Hope..."Hope springs eternal in the human breast"..."where there's life there's
hope"..."Faith is the assurance of things HOPED for, the conviction of things not seen."
HOPE...a good word!
A "For Sale" ad appeared in the classifieds of the Roanoke, Illinois Review: "Hope chest -
brand new - half price - long story." Samuel Johnson told of a man who had been very unhappy
in his first marriage but remarried immediately after his first wife died. Johnson said it was "the
triumph of hope over experience."
What is hope? The dictionary defines it several ways: to WISH or WANT; a DESIRE for
something; or "to desire with expectation of fulfillment." That last one is the hope we have as
Christians...the CONFIDENT EXPECTATION of something to come.
For example, I can say, "I hope I will get to the airport on time after worship today." You
bet! But you also know that I am reasonably CONFIDENT that I WILL get to the airport on
time. Barring something utterly unforeseen, by about 1:30, I will be airborne. HOPE in that
context comes just short of saying I KNOW. And the only reason I DO NOT just come right out
and say I KNOW is that every detail of the future has not been revealed to me. So I say, I HOPE.
And that is the kind of hope...not wishful thinking...not just wistful dreams...but confident
expectation...that Christians have. It is the hope we hold in any contest between God and the
world; it is the hope we have in any clash between the spirit and the senses; and it is a hope in the
future whenever it is pitted against the present.
Consider it for a moment. We live in a messed up world: the war in Iraq continues with
no end in sight. Disasters? Tsunami in South Asia, mudslides in California, famine in Africa.
The economy? The administration says things are just fine, but we all know they are not. If we
would be honest about it, the only thing that we might be genuinely confident about is the fact
that, as Job said so long ago, "human beings are born to trouble, just as the sparks fly upward."(1)
It does not seem to be God's world at all, and if it is, God must not care much about what
happens to it. The cynic would happily say that he who would live on hope will soon starve to
death. But it is hope that we need, the confident expectation of God's ultimate victory, to sustain
us through the darkest hours.
You remember the story of Meshach, Shadrach and Abednego. They were three of
Daniel's friends in Babylon. King Nebuchadnezzar had set up a ninety-foot-tall, nine-foot-wide
golden idol that he commanded all his subjects to fall down and worship, but these three men
refused to do it because they were obedient Jews, loyal to the God of their ancestors Who had
said "Thou shalt have no other gods before Me." The king was informed of their attitude and
commanded that they they be brought to him, calling on them to recant their position. When they
refused, Nebuchadnezzar told them they would be thrown into into a fiery furnace to pay for their
crime. Listen again to what they said: "O Nebuchadnezzar, we have no need to present a defense
to you in this matter. If our God whom we serve is able to deliver us from the furnace of blazing
fire and out of your hand, O king, let Him deliver us. But if not, be it known to you, O king, that
we will not serve your gods and we will not worship the golden statue that you have set up."(2)
THAT is Biblical hope. And of course their hope was vindicated: Meshach,
Shadrach and Abednego were thrown into the furnace but they survived with not even a hair of
their head singed. Their hope was that the God Who had created them was also the God Who
could deliver them even from certain death...hope that rested in a God who overcomes the world.
Few of us are ever called upon for that kind of hope. And quite honestly, even when
called upon, there are fewer still who would evidence such confidence. The shame of it is that if
we did, our lives would be immeasurably better off. As it has been said, "The coward dies a
thousand deaths; the brave man dies but one."
The writer to the Hebrews knew about that. In that short portion of scripture we read a
moment ago, the early Christians were being called upon to exercise precisely that kind of
confidence. It might be helpful to us if we knew exactly what situation was being addressed, but
we do not. We do not know who wrote the letter, to whom it was written, when it was written or
even just why. But despite all the questions about it, Hebrews contains so much magnificent
material that it has proven continually useful to Christians for almost two-thousand years,
especially when we come to questions about standing fast and maintaining a constant hope in the
God Who delivers us.
Listen to the way Eugene Peterson paraphrases it in The Message:
Remember those early days after you first saw the light? Those were the hard
times! Kicked around in public, targets of every kind of abuse--some days it was
you, other days your friends. If some friends went to prison, you stuck by them.
If some enemies broke in and seized your goods, you let them go with a smile,
knowing they couldn't touch your real treasure. Nothing they did bothered you,
nothing set you back. So don't throw it all away now. You were sure of
yourselves then. It's still a sure thing!
We do not know what that persecution was. It might have been under Nero some thirty
years after the time of Christ; it could have been from Diocletian around the turn of the century.
To be sure, it was a time of terrible trial, but the context of the passage would indicate that the
darkest days were over, just a dim and distant memory. Now the danger was that the hope that
had sustained them through their difficulties was beginning to wane because they did not NEED
that hope so much. But the Word of God says DO NOT LET IT SLIP AWAY; you WILL need it
again, and it had better be there for you to call upon. God is in control...even during the good
times.
But there is more to the Christian hope than just the confidence that God runs the world.
To let it go at that would make us fatalists. We have hope in OURSELVES, hope in the triumph
of the spirit over the senses. After all, we affirm with Paul that "If anyone is in Christ Jesus, that
person is a new creation; old things are passed away; behold all things are become new."(3)
Admittedly, there is the temptation to put our hope in things that we can see, hear, smell,
taste, and touch. Our poetry says,
Gather ye rosebuds while ye may,
Old time is still a-flying;
And this same flower that smiles today,
Tomorrow will be dying.(4)
Our senses tell us to seize the moment. "Eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow we die."
But the spirit tells us that there is more to life than that.
If you think about it, we would certainly not have as good a world as we do...problems
though there are...without people who have been discontented with just living in the here and
now. In seventeenth century England, there were those who were being oppressed for their
religious convictions. They had a hope for a better life, so despite the dangers and hardships that
they KNEW lay in wait for them, they set out for a new world, full of that confident New
Testament expectation that says living only for the moment is not really living at all.
As time went along, the descendents of those early pilgrims came to feel their own kind
of oppression. They felt like political nonentities in an empire that spanned the globe. They
resented it and took their destiny into their own hands, taking up arms against the king. Their
hopes for political freedom resulted in the formation of a new nation that has become a model for
representative democracy.
It was hardly a perfect democracy, as we are too painfully aware. Oppression and
injustice simply operated on a different level, that's all. If you did not happen to be of the right
color or economic condition, you were just as downtrodden and abused as the English Puritans or
American colonists. But there were some who had HOPE, and that hope led to changes in our
society.
This weekend America is remembering the birthday of one of those who held on to his
hope despite almost insurmountable odds, Martin Luther King, Jr. In the spring of 1968, Dr.
King was very much involved with organizing what was known as the Poor People's Campaign,
but in the midst of that, he took time off to travel to Memphis, Tennessee to lead a demonstration
in support of higher wages for the local garbage collectors of that city. At a rally on April 3rd, he
said,
I don't know what will happen now. We have got difficult days ahead. But it
doesn't matter with me, because I've been to the mountaintop. Like anyone else, I
would like to live a long life. But I'm not concerned with that. I just want to do
God's will and He has allowed me to go up the mountain. I see the promised land.
I may not get there with you, but I want you to know tonight that we as a people
will get to the promised land. I am happy tonight that I am not worried about
anything. I'm not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming
of the Lord.(5)
The next day, April 4, 1968, Martin Luther King was struck down by an assassin's bullet
while standing on the balcony of his motel room. Dr. King had HOPE, hope for a better life for
his people and millions like them. He could have led a most comfortable life as an outstanding
black preacher, but the hope, the confident expectation, that a better life was possible drove him
to live for MORE than just the easy life that comes when the senses win out over the spirit.
Ultimately, of course, the Christian hope is centered around the thought that the future
will be better than the present. In the long run, that is why we would be willing to acknowledge
that our God is in control of this world (despite all the things which would try to convince us
otherwise) and why we would be willing to forego the pleasures of the moment in pursuit of
something greater and more worthwhile. We think the future is worth it.
A few moments ago I quoted something that has come to be thought of as the essence of
Epicurean philosophy: "Eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow we die." It is true that Epicurus
said that the chief end of life is pleasure, but to be entirely accurate, even he was willing to admit
that there are times when the sufferings of the moment are most worthwhile because of the
ultimate benefit, the eventual joy they bring. Christians do not think in those terms, but we do
indeed believe that the future holds more joy for us than we can ever imagine right now. For that
reason, Christians have been willing to endure even the most devastating hardships and
persecution for their faith...they know that this life is but a moment in comparison to the joys that
await in eternity.
Why do we have that hope? Because of Jesus...and what He had to say to us concerning
what lies ahead. "Let not your heart be troubled. Ye believe in God; believe also in Me. In My
Father's house are many mansions. If it were not so I would have told you. I go to prepare a
place for you, and if I go to prepare a place for you, I will come again and receive you unto
myself that where I am, there ye may be also."(6) We look forward to a time when we will reign
with Him in glory, and that makes all the sufferings of this present age pale by comparison. Yes,
we have hope...confident expectation...of life in a new dimension, one in which "eye hath not
seen nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath
prepared for them that love Him."(7)
If you recall your ancient mythology, you will remember the name of Pandora, a lady
endowed with every charm...the gift of all the gods. She was sent to earth with a little box which
she had been forbidden to open, but curiosity finally got the better of her...she lifted the lid and
out from that box escaped every conceivable kind of terror that is known to the mind and body
and spread themselves over the face of the earth. Pandora made haste to close the box up again,
but it was too late. There was only one thing left...HOPE. That was the ancients' way of giving
preeminence to it. All was lost...except hope.
We are in the first month of a new year. There are challenges that face us; there will be
pitfalls in our road; there will be disappointments and discouragements. But because we know
that our God has overcome the world, because we know that the spirit can hold sway over the
senses, and because we know that the future holds far more promise than the present, we look on
what lies ahead with that confident expectation that we call HOPE.
Amen!
1. Job 5:7
2. Daniel 3:16-18
3. II Corinthians 5:17
4. Robert Herrick, "To the Virgins to Make Much of Time"
5. Quoted by Clyde Fant and William Pinson, eds., 20 Centuries of Great Preaching, Vol. XII,
(Waco, TX: Word Books, 1971), pp. 352-353
6. John14:1-3
7. I Corinthians 2:9
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