From Octavius Winslow "No Condemnation in Christ Jesus" (1853)
Ch. 20 "A Suffering World in Sympathy with Suffering Man"
From the ruin of man, our Apostle naturally turns his consideration to the ruin in which the apostasy of man plunged the whole creation--animate and inanimate. If another link were wanting to perfect the chain of evidence demonstrating the existence of the Divine curse for man's sin, this passage (Roms 8:21) would seem to supply it.
We read of no blight resting on the material world, of no suffering in the brute creation, prior tot eh period of Adam's transgression. The present is juste the reverse of the original constitution of the world. When God made all things he pronounced them very good (Gen 1:31). We delight to look back and imagine what this world was when, like a new born planet, it burst from the Fountain of Light, all clad with beauty, radiant with holiness, and eloquent with praise...
All the materials and elements of nature were harmless, and in harmony, because all were sinless. Innocence and happiness reigned over teh irrational creation. The whole world was at rest, because man was at peace with God, at peace with his fellows, at peace with himself...
Man was in "league with the stones of the field, and the beasts of the field were at peace with him" (Job 5:23)
[describes the world as fallen]
Yea, every creature that we meet, and every object we behold, supplies an evidence (sic) of man's fall, and bears the frown of God's curse...thus closely is a suffering world linked with suffering man. Thus the whole creation--material and animal--sympathizes with the weight of woe that crushes our race to the earth. When man fell, God cursed the ground, and cursed the brutes of the field, for man's sake' and no the whole creation groans and travails in pain until the time of the restitution of all things.
Interestingly both Leon Morris in his Commentary on Romans (Eerdmans 1988, p. 329f) and Cranfield in his ICC commentary on this same book (v. 1 p. 413ff) consider that Paul in Romans 8:21 has in mind the 'sub-human' creation.
Calvin is at one with this view:
21. Because the creation itself, etc. He shows how the creation has in hope been made subject to vanity; that is, inasmuch as it shall some time be made free, according to what Isaiah testifies, and what Peter confirms still more clearly. It is then indeed meet for us to consider what a dreadful curse we have deserved, since all created things in themselves blameless, both on earth and in the visible heaven, undergo punishment for our sins; for it has not happened through their own fault, that they are liable to corruption. Thus the condemnation of mankind is imprinted on the heavens, and on the earth, and on all creatures. It hence also appears to what excelling glory the sons of God shall be exalted; for all creatures shall be renewed in order to amplify it, and to render it illustrious.
Then, I just had to see what Barth had to say on Roms 8:21: check his commentary in the Oxford edition (pp. 309-313). I can't figure if he's a full-blown mystic, or even a pagan, with his seeing 'evil' within God (when it is the antithesis of God-ness), his making the Fall unobservable (I take it he means this in principle, not in force of historical remove), and the trajectory from despair to hope being one of perception, not historic act!
Yet, I like these comments: "We groan as the creation does; we travail in pain together with it." (p. 312) and "Ought we then to regard this knowledge as too scanty for us? Is it not enough for us to know the groaning of the creation and our own groaning? Ought we to demand some higher or better knowledge, which takes no account of the Cross or of the tribulation of time? If so, we must, perforce, take no account of the Resurrection" (p. 313)
Finally, from an old Puritan: Matthew Poole on Roms 8:21:
...the creatures in their kind, and according to their capacity, shall be partakers of that liberty and freedom, which in the children of God is accompanied with unspeakable glory: they shall not partake with the saints in glory, but of that liberty which in the saints hath great glory attending it, and superadded to it. The creature, at the day of judgement shall be restored (as before) to that condition of liberty which it had in its first creation; as when it was made at first: it was free from all vanity, bondage and corruption, also it shall be again at the time of the general resurection (Acts 3:19,20; 2 Pt 3:13).
Sermon on Roms 8 that may interest.
