The Hope of the Believer . . .

The Hope of the Believer... No.2   

THE LIVING HOPE  

Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who according to His abundant mercy has begotten us again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. (1 Pet. 1:3) 

The best definition I have found of hope is that one given by the famous British preacher Leslie Weatherhead: "a firm expectation of promised blessing." Hope is always in reference to what God has promised, and so Paul says "Now hope does not disappoint" (Rom. 5:5). Of all that God has promised there will not be a single disappointment. Moffatt's translation is appropriate: "No one who believes in him will be disappointed, no one." So hope can be defined as the assurance that God will perform all that He has promised. Hope is the expectation of a future, always a future, no matter what. It is the expectation that ultimately everything will be all right, however wrong things seem to be.  

Hope may be seen as the child of faith and love, and so Paul in his love hymn in 1 Cor. 13 joins the three as inseparable, faith, hope, and love. If an artist should attempt to capture this great truth on canvas he might depict faith as a strong man, quiet and confident. Love might be likened to a tender and caring woman. Hope as the child of the two would be shown as vigorous and vivacious, with her eyes looking upward into the future. Such a picture should have a background of serene color, indicating that all three of them, faith, hope, and love, live only in the presence of God. This is why the apostle Peter refers to "a living hope," which is redundant, for there is no real hope that is not living. It lives because it is rooted in the presence, power and promises of God as manifest in the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.  

So hope and God are meaningfully linked in Scripture. When the psalmist says "Hope thou in God" he seems to give the sum and substance of religion. And when Paul refereed to some as "having no hope and without God in the world" he seemed to make the phrases equivalent, for if one is without God he is without hope, and if he is without hope he is without God. What a difference it makes when one believes in God! Without such faith one hardly rises above the level of a cultivated animal, and he has no hope beyond this world. He has no future beyond his few fleeting years here. But with God he is spirit and can dream of an eternal, spiritual universe. Without God we live in a world that is on a collision course, an existence that has no meaning. With God we become pilgrims in this world, but not displaced persons, in that we are adventuring on into eternity, into an unseen world "whose builder and maker is God." God is the God of the future as well as the God of the past and the present.  

This may be the most important thing about hope, that it makes sense of this world. It took a poet who walked with God, like John Keats, to speak of this world as "the vale of soul making." How inspiring! That concept within itself can change one's way of looking at the world. It tells us that God is up to something in our kind of world: He is making souls, preparing them for another world. My dear Ouida has now cared for her feeble mother for almost seven years. While it is a labor of love it is also a tough discipline. Sometimes she says to me, when her patience is tried, that God must be trying to tell her something. I tell her that God in His mercy has great things in store for her in another world, an assignment that requires special preparation, and He is getting her ready. John Keats would tell her that God is cultivating her soul, that that is what life is about.

How beautiful it is to see life as soul making! And that is what hope is all about. It gives meaning to an otherwise senseless world - all the suffering, heartache, disease, tribulation, injustice is bearable if one believes there is another world in which everything will be set right. Nothing is more unbearable and agonizing than to bury an innocent child-it seems so brutal and unjust—but even that can be dealt with when there is hope of life beyond death. What solace it is for a parent to believe that it is not the end for that child but actually the beginning, that in another world God will fulfill His intention for that child, including soul growth! What a blessing it is to believe that we will one day see the loved ones that we have to surrender to the pale rider of death in this world! There is always a future, always a tomorrow, and it is God's tomorrow! When we leave this world we are not leaving home but going home. All the good will be rewarded; all the wrongs will be set right. Hope is the child of that kind of faith.

Skeptics and merchants of despair can always discredit hope on the ground that we have a lot of disturbing questions, such as why a loving and powerful God allows so much gross evil in our world. It is a world in which the weak, the innocent, the poor, and the aged have to suffer the most. Evil is so pervasive and inexplicable, such as the rise of Nazism in one of our most enlightened nations, that the Bible properly refers to it as "the mystery of evil." And yet it is in such a world that we as believers have been begotten again unto a living hope. How can this be? Because we look to the God of hope, He who is depicted as sitting upon His throne and declaring that He will make all things new, that there will be anew heaven and a new earth.

We know that God and His ways are beyond all that we can ask or think, beyond our fondest dreams and wildest guesses. He has qualities that we cannot even begin to understand. Yes, of course, God does things or allows things to happen that confuse and bewilder us. Why do famines, floods, and earthquakes blight our world with such fury, especially upon the nations least prepared to cope with them? Why do terribly bad things happen to especially good people? I cannot answer those questions, and I confess my frequent bewilderment. In spite of this, or perhaps because of this, I anchor my life in the living hope.

We may sometimes think of ourselves as children anticipating a joyous Christmas who hear their father come home drunk, bereft of both presents and food. Apparently forgotten by their father, the children weep their disappointment into their pillows. We know that even with earthly fathers sad tales like that are often turned into stories of joy. How much more with our heavenly Father! Can we believe that he would put us in a world where there are so many arguments against a living hope unless He could answer them all? While we may sometimes be tempted to feel lonely, even forsaken, in this cruel world, we can be assured of the promise, "Never will I leave you; never will I forsake you" (Heb. 13:5). To believe that is to be borne up by a living hope, which is the source of great joy. As Heb. 13:6 goes on to say, "So we say with confidence, 'The Lord is my helper. I will not be afraid. What can man do to me?"'

But it is easy to be fearful in a world like ours. God knows that. That does not mean that we have no hope. The great heroes of the Bible knew times of fear and doubt. Not many of us could write of his experiences as Paul did: "We are hard pressed on every side, but not crushed; perplexed but not in despair; persecuted but not abandoned; struck down, but not destroyed" (2 Cor 4:8-9).

Nor are we to suppose that we have to have a blueprint or a time-table of future events. If He who notes the sparrow's fall knows the way, it can be an uncharted course insofar as we are concerned. Our task is simple even if rigorous: to be faithful and trust the future to God. We can pray "Thy kingdom come" even when we know little about what the fulness of that kingdom will be, and nothing about when it will be. But even without a blueprint or a time-table we can believe that one day peace will triumph and injustice will be overcome.

A living hope is not passive. It is always out on the growing edge and at work. It is noteworthy that when Paul spoke of "the glorious riches of this mystery, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory," it was in the context of his work as a minister for Christ. He goes on to say, "To this end, I labor, struggling with all His energy, which so powerfully works in me" (Col. 1:29).