Whose Fault Is It?
For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of Him who subjected it, in hope Romans 8:20 NASB
Not willingly – You know, the whole human race is in deep trouble. We don’t think about this too often, but the truth is that we live on the cusp of extinction, both physically and spiritually. A pandemic reminds us how easily our fragility can spread. The Bible reminds us how tenuous our lives really are. The inhabitants of the Roman Empire in the first century had a much better visceral experience of these truths than we do. They weren’t protected by the artificial barriers of government agencies. When it didn’t rain at the proper times, they starved. When some king decided he needed more land or more women, they were brutalized. When the Empire wanted money, the legionaries took it. When pestilence flowered, they fell ill. In fact, for most of human history, this has always been the case. Even today, most of the world can’t survive real catastrophe. And that’s just the physical side of life. The prophets delivered the message: “If you think you might possibly escape these sorts of tragedies, wait until God’s wrath is poured out on your disobedient souls.” It seems as if there is a good argument that we deserve all we get. Biblically, we chose this path. But even without the Bible, it doesn’t take much expertise to see the human hand of evil working toward our destruction. It’s our fault.
So why does Paul use the Greek term, hekṓn, “unwillingly”? Well, he’s not talking about us. He’s telling us that the creation, everything except us, was subjected (notice the past tense) to futility. What does that mean? Ah, Paul is waxing like Koheleth. The word he chooses might just as well have been in Koheleth’s vocabulary—mataiótēs. “This rare word is used in Greek for human nothingness. The LXX has it more often, e.g., in Pss. 39:6; 144:4. Eccl. 1:2 calls everything vanity; for this reason we must look to God, with whom alone is no mataiótēs. Rom. 8:20 takes up the thought of Eccl. 1:2.”[1]
Paul, the apostle of hope to the Gentiles, tells his audience that everything in the world is hebel (“wind, vanity, purposelessness”). He just uses the Greek word instead of the Hebrew. Not very encouraging. We already knew this, didn’t we? Life inside the box leads only to the grave. But Paul isn’t talking about our lives in the box. He’s talking about the cosmos. It is subject to nothingness. There is no point to the universe without God. Maybe we should write that in capitals: THERE IS NO POINT TO THE UNIVERSE WITHOUT GOD. It’s just slipping into entropic extinction. The Second Law of Thermodynamics rules the cosmos.[2] Unless, somehow, sometime, the trajectory of the universe is reversed, everything will end in a big heat sinkhole.
Paul isn’t an astrophysicist. He probably never heard of entropy. He probably didn’t care either. What he knows is this: God is behind it all. The creation didn’t choose self-termination. Sin isn’t the real reason. God could have ignored the wider consequences of human misbehavior and let the universe get a pass. But He didn’t. When the Flood came, all life on the ground was extinguished. Even the plants. They were subject to God’s judgment just as human beings were. They didn’t sin. They just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. God didn’t make an exception for tomatoes. They perished along with the palm trees and the dandelions. Maybe if you were a fish you could make it, but that’s a different “animal.” The point is that God’s judgment sweeps. The righteous fall with the unrighteous. The creation collapses as if it had a moral problem. In a world where most of the gods could care less, Paul asserts that his God not only cares, He orchestrates. Not very comfortable—except that the purpose of this grand expression of the Second Law is not a heat sinkhole but a glorious renewal. Not inevitable death but certain hope. Koheleth’s hebel isn’t the last word in the world. YHVH is the last word. And the first.
Topical Index: hekṓn, unwillingly, mataiótēs, hebel, purposelessness, nothingness, entropy, second law of thermodynamics, hope, Romans 8:20
[1] Kittel, G., Friedrich, G., & Bromiley, G. W. (1985). Theological Dictionary of the New Testament (p. 572). Grand Rapids, MI: W.B. Eerdmans.
[2] The second law of thermodynamics states that the total entropy of an isolated system can never decrease over time, and is constant if and only if all processes are reversible. Isolated systems spontaneously evolve towards thermodynamic equilibrium, the state with maximum entropy.
