Deleted Scenes: Romans 8:18-25. Legos or The Rock?

On Sunday, as I was preaching Romans 8:18-25, I used a physical illustration- an object lesson of sorts. This required me to tap into my crafty side. “Side” makes it sound like there’s half of me that really enjoys doing crafts, but in reality this “side” is about 0.01% of me. Thankfully I have a daughter who makes up for that and she was all in on helping me with this part of my sermon preparation. After trying and failing to locate one of those apothecary-type of scales (if you don’t know what I mean, think about what “Lady Justice” is holding in her hand, or google “Lady Justice”), we decided to make one ourselves. If you were here on Sunday, you saw the very sophisticated result: a coat hanger with two buckets hanging off either side.

As I talked about the frustrations and groaning of this world, I dropped some marbles into one of the buckets, illustrating the “heaviness” that exists in this world. A number of news stories and personal conversations in the last couple of days have brought this home to me even deeper. Even in a society like ours that is comparatively healthy and functional, there is so much injustice. Guilty people go free or receive a slap on the wrist while others are punished and publicly shamed for comparatively much lesser deeds. There is so much brokenness in our culture. People who appear to have it all together in public are privately abusive or filled with rage. People who should be able to be trusted, like parents or pastors or teachers, take advantage of those in their care and exploit them for their own ends. It doesn’t take much exposure to this world to find yourself zealously praying some of the last words of the Bible: come, Lord Jesus!

On Sunday, though, I also talked about that glory that is to come through Christ. This is a glory that we already have the first taste of through the Holy Spirit and through the church (when the church is truly the church, when it has its eyes fixed on Jesus). However, a day is coming when Jesus will return, he will resurrect his people in bodies like his own resurrection body, and creation itself will be raised to new life in a new heavens and earth. In Romans 8:18, Paul says that he considers that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us. To illustrate this, I took a large rock and placed it on top of the bucket opposite the marbles, entirely reversing the balance of my makeshift scales. Previously, I had put a few pieces of lego in that bucket to illustrate how ineffective and useless many of our attempts to deal with the heaviness of the world are. Maybe we turn to distractions like addictions, maybe we try to fix the brokenness of the world through protests or an obsession with safety- but apart from Christ, none of these attempts will alleviate the anxiety caused by the world’s heaviness.

So far, I’ve only said what I said on Sunday, so what makes this a “deleted scenes”? Here it is: I didn’t realize until later on Sunday the significance of choosing a rock to represent the coming glory. I just wanted something heavier than marbles. However, the Bible consistently compares God to a rock. Jacob calls God “the Rock of Israel” in Genesis 49:24. Deuteronomy 32:4 has Moses singing about how God “is the Rock, his works are perfect, and all his ways are just.” Later on in that chapter, Moses says about other nations, “their rock is not like our Rock” (32:31). In Psalm 18:2, David proclaims that “the Lord is my rock, my fortress and my deliverer; my God is my rock, in whom I take refuge, my shield and the horn of my salvation, my stronghold.” In Matthew 7, Jesus compares the person who builds their life on his words with someone who builds their house on a rock instead of sand. In 1 Corinthians 10, Paul says that the rock that the Israelites received water from in the wilderness was in fact Christ. Peter encourages us to come to Jesus, “the living Stone” (1 Peter 2:4). That’s a “who’s who” of Bible names, all proclaiming the “Rock-ness” of God. He’s a steady foundation, He’s not shifting and changing, He’s dependable, He’s strong, and His glory outweighs all.

So the question I want to ask you today is this: given all the heaviness of the world, what will you put in the bucket of your life in order to deal with it all? Will you keep tossing in bits of legos? Lego can be fun, it can feel useful for some things, but it’s not going to do much to counteract the groaning of this world. Or will you turn to the Rock? Will you base your life on Christ, the faithful one, the dependable one, the Glorious one, the coming one? Make your choice: legos or the Rock?