Creation’s Groans and the Saints’ Sighs — Charles Spurgeon on Natural Evil

On January 5, 1868, Charles Haddon Spurgeon preached a sermon entitled “Creation’s Groans and the Saints’ Sighs.” The sermon is filled with biblical insights, and it speaks directly to the realities of natural evil and human suffering. As always, Spurgeon preached Christ, even as he offered rare biblical insights into the groaning of our fallen creation:
Creation glows with a thousand beauties, even in its present fallen condition; yet clearly enough it is not as when it came from the Maker’s hand–the slime of the serpent is on it all–this is not the world which God pronounced to be “very good.” We hear of tornadoes, of earthquakes, of tempests, of volcanoes, of avalanches, and of the sea which devoureth its thousands: there is sorrow on the sea, and there is misery on the land; and into the highest palaces as well as the poorest cottages, death, the insatiable, is shooting his arrows, while his quiver is still full to bursting with future woes. It is a sad, sad world. The curse has fallen on it since the fall, and thorns and thistles it bringeth forth, not from its soil alone, but from all that comes of it. Earth wears upon her brow, like Cain of old, the brand of transgression. Sad would it be to our thoughts if it were always to be so. If there were no future to this world as well as to ourselves, we might be glad to escape from it, counting it to be nothing better than a huge penal colony, from which it would be a thousand mercies for both body and soul to be emancipated. At this present time, the groaning and travailing which are general throughout creation, are deeply felt among the sons of men.