Verse of the day · August 22
Does Romans 8:18 mean my suffering does not matter?
He added up what following Christ had cost. It came to very little.
For I reckon that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory which shall be revealed in us.
Romans 8:18
Outcasts, despised, persecuted, slain — a reader now has little conception of what being a Christian cost the saints of that time. The state of the church in this world always is, but was then especially, an afflicted state. The believers in Rome who received this letter were inside that. Into it, the apostle sets down a sentence about their pain. The verb he opens it with is the one a man uses when he has finished adding something up.
The word is logizomai, and it rules out a quick reaction. Not a rash and sudden determination, Matthew Henry has it on this stretch of the chapter, but the product of a very serious and deliberate consideration — the case reasoned within himself, the arguments weighed on both sides, the point at last resolved. That is deliberation and not doubt: John Gill reads it as no bare opinion, from a man not in the least doubting what he says. The allusion is either to logicians, who having settled the premises draw the conclusion, or to arithmeticians, who having cast up the account give the sum total. One older rendering covers the whole verb: all being well considered, I gather.
Henry reads the apostle as holding the balance up so that suffering saints may have strong supports from their hopes of heaven. Into one scale go the sufferings of this present time, which strike no deeper than the things of time and last no longer than it, and across them he writes tekel — weighed in the balance, and found light. That verdict is a reading off the balance, and it is a comparison: they are light beside the due desert of sin, the sufferings of Christ, and the torments of the damned in hell — and light, Gill adds, when they are borne under divine supports. Into the other scale goes the glory, and it comes back heavy — an exceeding and eternal weight.
The phrase this present time does more than date the trouble. Gill reads it as the whole present time of life on earth, which could hardly be otherwise, considering the world we are in and the nature of it, the condition of our souls, the constitution of our bodies, and the many enemies we have about us.
The glory in the other scale is not something still to be made. It is already given to Christ, who has entered into possession of it, and it waits only to be revealed when he appears in it. The present state comes short not in the enjoyment alone but in the knowledge — something to come, Henry says, something behind the curtain, that will outshine all. Adam Clarke's argument turns on that glory being the enjoyment of God himself. And it is revealed in us: not only revealed to us, to be seen, but revealed in us, to be enjoyed. Gill reads the small word the same way: not merely visible upon them, upon bodies made like the glorious body of Christ, but in them, in the perfection of knowledge and holiness in their souls.
Then comes the phrase itself — not worthy to be compared. Henry's conclusion on it goes past magnitude to merit: the sufferings cannot merit that glory, and if suffering for Christ will not merit it, much less will doing. The saints do not come to heaven as purchasers by any merit or procurement of their own, but as heirs, purely by the act of God, for God makes heirs. The same bar holds in ledger terms: no proportion between the one and the other, no causal influence of the one upon the other. The glory is not withheld until the pain reaches a price. The pain was never the price. What follows, for Henry, is not resignation but appetite: the sufferings should not deter and frighten us from the diligent and earnest pursuit of that glory.
The man who worked the sum was not standing outside it. He could reckon not by art only but by experience, because he knew both columns — what the sufferings of this present time were, and what the glory of heaven is — and gave his judgment on the view of both. A few lines on, the same chapter has the whole creation groaning, and the saints groaning within themselves: not the pangs of one dying but the throes of a woman in travail, groans that are symptoms of life, not of death. Present comforts are consistent with a great many groans. He set that reckoning down for men who were still carrying the weight, and he set it down to hold them up.
Drawn from Matthew Henry, John Gill, Adam Clarke, the Geneva Bible notes and B. W. Johnson.
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