially what he, Paul, is saying here. Because something is happening when we're walking by the Spirit, God is directing His power, and His character toward us. Often the word 'glory' is used as a synonym for the entire essence of God. So the sufferings of the present time are not worthy to be compared with the essence of God that will be revealed in us. Now does that passage seem to make a little more sense? God is creating His character in us. Look at Romans 3:23, "For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God." There, the 'glory of God' is used as a summary term for the essence of God. We're fallen short of the essence of God. It's used the same way here. The glory that is going to be revealed in us is really the essence of God that is being revealed in us, His character. We're being transformed into that character from grace to grace, as Paul says, so it is a matter of spiritual growth. That is revealed in us. It's moving to us, in a sense, and being produced in us, as we learn to handle the suffering and as we go forward.
Now Paul is going to add an additional explanation. See this verse, verse 18, started off with a 'for'. Everything that comes between this verse, verse 18, and verse 27 is helping us to understand suffering with Him. So we're learning to suffer with Him so that we may be what? Glorified with Him. The way in which we're glorified with Him is manifesting His glory in us, His character in us. I bet no one here has ever read it that way before and I think that brings it out in a much clearer fashion. As I was going through this today, working on this preposition, that suddenly struck me that that's what going on here, this kind of directional thing with that preposition eis [e)ij].
We're going to go to the next step in this explanation in verses 20. "For the creation was subjected to the futility, not willingly, but because of Him who subjected it, in hope." Now this is another verse I talked about last time to understand what happened when the fall occurred, what happened when Adam sinned. As a result of his sin, the whole creation came under condemnation. So it is subjected and this phrase "in hope" is a phrase that should be understood in terms of a reference point. It's a dative of reference. The word is elpis [e)lpij] there and it's in the dative case. Dative case is used to indicate the indirect object. It's used to indicate means or instrument or location but one of the things that it indicates is reference with regards to something. So God subjected it with reference to hope.
Now this opens up an interesting line of thinking. We have to stop and we have to say, "What is the focal point of hope all through the Scripture?" As I say all the time, it's not just a wistful optimism. Like we wake up today and the weather is beautiful and gorgeous and the weather is probably going to be beautiful and gorgeous tomorrow and we hope it will be on Saturday because we want to go fishing or hunting or some outdoor activity but it could rain. We could have another day like Monday again just to get everything washed out but we're not sure. We know that the weather "guessters" say one thing but it can often change in 24 hours. That's how we use hope. But that's not how God uses hope. Hope is a confident expectation of a certain future reality. We're certain, we're sure, we're confident. We know something is going to happen in the future. God subjected, He brought this judgment, this curse, upon the physical, material universe because He's focused on where He's going to take everything in terms of the future destiny.
"Hope" brings in the future. "Subjected it" is the past. He subjected it because He understood in His omniscience that in order to bring about the solution to sin and all the corruption that entered into the universe because of evil He had to bring everything under judgment. This eventually would be necessary to bring everything to its ultimate resolution and the destruction of evil. That's one of the difficult things about solving the problem of evil is that we don't have a mind that can comprehend all the bits of data that God can comprehend. He recognized that the pervasiveness of evil and the pervasive destruction of evil is so great that only His plan could ultimately redeem the planet from the corruption of sin. Now this is interesting because the word "redemption" is almost always used in Scripture of redeeming people from sin. It has that idea of purchasing or paying the purchase price of a slave. The focus in redemption is almost always people except in this passage.
In this passage we're not redeeming people but we're redeeming the material, physical universe from the corruption of sin. It didn't happen at the cross. The cross is what allows it to happen. It isn't accomplished until when? When is this redemption of creation going to come into effect? At the end of the Millennial Kingdom. Not at the beginning but at the end because it's only when the present earth is finally destroyed and new heavens and new earth are created that we have a creation that is free from corruption. So the creation is subjected to futility for a purpose. It's not random. You don't have to understand it. I don't have to understand it. One of the most difficult things as a pastor when people say, "Why did this happen? Why did God do it that way?" I don't know. All I have to know is that the Bible said this is why it happens and it happens for a reason but we don't understand it. And I don't have to explain it. Often we feel like if we can't explain it, there's not an answer. I know my brain is way too finite to come up with those kinds of answers and it's unjust and unrealistic to say we ought to come up with those kinds of answer. We can't.
We have the general principle that God's in charge and He recognizes that this is the only way to get a resolution of the problem of evil. So, "The creation is subject to futility, not willingly but because of Him who subjected it in hope." God is the One who brought that judgment on the creation because in verse 21, "That the creation itself also will be set free [delivered] from its slavery [bondage] to corruption into the freedom of the glory of the children of God." Now we've changed our terminology again. We've gone from "sons of God" which is huios [u(ioj] the adult sons of God back to "children of God" which is every believer when we experience our true freedom from the sin nature in glorification of phase 3. Verse 22, "For we know that the whole creation groans and suffers the pains of childbirth together until now." Now, I didn't have a tremendous amount of time to study this; I spent about an hour trying to figure out the meaning where this second phrase indicates birth pains. This phrase does not appear in the original Greek. It just says, "We groan together or mourn together and we travail together." The examples that I saw in the Lexica that I consulted and I have about six or seven on my computer, which are all the best ones there are, never gave me any usage examples of these words being used in labor pains context. Now that doesn't mean it's not but I couldn't find those examples. There's not a sense of that in the passage. It's just that the whole creation groans or laments. It's an extremely picturesque word of someone who is in deep profound grief or mourning. The creation is personified as someone who is going through tremendous agony over grief over what has happened to creation over sin and it's laboring, that is, it is in travail, it is going through constant shifts and changes. There are earthquakes and hurricanes and tornadoes and all kinds of physical disasters that take place on the planet. "We know the whole creation groans and labors [mourns and is in travail] or is in agony together until now.
Now this word sustenazo [sustenazw] is translated groaning together. The sus emphasizes together. It's the Greek preposition sus plus the verb stenazo and when it's combined together it means lamenting together. But the basic core word is stenazo which is the verb which we see showing up in two or three other verses here in this context. So, not only is the whole creation going through this physical agony but in verse 23 there's something in addition going on, "And not only this…" Not only is the physical world going through this groaning, "but also we ourselves, having the first fruits of the Spirit, even we ourselves groan within ourselves, waiting eagerly for our adoption as sons, the redemption of our body." So first of all let's talk about the concepts of the first fruits, which is the Greek word aparche which is a concept that goes back to the Old Testament. It indicates the beginning of something. For example, it was an agricultural term and it was used to describe the first harvesting, the first time when you went out in the fields and you were able to harvest some of the crop or some of the fruit off the fruit trees and it's that initial part of the harvest that was then dedicated to God in a first fruit offering. So the first fruit emphasizes something from the beginning.
This first fruit is the first fruit of the Spirit or something that is the beginning of something that is of the Spirit's work. So I think that the phrase there, "of the Spirit" which is a genitive phrase and it simply is what's called an epexegetical or explanatory of the first fruits. We're the beginning of the work of the Spirit. That wasn't true in the Old Testament. They didn't have the Spirit so this is emphasizing that there's something new and fresh that's happening in the Church Age that's going to have a role, an impact in the future time when the groaning ends. Now that takes us right back to what we read in verse 17, this concept of being joint heirs with Christ. So we move back and forth in Paul's thinking with the present suffering to the future glorification with Christ in an environment where there's no longer any sin.
"So we who have the first fruits of the Spirit" also emphasizes the idea of a pledge. We get this in the phrase that we find in Ephesians 1:14 that the Holy Spirit in his ministry as the sealing of the Spirit, is called the guarantee of our inheritance until the redemption of the purchased possession. There redemption is used in a future tense sense in Ephesians 1:14. Ephesians 4:30 says, "Do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God by whom you were sealed for [or until] the day of redemption." So I think in both of these passages that which is redeemed is the same thing we have in creation, which is the ultimate completion of the application of God's redemptive work. He pays the price at the cross but it's not until that final part of creation is overhauled and restored to perfection that redemption is complete. That's spoken of as a future tense in terms of the day of redemption.
So we're the first fruits. We're the beginning but it's looking forward to the completion of the work of the Holy Spirit.
And so we read, "And not only this, but also we ourselves who have the first fruits of the Spirit.." It also brings in the fact that we have the fullness of the Spirit. We have all of these magnificent blessings from God the Holy Spirit and yet we still legitimately groan. Now we don't legitimately complain. Paul clearly knocks that out over in Ephesians 4 that we're not to complain or be embittered but here we are to groan within ourselves. That's an inarticulate groaning. Some people need to have this spelled out. That means you don't have a gripe session with other Christians about how bad it is, living in a fallen world. It's within yourself. Totally silent. We're going to come back and have another concept of 'within yourself' in just a minute. That's why I'm emphasizing this. It's inarticulate. It's not something that's spoken about. It's not something that's talked about. It's that we feel in the very core of our being that there are things that aren't right with the world today. We see wars; we see famines; we see things that go wrong on cruise ships and we say, "This just isn't right." We're living in a fallen world. Bad things happen because we live in a fallen world that is characterized by a lack of justice and righteousness. And sometimes nobody is to blame.
In our arrogance we have to go out and find someone to blame all the time but there's no one necessarily to blame. We live in a fallen world; everything we buy, everything we construct has to be painted, has to be repaired, and has to be kept up. At times it falls apart even when we keep it up, even when we paint it, cut it, repair it, it still falls apart when it's least convenient because we live in a fallen world. But we have an internal sense that it's not right. So, "Not only this but also we ourselves, having the first fruits of the Spirit, even we ourselves groan within ourselves, waiting eagerly for our adoption as sons, the redemption of the body." Now, this word "eagerly awaiting" means to anticipate something enthusiastically. It's an excited anticipation of something that's coming. Remember when you were about six or seven years old and for the first time in your life you really understood that Christmas meant that you were going to get all kind of goodies and you just couldn't go to sleep on Christmas night because you were going to get a bicycle or, I don't know, an Elmo doll, or whatever was popular back then. That's it! You were going to get it and you could barely contain yourself. That's eager anticipation. That's how we are to look forward to the coming of Christ.
We're groaning, we have eager anticipation but that doesn't justify believers who just got so tired of dealing with the garbage in the devil's world that they committed suicide just because they knew they'd be face to face with the Lord.
That's not the way to handle it. We have to recognize, as our Lord did, that we're living in this fallen, corrupted world for a purpose and we have a mission in this world. We have to engage that mission until the Lord takes us home. He's the one who decides when it's time to take us on a permanent R&R back to heaven. But until then we eagerly wait for that R&R. We're eagerly looking forward to it just like kids at Christmas.
We're eagerly awaiting the adoption. Now wait a minute. This is a funny phrase here. It's huiothesia [u(ioqesia] which indicates that adoption which we've talked about before that every believer at the instant they receive Christ is adopted but this is talking about something in the future. Something future. We're adopted at the instant of salvation. That's clear from Galatians, chapters 3 and 4, dealing with the doctrine of adoption. But here the concept of adoption is explained in the next phrase which is an appositional phrase. It's when you have a word and then the next phrase further defines the word. The adoption here is called the redemption of our body. The redemption of our body and this is the word apolutrosis [a)polutrwsij] so we have here the idea that the fallen world is going to be redeemed and the body, the physical body, is going to be redeemed. That occurs for the believer at our resurrection when we receive a new physical body that somehow is produced from the molecules and the chemicals of this original body. The reason I say that is because the only model we have for resurrection is not the widow's son with Elisha, not Lazarus, because they were just restored to this physical life. They hadn't been dead long enough for the body to go through a lot of decomposition and decay. It had a little bit but God regenerated that body and gave them their life back but it was still a physical, mortal life. The only example we have of true resurrection is the Lord Jesus Christ and on that first day of the week following the crucifixion when the disciples, first Mary, goes to the tomb and sees that it's empty and then the disciples come to the tomb and see that it's empty, then Jesus appeared to them.
The tomb was empty because God didn't just say, "Poof, Jesus has a new body". The body he had before is no longer there. That physical body that Jesus had in His humanity becomes what is transformed into his new spiritual body. How that happens, we don't know. It's going to be interesting because for most people in history we've actually gone through a long period of decomposition and decay and there's not a lot left. Maybe a few bones here and there but if they went down in a shipwreck and they were eaten by four or five different sharks, then they're just going to be spread all over the ocean. Or if they get hit with a five hundred ton bomb right on the center of head there's not going to be a whole lot left of them left. There's just going to be a lot of molecules scattered all over everywhere and if people are cremated and had their ashes scattered in the Mississippi River, then those molecules are going to be scattered all over everywhere. I think that the God of the Bible is powerful enough and knowledgeable enough to know where every one of those molecules are and he's going to bring them all back together. Just think of all those believers who died before the flood and there wasn't a whole lot left of their remains on the planet. That all got scattered and pretty much destroyed.
There are some people who come along and say Christians shouldn't be cremated. Some of their arguments are a little more serious but we lose the reality that we have a God who can put back together what we think is impossible to put back together. If you think that if someone is cremated and their ashes are scattered, and that God can't put their bodies together from those ashes then you don't have an omnipotent or an omniscient God. Now not everybody reduces it to that superficial kind of argument but some do. God can bring that body back together. I always have the silly question. If I were to die today and if my eye was given to somebody for an eye transplant, and my liver for a liver transplant, and a heart for a heart transplant and the Rapture occurred, do they get to keep the heart and the liver or do I get that back? Sometimes we all engage in overthink! All right.
Redemption is only used a few other times in Romans. This wordapolutrosis is used in, "We're justified freely by His grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus." Redemption there is definitely related to justification which is not in the future but in the past. Ephesians 1:7 redemption is used in reference to forgiveness. It talks about the payment of a price. "In whom we have redemption through His blood, the forgiveness of sins." It's that payment of a price that occurred at the cross. Ephesians 1:14, "The Holy Spirit is the guarantor of our inheritance until the redemption of this purchased possession." That's a future tense concept there for redemption. That's the completion of the process.
Ephesians 4:30, "Don't grieve the Holy Spirit of God by whom you are sealed until the day of redemption." So there's a past tense reality when the price was paid and its application over time leads to an ultimate full realization of the ending of the curse of sin.
Now we come to verse 24, "For in hope we have been saved…" This, then, is a reference term. It makes more sense if we say, "We were saved with reference to this hope.." Now this is the only time in Romans that I have found sozo [swzw] here in a past tense. Every other time sozo is used in a future tense. Romans 5, "We were justified that we might be saved.." Future tense. Other passages saved has to do with justification. This is the only time sozo is used in the passages on sanctification. So here it seems to be used as a synonym for phase One. Sometimes in the past I've said it's never used for Phase One but this could be the one exception that it's used as a synonym for that time in which we were justified at point of belief in Christ. "For we were saved with reference to this hope…" It's just like the planet which is going to be overhauled with reference to hope. God subjected it to corruption with reference to hope in verse 20. We were saved with reference to that same future hope and that certain destiny.
Then we see something interesting about hope, "But hope that is seen is not hope." Hope is like faith. It's not based on sight. It's based on belief in something that is not seen, not felt, not subject to empirical verification. We're simply trusting in the promise of God. Hope that is seen is not hope. "For who hopes for what he already sees?" If you hope it's a present reality but hope focuses on a conviction of the certainty of a future reality. Verse 25, "But if we hope for what we do not see, with perseverance we wait eagerly for it." But if we hope, if we have confident expectation for a future destiny which we do not see, we do not have empirical evidence of heaven. Listen, it does not matter how many children on numerous surgical tables have out of body experiences claiming they went to heaven while they were under surgery and write bestselling books about it and have credibility because their daddy is some kind of a pastor. It doesn't matter how many of those instances people talk about, that's hope that is seen. Our hope in heaven is spoken of in the Bible as an unseen reality. It's not based on what some child comes back and tells us. In fact, if that does anything for your Christian conviction, then I don't think you've ever learned any doctrine.
Remember what happens with Lazarus, when he died and the rich man goes to torments and Lazarus is in Abraham's Bosom, and the rich man says to Abraham, "Let Lazarus [not the Lazarus who was raised from the dead] go back and tell my brothers. And Abraham said, "That's not going to work because if they don't believe Moses and the prophets, they're not going to believe somebody who came back from the dead." See, Moses and the prophets and the New Testament are enough. You don't need what some little kid writes in a bestselling book to give you extra confidence in the truth of Scripture. If you need that, then you don't have much confidence in Scripture. Here's my suggestion. You need to take a long, hard look at what you really believe, because Moses and the prophets and the apostles in the New Testament are enough. They're more certain than what some little kid is going to tell you because he had hallucinations under anesthesia.
So we hope for what we do not see. This is a universal principle. We don't see it. We eagerly wait for it with perseverance. That means we endure suffering. Perseverance is always a term used in the Scripture for hanging in there in time of suffering and adversity. Verse 26, "In the same way the Spirit also helps in our weakness…" The word for weaknesses is the Greek word asthenes [a)sqenhj]. Now that's one of my favorite words because way back when I was just getting out of seminary I read a great article on praying for the sick in James 5 that was one of the best written articles I'd ever read in a theological journal and it was talking about we ought to pray for the sick. But the sick there isn't the word for sick. It's the word asthenes in the noun form. It means those who are either physically weak or spiritually weak. In the gospels it's used about 80 percent of the time for those who are physically weak or sick. Jesus healed the asthenes but there are a few times it's used for those who are spiritually weak. When Jesus talks about the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak. He's talking about spiritual inability, spiritual weakness, and spiritual weariness.
"The Spirit also helps our weakness..." This is talking about spiritual weariness in times of adversity. It's used that way in James. "But we do not know how to pray as we should..." Now I want you to pay attention to that sentence and think about that sentence because a lot of you heard me say, "Some of the time we don't know what we should pray for as we ought." It doesn't say that. It makes a universal, absolute statement. We, as believers in the Lord Jesus Christ, as creatures, do not know how to pray. That's an absolute, universal statement. It doesn't say we don't know how to pray in certain situations. That's often how it's used. It just says we just flat, period, all the time, just don't know. Why? Because the data that we do know is such a microscopic, infinitesimal, small amount of all the information that goes into why that event is happening that we really don't have a clue how to pray for it.
But remember, that's not an excuse to not pray. It's not an excuse to just generalize your prayers and say, "God, you know what to do, so just do it." Because the examples we have in Scripture are not that way. That's why we have to study the Scriptures. The prayers of Paul are not generalized prayers like that. They're very specific in ways we can be specific. In lots of ways we can be specific because we're claiming promises, just as the psalmist does. Many of the psalms are prayers. But we don't know how to pray for anything as we ought but that doesn't mean you shouldn't pray. Because we have a translator. So we pray and the Holy Spirit dusts off and cleans out and straightens whatever the prayer is so you don't have to worry about "Oh, I said it wrong." Guess what? A lot of us say it wrong, a lot of the time. The Holy Spirit cleans it up. Verse 26, "For we do not know how to pray as we should but the Spirit Himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words."
This should be translated, "With unutterable groans". The emphasis is on unutterable. It's silent. Remember I talked about the fact that we groan within ourselves. It's not audible. This is the Holy Spirit handling it in terms of silent prayer. Now there are those within the charismatic community who try to argue that tongues is a prayer language. They use this as a support for that. That it's the Holy Spirit praying with these unutterable groans. I say, "Well, they're unutterable. How come I hear it?" Not only that, but I had this conversation with one Pentecostal who said, "When I pray in my prayer language, God answers my prayer more often." I said, "Really? How do you know what you pray for?" "Well, I don't." "Then how do you know they're answered?"
We don't know how to pray as we ought. The Holy Spirit makes intercession. This is the word sunantilambano [sunantilambanw] and I'm not going to say it again. That's a long word. It means to assist or to help. Let's say Jess over there is working out to unload all the heavy furniture for the Camp Arete garage sale and he comes upon this large buffet. Jess has been working out so Jess manipulates it so he can actually pick it up off the ground and start shuffling like an old man as he moves it forward and moves it all by himself. Now that's the picture here in sunantilambano. The Holy Spirit is the one who comes along. He doesn't say, "You can't carry that. I'll carry it for you." He doesn't take hold of it and carry the weight all by himself. No, he says, "I'll get this end and you get the other end." He assists. He doesn't take it away from us. He assists us in our prayer. We pray. He assists. We don't say, "Oh, he's going to do it anyway, so I'll just go about my business and make some generalized statement." No, that's not the idea. It's that he's going to come along and say, "I'm going to take this end and you take that end and together we'll make the prayer work."
So He comes in as an assistant with groanings that are unutterable. They're inaudible groanings. This word for intercession is huperentechano [u(perentexanw] and it just means to pray on behalf of someone else. But in the next word we have a different word that's going to be used for intercession. In verse 27, "And He [God the Father] who searches the hearts know what the mind of the Spirit is.." The Holy Spirit is one with the Father in the Trinity. They're both omniscient so the Father knows exactly what the Spirit is thinking and He knows the mind of the Spirit "because the Spirit is making intercession for the saints according to the will of God." This is a different word. It's entuchano [e)ntuxanw] and it means to appeal, to make an appeal to someone. So the Spirit makes an appeal on behalf of the saints according to the will of God." So we pray to the best of our ability. But we pray. We don't back off; we don't say, "I'm not really sure so I'm just going to let the Holy Spirit handle it." We do it to the best of our ability and then unbeknownst to us, we don't know how it happens. He sort of dusts it off and cleans it up, straightens out, and then it goes to the Throne of God. He is our intercessor.
Verse 34, if you skip down, also uses this same word for the Lord Jesus Christ. That verse tells us, "Christ Jesus is He who died, yes, rather who was raised, who is at the right hand of God, who also intercedes for us." So both the Holy Spirit and Jesus Christ intercede for us. So that leads us up to verse 28 which says "all things work together for good". In context, what are the all things in this passage? It's the suffering we've been talking about since it was pointed out in verse 17 that we can be a joint-heir with Christ if indeed we suffer with Him. So when we go through all these adversities and all the things that make us groan, we can claim a promise that all things, all these things that cause us to groan, will work together for good to those who love God. There are questions about that. There are some alternate readings and so we're going to have a take a look at some of the finer points in the exegesis of verse 28 when we come back next time.
Now we understand the relationship between groaning, who groans, the earth groans, the creation groans, we groan but eventually that groaning is going to be converted into intercessory prayer to God by the Holy Spirit and eventually everything will be straightened out and evil will be destroyed at the end of the Millennial Kingdom.