Romans 8:22

Romans 8:22, in plain English

Right now, creation itself is suffering under the weight of decay and death—and has been since sin entered the world. You can practically hear it groaning, the way a woman in hard labor groans as new life is about to break through.

Why it's here

For believers in Rome who were surrounded by natural disasters, disease, crop failures, and the general messiness of a fallen world, Paul wasn't ignoring their reality. He was acknowledging it honestly while pointing to what it meant. Creation groans because it's not what it's supposed to be.

Who's speaking

Paul, to the Roman church

Where it sits in the story

This connects back to Genesis 3, where God told Adam that the ground would produce thorns and thistles, that work would be hard. But the groan also looks forward—it's the groaning of labor, not just pain. Something's being born.

The scholarly reading

All of creation is actively suffering—experiencing birth pangs—waiting for the completion of God's redemptive plan, just as a woman in labor anticipates new life.

Language and setting

This metaphor would have struck Paul's audience with particular force. The ōdin (ὠδίν)—labor pains—was apocalyptic language used in Jewish eschatology to describe the age before the Messiah's full arrival. Romans living in a bustling commercial center would recognize the groaning (stenazō, στενάζω) as visceral reality: creation's resistance, its difficulty, its incompleteness. Paul validates the observation that the world is broken—not denying it but reframing it theologically.

Voice

Paul, maintaining his argument about creation's liberation

Significance

This language connects back to Genesis 3's curse on the ground (adamah) and forward to the New Testament's consistent teaching that history moves toward consummation, not mere stasis. Irenaeus and later Augustine would wrestle with how to hold together creation's goodness (contra Gnosticism) with its present suffering—precisely what Paul articulates here.

20For the creation was subjected to futility, not by its own will, but because of the One who subjected it, in hope

21that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God.

22We know that the whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth until the present time.

23Not only that, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for our adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies.

24For in this hope we were saved; but hope that is seen is no hope at all. Who hopes for what he can already see?

Read all of Romans 8 — Paul builds to one of Scripture's greatest crescendos: a list of every terrifying thing — and declares none of it is strong enough to pull you from God's love.