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And now abide faith, hope, love, these three; but the greatest of these is love (1 Corinthians 13:13).
Hope has gotten a bad name in the last forty years or so, in most Christian circles. We speak glowingly of faith, talk frequently of love, but utterly neglect hope. And while the inspired apostle does indeed declare love to be the greatest, he does by no means, here, or anywhere else in his writings, disparage the value of hope.
Some see hope as the wimpier cousin of faith. Hope is for the weak-kneed, nervous, fearful believers; faith is for the strong and courageous ones. If you need hope it is a clear sign that your faith is lacking. Such is far from the truth. Faith and hope are not antagonists; they are companions! They are not mutually exclusive; they are mutually reinforcing.
The Rapture of the church is also looked upon as an event that is not necessary for strong, courageous Christians to concern themselves with. Because it deals with escape and deliverance in the future, it is sometimes relegated to those Christians who don’t have the moral fortitude to live dynamically in the present.
The Bible represents hope in the most positive of terms. It is to be a significant component in the life of every believer, and it has a powerful, positive effect upon all who possess it. Indeed, without strong, Christ-centered, Bible-based hope, none of us would or could stand. Anyone who studies Bible prophecy can’t help but see this concept woven repeatedly throughout the prophetic promises. A hopeless Christian is a contradiction in terms.
Biblical Hope
To understand hope, it is necessary to rid ourselves of its most common perception. Bible hope and the world’s hope are worlds apart. We must carefully study what the Scriptures tell us about the hope that has its source in God. What we will find is an entirely new understanding that will cause hope to receive its proper significance in our sight. Let us look at the key aspects of hope as revealed through the Holy Scriptures.
Looking Forward
According to the Bible, hope is a joyful look into the future. It deals with things yet to come. In Jeremiah, God tells Israel:
For thus says the Lord: After seventy years are completed at Babylon, I will visit you and perform My good word toward you, and cause you to return to this place. For I know the thoughts that I think toward you, says the Lord, thoughts of peace and not of evil, to give you a future and a hope (Jeremiah 29:10-11).
At that time Israel was just entering one of the most dismal periods of its history. The mighty nation of Babylon had conquered Jerusalem. Most of the national leaders had been executed. Much of the populace had been taken as captives to Babylon, and only the poorest of the poor were left in Israel. Things could hardly have looked bleaker. Jeremiah, who had been prophesying of these judgments years before they occurred, now had a more positive word from the Lord. Yes, they would experience all the judgments God had promised, but this would not last forever. After 70 years God would “visit” His people, and they would return to their homeland. God declares that they do indeed have a future and a hope.
While some people mock the idea of hoping for a better future, God never does. As our wise Creator, He knows just how desperately we need to be able to look forward to better times. The opposite of hope is despair. It is fair to say that nearly every suicide attempt occurs with one primary thought running through the distraught individual’s mind: “Things will never get any better.” Terrible hardships can be endured if only we can have some expectation that things will someday improve. Men and women have suffered monstrous ordeals, clinging to the thought that things won’t always be that way. But once that hope is removed, once a person becomes convinced that there is no improvement possible, and that they will be miserable for the rest of their life, suicide begins to seem like a rational option.
How you perceive the future is extremely important. And hope always has to do with the future. It is not so much interested in what is going on right now; it speaks of things to come. Paul writes:
Hope that is seen is not hope; for why does one still hope for what he sees? (Romans 8:24)
When the desire of your heart becomes a reality, hope disappears. You no longer hope; you possess. But as long as that desire is unrealized, hope co-mingles with desire, and flavors your contemplation of it.
One of the most tragic individuals I have known in my youth was a man who was well-loved by everyone in our church. He had an enthusiastic, outgoing personality, and was one of the few adults in our particular church that seemed to maintain his sense of humor decades after his adolescence. In his middle age he had been hurt in an accident connected with his job, and his employer refuse to provide any type of compensation. The situation wound up in court, and when the court did not rule in his favor, he went out to his garage, attached a hose to the exhaust pipe of his car, and sat inside while the fumes quickly overcame him and ended his life.
This beautiful brother had lost all hope. The “things will never get any better” lie, used so successfully by Satan on both Christians and non-Christians alike, had taken another victim. It wasn’t his present situation that killed him. At that time he had housing; he had clothes to wear and food to eat. He had a family that loved him, and a church family that supported him. He had placed all his future hopes on one outcome, and when the desired outcome did not materialize, he could imagine no other future.
Such a waste! God has many ways of providing for his children. When one means fails, God’s promises do not evaporate. They are just as potent then as before. When our hope is based on God and His powerful, unchanging promises, we shall never falter. When it is based upon specific outcomes or events, despair can overwhelm us like a flood.
Faith & Hope
How does faith differ from hope? At first glance they seem to be almost the same. Both relate to good things God has for us in the future, things which we believe will occur. Yet they are not the same. When God promised Abraham a child to be his heir, the Bible tells us:
Abraham believed God, and it was accounted to him for righteousness (Romans 4:3).
Abraham is the Biblical father of faith. God says, “You may look old, feel old, and act old, but you are going to start a family in your old age. In a year’s time you will be a dad!” Abraham starts figuring out where they are going to put the little newcomer. He believes God, and that faith is somehow tied into a state of imputed righteousness.
Faith takes God at His word! When God speaks, faith always says, “Amen, Lord. Let it be to me according to Your word.” It is the accountant writing down the precise amount of funds coming in, or the historian who records the facts exactly as they happen. It is the soul of man recognizing the faithfulness and verity of his Creator, and planning his life around the sure fulfillment of God’s promises, long before they come to pass. Faith declares, “It must be; God has declared it!”
So where does hope fit in? While faith is the calm, dispassionate acceptance of the promise of God, hope is the joyful delight in contemplating the desire fulfilled. Faith says, “It must be,” but hope says, “And I can’t wait until it gets here!” Faith records the truth, but hope delights in it.
Here is a poor little boy that has never had anything but old, rusty bikes in his young life. He is constantly taunted and teased by his classmates for riding his pathetic hand-me-down bikes. His dad, feeling sorry for his son, promises him that this Christmas he will scrimp and save and finally get him a brand new bicycle. The boy, trusting his dad fully, takes it as a matter of fact that he will, in fact, receive the bike for Christmas. But knowing he is getting the bike is not enough. The boy snoops around the house constantly, looking for evidence of his present. Finally he finds it, hidden under a blanket in the garage.
Throughout the month of December he constantly sneaks into the garage to sneak a peak at the bike that will soon be his. While he never doubted he would get it, it is such a pleasure to gaze upon it, and daydream of when he will finally be able to ride it. Even in his bed at night, he spends his final minutes before falling asleep imagining the pride and joy he will have in riding that new bike in front of his classmates. And while he still rides his old, rusty bike to school every morning, somehow he doesn’t mind it so much now. He has seen his future and it is very bright. He can afford to ride that old bike until Christmas. He knows what lies ahead.
Thus we see the power of hope. The boy’s faith took hold as soon as his dad told him he would get the bike, but hope kicked in as he daydreamed about the bike, and gave him the stamina to joyfully endure his remaining weeks with the old bike. Faith told him the bike was his - hope inspired him with the dream of wonderful things ahead.
We can see that hope is no small thing. Hope feeds the soul and stirs our emotions in a very positive way. If hope could be formulated into a pill, we’d all be taking it. No price would seem too high to have a life bursting with hope. While it always looks to the future, it is a powerful medicine for the present. More inspiring than any drug, hope banishes dark clouds, laughs at difficulties, and provides spiritual adrenaline that fits us for effective service.
Perseverance during great difficulties is hope’s specialty. Paul writes, “But if we hope for what we do not see, then we eagerly wait for it with perseverance” (Romans 8:25).
Natural Hope
One does not have to be a Christian to have hope, of course. There is natural hope that atheists, Buddhists, Hindus, and Muslims all experience. There is nothing wrong with this kind of hope. It is part and parcel of our daily lives, and seasons them with the expectation of small joys and pleasures, and makes the mundane duties of life imminently more bearable. The factory worker may dislike his job, but at least he has the weekend to look forward to. The tired businessman is burned out, but lives for those three weeks in July, when he and his family will fly to Hawaii for vacation. The family living on a meager income may have few nice things, but they are saving for a new television, and can hardly wait until they save enough to go down to Wal Mart and buy it.
There are, however, several problems associated with natural hope. First it is often based upon a falsehood. When our dreams finally come true, we find they weren’t all we expected them to be. When I was a boy, I was captivated by an ad for several hundred Revolutionary War figures. The ad, found on the back of a comic book, portrayed these soldiers in various postures. There were horses, cannons, and all types of soldiers, enough to give me many happy hours of devising various battle scenarios and plots. After talking my mother into ordering them for me, I could hardly wait for the promised package to arrive. It seemed to take forever.
Finally the longed-for day came, and my mom handed me the package I had dreamed of for so long. But there was something odd about it. It was considerably smaller than I had imagined it. How could so small a package contain all those hundreds of soldiers and cannons and horses?
I soon found out. The little box easily held those soldiers, due to the fact that they were each made of a sliver of plastic, and were so thin that when you turned them sideways they disappeared. What a disappointment! After all those weeks of waiting I had no heart to play with them when they finally arrived. I sent them back for a refund. My hope had been based on an illusion.
Natural hope often turns out that way. Our dreams usually are so much glossier than our realities. Even when the expected outcome turns out exactly as we had hoped, somehow the satisfaction isn’t quite as intense as we thought it would be, or doesn’t last as long. Then we turn to a new hope, a new dream.
Many people live by overly optimistic, totally unrealistic philosophies based on a synthetic kind of hope. One man I knew used to say, “Things will work out; they always do.” The man was not dumb. Nor was he young and naïve. Yet somehow he had missed the fact that things definitely do not always work out. Marriages collapse and couples go their separate ways. Things did not work out. Young people die prematurely through accidents or cancer. Things did not work out. Distressed and harried people write despairing notes and then take their own lives. Things did not work out.
Another problem with natural hope is that it is never enough to base a life upon. Natural, human hope is based on temporary events, and buoyed by temporary emotions. The child hopes to be a teen, and expects that life will be great then. He can drive his own car, work at a job and have lots of money, stay up later, and be a little more free from mom and dad’s control. When he gets to be a teen, and finds job pressures, peer pressures, and a host of decisions that he must make about his future, he decides that being a teenager isn’t quite as great as it looked, but once he gets out of the house, that’s when the good life will really begin.
Of course, once that happens, there are more pressures than ever. He then sets his eyes on a future stage of life, and on and on until finally he has lived his life nearly out, and never yet found the perfect age. You cannot base your life upon human hope. It is useful, even needful, but it is never enough.
Results of Hopelessness
What are the results of a life without divine hope? There are four primary results that are frequently associated with such a life:
1. Depression and despair. We were made to live in continual expectation of good things. God is the source of all good, and those who live in relationship with Him will continually see a never-ending stream of good coming forth from the Father. The expectation of these good things is a hope that anchors the soul; it makes us unshakeable. “I shall not be moved” is the theme song of the hopeful.
It is impossible to be joyful if you live with no future. If we live only for the future we become idle dreamers, but if we live only in the present, we are depressed and uninspired. We are eternal beings; it is below our dignity as sons and daughters of God to live focused only upon the temporary and the finite. To look at “the things that are not seen” (1 Corinthians 4:18) is to focus our gaze beyond our present earthly existence.
Margaux Hemingway was a model and an actress. She was physically gorgeous, and seemed to have the life any young woman would want. But as the years went by, she struggled with an eating disorder and epilepsy, her movies were mostly flops, and her younger sister surpassed her in fame and success. In July of 1996 Margaux took her life with an overdose of a sedative. She was the fifth person in her family to commit suicide. Her grandfather, Ernest Hemingway, was the most famous, who ended his life by putting a shotgun to his head. Five suicides-five who surrendered to the fatal thought: “It will never get any better.” They had no hope.
2. Moral laxity. When hope is absent, morality always suffers. Do you remember when you had the misfortune to be on the losing side of a softball blowout? Most of us do not make it through childhood without suffering such a fate. You begin the game with great anticipation, but after the first inning the score is 13 to 1, and you’re losing. You tell yourself that you’ll be able to turn things around the next inning, but at the end of the second inning the score is 29 to 2! A horrible reality begins to set in. With crystal clarity, you now realize that you have absolutely no chance at all of winning the game. But you still have five more innings to play.
What happens? Your play suffers. With no hope of winning whatsoever, you begin to get silly. You toss your glove in the air. You joke around far more than usual. You no longer concentrate on the game, for in your mind, you have lost it already. You may go ahead and play out the final innings, but your heart is not in it. Who wants to put out all their energy into an effort that is doomed from the start?
Of course, we got over the game fairly quickly. By the time we got home from school, our minds were already on a peanut butter and jelly snack, or our baseball card collection, or the girl next door. Life moved on.
As adults, it’s not so easy. Our world is filled with millions of adults who have decided that they are already losers in the game of life. They may “play out the game” or they may decide to end it prematurely, but in their mind there is no possible chance of winning. They lose at marriage, they lose in child-raising, they lose at their jobs, they lose in their finances – they lose at life. And having decided that they have already lost, they are not particularly careful to live a strict moral life. Why seek purity, when you’re a loser? Why passionately pursue holiness when you fail at everything else? With their hope dissolved they live out their careless, depressed lives in quiet desperation - without God and without hope.
3. Slavery Another result of hopelessness is bondage. The Scriptures declare:
Since the children have flesh and blood, he too shared in their humanity so that by his death he might destroy him who holds the power of death--that is, the devil-- and free those who all their lives were held in slavery by their fear of death (Hebrews 2:14-15).
The people for whom Christ came to save (all of humanity) were a people whose fear of death had held them in slavery all their lives. At first glance this does not seem to be the case. The average sinner does not walk through life with a conscious dread of death, fearing the Grim Reaper every minute of his life. This fear of death that enslaves is much subtler. It is that nagging, unceasing awareness of the aging and dying process that saps meaning from life, takes the edge off our greatest joys and accomplishments, and agrees with Solomon that “all is vanity” (Ecclesiastes 1:2).
When the future is tragic, the present can never be fully joyful. Imagine a young bride who is blissfully in love with her husband. Suppose someone could come to her from the future and clearly prove that her husband, ten years later, was going to cheat on her, and leave her for another woman. If she could be fully convinced of that, it would absolutely spoil all her present joys. It wouldn’t matter how many wonderful loving acts her husband performed now, or how many sweet nothings he whispered in her ear. Her heart would continually be grieved by the knowledge of what was to come. Be he ever so loving, ever so considerate, ever so tender, she could not look at him without pain. A tragic future creates a dismal present.
Secular man lives in just such a situation. Without faith in God, without the expectation of eternal life through Jesus, all his present is lived in light of the harsh reality of his own aging and death. He may have a great life now, but aging and death lies ahead. He may just have been given a raise, or received a gold medal at the Olympics, or won an academy award, or been given a Nobel Prize, or been voted the most popular man at the office, but he is not getting any younger. He will die, his wife will die, his children will die, and all his accomplishments will mean nothing in a thousand years. “Vanity of vanity, all is vanity,” cried Solomon, who had no clue to a life beyond this life. “Man has no advantage over animals, for all is vanity. All go to one place; all are from the dust, and all return to dust” (Ecclesiastes 3:19,20). Such is the subconscious attitude of all whose secular philosophy precludes a divine Creator who offers eternal life to His creation.
Biblical Hope
The hope the Bible speaks of is a world apart from the hope of the humanist. It is firmly based on God and not merely wishful thinking. It inspires God’s children to courage and perseverance, and it produces a buoyant joy that makes present difficulties bearable. Let us look at some of the attributes of Biblical hope:
1. Biblical hope is of God. The Scriptures affirm that God Himself is the author of our hope.
· Happy is he who has the God of Jacob for his help, Whose hope is in the Lord his God… (Psalms 146:5).
· the Lord Jesus Christ, our hope… (1 Timothy 1:1).
· Now may the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, that you may abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit (Romans 15:13).
It is not merely that God gives us hope; He is our hope! His very presence, His powerful stirrings of the soul, the reality of His personal dealings in our life produce a hope that burns brightly within us. To experience God is to have the most optimistic thoughts about the future. God is the essence of all that is beautiful and good, and He is our ultimate destiny. We are destined to enjoy an eternity with the One in whom there is no sadness, no disappointment, and no depression.
Our lives may be filled with terrible pressures and difficulties at present, but our future is bright indeed. Now every Christian knows this intellectually, but only those who enjoy God’s presence daily can know it from the heart. The Holy Spirit continually confirms to our spirits that “it is well with my soul.” We know this, not because we have heard it in a sermon, or even read it in the Bible, but because God Himself has given us His Spirit as a guarantee of good things to come.
To have God is to have hope; to be without God is to be without hope. Paul writes, “at that time you were without Christ … having no hope and without God in the world” (Ephesians 2:12).
2. Biblical hope is based on a faith-glimpse into the future. Paul writes, “Hope that is seen is not hope…” (Romans 8:24). In another words hope has to do with things we have not yet seen. While this is true of all hope, the hope that is from God relates to a future that God has revealed by His word and through His Spirit. It is not based on what we would like to see in the future, or what we imagine might happen in the future, or what we think could happen in the future, but upon what God has said will happen in the future.
Paul writes of “the hope which is laid up for you in heaven, of which you heard before in the word of the truth of the gospel…” (Colossians 1:5). The preaching of the gospel contains a huge dose of hope! The gospel is not merely a dry set of doctrines or a theological treatise – it is a message of incredible good news throbbing and pulsating with hope for hurting and despairing people who have lived all their lives subject to the bondage that comes from the knowledge of and dread of death.
When my wife, Sharon, and I were first married, I was still in college, and working at a job which paid little. Sharon got a job at a plant food factory which didn’t pay well either, but at least it kept us in food and paid the rent. Sharon’s job was particularly unpleasant. Her boss was mean-spirited and demanding. Her job consisted of handling little bottles and droppers of a green plant food that got all over her. By the end of each day she looked like a leprechaun! The hours were long, the conditions lousy, and the pay was meager.
But Sharon had a secret. We had plans to move within a year’s time, and she would be able to quit her job. She worked with a middle-aged woman who had little education, no husband, and children that were dependent upon her. This woman told Sharon that she expected to work there all of her life. She had no hope of ever doing anything else. So here were these two women working side by side, doing the same thankless and dirty job. But one worked in hope of better things to come, while the other worked with no such expectation.
So it is in this life we live “under the sun” (as Solomon liked to put it). Sinners get colds and Christians get colds. Sinners have car accidents and Christians have car accidents. Sinners have doctors tell them in grave voices that their biopsy was cancerous, and so do Christians. Knowing Christ does not make us immune from the tragedies and pains of life. It does give us a hope of better things to come. When the Christian finds he is dying of cancer, he knows it is not the end. He will soon be with the One who is the essence of life and health, never to be sick again. When the Christian is laid off from his job, and the bills coming in are far more than his little bank account can manage, he knows that it will not always be thus. His God is able to change his circumstances, and has promised to meet his needs. He may be going through a time of leanness, but the time of abundance will come. Has not God promised to provide all his needs according to God’s riches in Christ Jesus? (Philippians 4:19).
The Spirit-filled Christian, who knows and values God’s word, is the ultimate optimist. While looking joyfully into the future, he works gladly in the present. If good times come, He gives thanks to God. If bad times come, he knows that even these are going to work together for his good. And at the end of his days he will begin his eternity in heaven.
3. Biblical hope is based on truth. Paul writes to Titus, “in hope of eternal life which God, who cannot lie, promised before time began…” (Titus 1:2). Life is filled with false and contradictory information. Every day tens of thousands of Muslim children are taught in their schools that a glorious future awaits all who will give their life for the cause of Allah. Nineteen year old young men, assured of a paradise of luscious fruits and dark-eyed virgins, strap bombs to their backs and head for a populated spot in Israel, eager to end their lives and reach their promised lands. They have believed a lie.
The Heaven’s Gate cult, certain that a deadly meteor would soon destroy the world, helped each other take a lethal cocktail of Phenobarbital and vodka. They were certain that the bright comet, Hale-Bopp, was a sign that they were supposed to shed their earthly bodies (or "containers") and join a spacecraft that was behind the comet which would take them to a higher plane of consciousness. They were deceived.
Secularists base their “hopes” on the notion that there is no deity to whom they are responsible, and who will judge them at the conclusion of their lives. Seeing no evidence of God (actually the evidence abounds, but they ignore it) they decide to go for all the gusto they can (gusto being interpreted as fulfilling the lusts of the flesh and the mind). They live out their lives not particularly happy for all their supposed gusto, and find too late that there was a God after all.
Christian hope is superior to all other forms of hope, because it is given by “God who cannot lie.” When we are told of things we have no way of proving or disproving, the credentials of the one who claims to know are all important. We generally assume that people who hold degrees in the field of knowledge of which they speak are reliable witnesses, yet even then we realize (or should) that they may be in error. In the case of Biblical hope, evangelical Christians have long held that these doctrines concerning heaven, hell, faith, repentance, justification, the deity of Christ, and so forth, have been written by men under the direct inspiration of the Holy Spirit. These are the very words of the infallible God.
Thus His promises become especially precious to us. The One who cannot lie tells us that those who believe in Christ will live forever. The One who cannot lie tells us that Jesus shall return and take His church to Himself. The One who only speaks truth declares to us that we shall all stand before the judgment seat of Christ, and receive rewards for those deeds done in His name. The infallible One informs us that, in the end, good will triumph over evil, and every hurt endured for righteousness sake will be amply compensated.
Jesus’ Return & Our Hope
The coming of Christ and the concept of Christian hope are inexorably linked in the Bible. You can’t find one without the other. Paul writes:
For the grace of God that brings salvation has appeared to all men, teaching us that, denying ungodliness and worldly lusts, we should live soberly, righteously, and godly in the present age, looking for the blessed hope and glorious appearing of our great God and Savior Jesus Christ… (Titus 2:11-13).
The return of Jesus for His church is called our blessed hope! It is in light of this hope that we are to live “soberly, righteously, and godly.” The expected return of Jesus should influence the way that we live. This is in keeping with the nature of a hope-filled life. Hopelessness always leads to sloppy and lax behavior; hope produces careful, controlled living. Surely this is the reason that our Lord enjoins us over and over again to watch for his coming.
Peter also commands us to hope and meditate upon Jesus’ return:
Therefore gird up the loins of your mind, be sober, and rest your hope fully upon the grace that is to be brought to you at the revelation of Jesus Christ… (1 Peter 1:13).
It seems strange that God has to “command” us to hope. Because He is our loving Heavenly Father, He always desires what is best for us. And He knows that hope is what is best for us. He wants cheerful, optimistic children who frequently gaze into the future and see beautiful and joyful experiences there. Yet many Christians fail to keep God’s command. They rarely think about, and never talk about the reality of Christ’s return. Pastors preach for twenty years and never preach on this incredible good news. Christians hope for new cars, nice houses, better jobs, fun vacations, but never seem to hope for the day when Jesus shall give the command to His church to come forth, and we shall all stand in His presence, praising the One who redeemed us from our sins.
Peter’s command to “rest your hope fully upon the grace that is to be brought to you at the revelation of Jesus Christ” is a command to give thought to the return of Christ. The more thoughtful attention we give to an object, the more precious it becomes in our sight.
When I was a young pastor, I went once a week to our county jail and shared Jesus with the prisoners. One particular prisoner was a large young man who had gotten involved in a robbery. This man was slow-witted, and seemed to have a sincere interest in spiritual things. He had been involved in a burglary with a couple of other guys, and in the process a woman had been shot and killed. He told me that he was not in the house at the time, and knew that one of the other two must have fired the fatal shot. The prosecution had made plea bargains with the other two and was attempting to pin the murder on this man.
Being convinced that he was telling me the truth, and aware that there was no real evidence that he had committed the murder, I became very much involved in the upcoming trial. I counseled, I prayed, I fasted, and I thought constantly about the stakes involved as this man could easily have his entire life taken from him on false charges. When the trial was over, the jury, realizing that there was no evidence that indicated that he was the murderer, found him not guilty. At the end of the trial I went out to my car with a great sense of relief.
And then I began to cry. I cried and sobbed for some minutes until I gained enough composure to drive. As I drove home, I was struck by the deep emotion I had felt. I am not a “crier” by nature, and it seemed out of character for me to cry that much and that hard. I realized that my prayers and thoughts and focus had built up powerful feelings in me, feelings that were far deeper than I had even realized.
We humans are built that way. What we think about, what we pray about, and what we focus upon begins to build up a deep reservoir of emotion and breadth of feeling that we could never have manufactured just by willing it. As a man thinks in his heart, so is he (Proverbs 23:7). We are physically what we eat; we are spiritually what we think. And so God commands us to set our hope fully upon Christ’s return. As we think about it, pray for it, hear sermons about it, and read books about it, we will begin to have the return of Jesus branded upon our souls. We will even start to have deep feelings about it. You cannot directly command your emotions one direction or the other, but you can take certain steps that will lead to certain feelings. Thought and prayer are our means to love the appearing of Jesus, and to possess strong hope that will see us through all life’s battles and pressures.
Results of Hope
The hope of Jesus’ appearing has a purifying effect upon the soul. It not only gives grace to sustain; it produces the will to change. John writes:
Beloved, now we are children of God; and it has not yet been revealed what we shall be, but we know that when He is revealed, we shall be like Him, for we shall see Him as He is. And everyone who has this hope in Him purifies himself, just as He is pure (1 John 3:2-3).
All who have the hope of seeing the revelation of Jesus are going to do something about the way they are living. People who live with an intense longing and expectation of Jesus to take them from the earth do not commit adultery. Nor do they steal, or lie, or tell filthy jokes.
It turns out hope is a most practical virtue. While it delights in promises of things to come, it lays the foundation for strong moral exertion in the present. It is a holy dream of a beautiful future, which creates resolve and toughness in times of stress and pressure.
I have often been struck by the tremendous contrast there is between King Solomon and the apostle Paul. They had much in common. They were both brilliant men. They were both highly industrious, ambitious men. They both had sharp, inquiring minds. They both experienced direct revelations from God.
Yet with all their similarities they were worlds apart. Solomon, like most of the Old Testament Jews, had little expectation of a life after death. The awareness of his own mortality colored his every perception. This is why Ecclesiastes is such a depressing book. We read Solomon saying such things as:
· What profit has a man from all his labor in which he toils under the sun? (Ecclesiastes 1:3).
· Therefore I hated life because the work that was done under the sun was grievous to me, for all is vanity and grasping for the wind (Ecclesiastes 2:17).
· For what happens to the sons of men also happens to beasts; one thing befalls them: as one dies, so dies the other. Surely, they all have one breath; man has no advantage over beasts, for all is vanity. All go to one place: all are from the dust, and all return to dust (Ecclesiastes 3:19,20).
· For the living know that they will die; but the dead know nothing, and they have no more reward, for the memory of them is forgotten (Ecclesiastes 9:5).
Solomon was not exactly “Mr. Cheerful!” Solomon’s problem was partly that he was a very smart man. He was smart enough to see that if death is the end of it all, all of life becomes utterly meaningless. It really is all vanity! People with no hope of heaven are generally better off if they don’t think too much about life. And this is one of the devil’s major goals for the unbelievers: to keep them so occupied chasing pleasures that they never take the time to analyze the folly of their empty lives.
A Different Perspective
Paul was a brilliant man as well. Anyone who reads the epistle to Romans would know that Paul was no intellectual lightweight. On an IQ test Paul may well have rated as a genius. (Of course he had more than a little help from the Holy Spirit in writing his epistles!) Yet we never find any of Solomon’s pessimism in Paul’s writings. In spite of being beaten, whipped, despised, and chased out of town and after town, Paul was so thoroughly upbeat!
We find, in Paul’s writings, such positive affirmations as:
· For to me, to live is Christ, and to die is gain (Philippians 1:21).
· I press on, that I may lay hold of that for which Christ Jesus has also laid hold of me (Philippians 3:12).
· To this end I also labor, striving according to His working which works in me mightily (Colossians 1:29).
· But thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ (1 Corinthians 15:57).
There’s no “all is vanity” sentiment here! Paul’s life is filled with purpose, filled with joy, and filled with determination to lay hold of all that Christ has for him. Paul’s love for Jesus, his appreciation of the cross, his hope of eternity with His Savior, and his vivid expectation of Christ’s return created a living, breathing hope that burned in his heart, fueled his tireless zeal, and carried him through life into the presence of his Lord.
May such be the case with us. As divine hope burns within us, disappointments, upsets, and troubles shall not shake us. Sickness and even the prospect of our own death will not move us.
This hope that we have is like an anchor for the soul. It is safe and sure. It goes behind the curtain inside the temple sanctuary (Hebrews 6:19- Simple English Version).
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