Romans 8:18
“For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory which will be revealed toward us.”
Where this sits
Written by a man who lists, in another letter, his own beatings, shipwrecks, and a night and a day in the open sea. The chapter it sits in is about creation groaning.
Reflection
I consider is an accounting word. Paul is not describing a feeling; he is reporting the result of a calculation he has run.
That matters, because the verse is easy to hear as dismissal — as though the sufferings of this present time were being waved away by someone who had not had many. Paul had. He lists them elsewhere in unsparing detail, and he does not minimise them here either. He calls them sufferings, in the present tense, and he does not say they are small.
What he says is that they are not worthy to be compared. That is a statement about scale, not about seriousness. Two things can both be real and still be incommensurable — you cannot get from one to the other by addition. The glory is not more of the same thing. It is a different order of magnitude, and putting them on the same scale is a category error.
And the direction matters: the glory which will be revealed toward us. Not merely shown to us, as though we were an audience. Toward us, into us — Paul has just said we are heirs, and will say next that creation is waiting for the children of God to be revealed.
So the comparison is not present pain against future compensation. It is present pain against what the present pain is producing, in you, that will eventually be visible.
- Theme:
- Future
- Book:
- Romans