The urgency of hope.
When gifts like prophecy have passed away, says Paul in 1 Corinthians 13, three things will remain; faith, hope and love. Obviously faith and love must remain because without them we cannot please God or grow to be like him, but hope? How does hope make it into the big three?
Hope is something we must urgently reclaim. In practice hope has become a vague wish that things will get better somehow, or merely a weaker type of faith. But in the bible it is neither of these things. First let’s reclaim the word itself. It means a confident expectation of what God in future will do. A firm anticipation of Jesus’ return and all that means. There’s nothing bland or blurred about Christian hope. And it must be like this because having a vague hope undermines our faith. If “faith is the assurance of things hoped for” (Hebrews 11:1) our faith can only be as sure as our hope. If our hope is foggy our faith will be weak. But what exactly is our hope? It starts with the resurrection of Jesus.
Do you believe in the resurrection of Jesus from the dead? This belief is an essential part of being saved. According to Paul in Romans chapter 10, “if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved”. The New Testament records the resurrection of Jesus as a historical fact of primary importance. Paul tells the Corinthian Church, “For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve.”(1Corinthians 15:3). The Apostles Creed and the Nicene Creed include the resurrection as foundational. Because of its importance, the historical reality of the resurrection has long been under attack. It has been watered down into a myth or a metaphor or some collective hallucination or conspiracy on the part of the disciples. But none of these will do. None explain the multiple witnesses or the readiness of martyrs to go to their deaths based on the reality of Jesus being physically raised from the dead. So before we go any further, reflect on what you believe. If Jesus was raised this changes everything. If not, he was just another failed messiah.
1 Peter 1:3 tells us that our hope comes to us through the resurrection of Jesus from the dead. And it is in the resurrection and all it means that we find hope. The resurrection of Jesus was not a standalone event. Jesus’ triumph over death kickstarted an unstoppable process that will culminate in the renewal of all creation and the resurrection of our bodies. It is for this that we long, groaning inwardly (Romans 8:23) until we are clothed with immortality, reigning with Jesus in the new creation where every tear will be wiped away and God will live with his people. This is our inheritance and the Holy Spirit is the guarantee, the downpayment of this glorious inheritance (Eph 1:14) which is being kept for us in heaven.
This does not tie with the surprisingly common belief that our eternal destiny is to inhabit an ethereal heaven, wafting around in a perpetual praise meeting. This is not what the Bible says. It is a recycling of ancient Greek ideas that saw matter as evil and therefore something to be released from. In contrast, our creator God repeatedly blessed and approved his creation in Genesis. These two beliefs met head on when Paul preached the resurrection in Athens. No wonder many of his listeners were provoked into mockery (Acts 17). For the Greeks, resurrection was a nonsense. But the Bible ends with a new heavens and a new earth where God lives with his resurrected people. The earth will be renewed, not done away with. Our bodies will be renewed but, like Jesus, real and recognisable. The curse of the fall will be reversed. No more death, no more suffering, life without end in a new creation. A new age. This is our hope.
But until Jesus returns we live in an age which is in between the breaking in of the kingdom and its fulfilment. Jesus has triumphed over sin and death but death is not yet finally destroyed. We proclaim a kingdom that is both now and not yet. Until the coming of this Kingdom is complete we taste the powers of the age to come but live in a fallen world in bodies subject to decay. It is for this completion we hope and long for. Only then will we see the new heavens and the new earth and the church prepared like a bride for her husband. No wonder Jesus taught us to pray “your kingdom come”. No wonder that in Revelation the Spirit and the Bride say “come Lord Jesus”. This completion is what creation itself is waiting for, groaning like a woman in childbirth (Rom 8:22).
And let’s be absolutely sure about this - Jesus is coming back. We live in the last days (Heb 1:2) and the events described in Revelation are “what will shortly take place” (Rev 1:1). Each revival, each awakening has been a foretaste of what is coming. It is for this we hope. This is our confident expectation. As we pray and meditate on this wonderful inheritance of hope we are purified (1John 3:3) as every other desire drops away. In times of doubt and instability this hope is an anchor for our souls (Heb 6:19) enabling us to persevere through suffering (Rom 5:2-5).
This hope is not passive. The more we allow our hearts and minds to dwell on its reality, the more we become dissatisfied with the world as it is. It drives us to pray and proclaim the good news of the kingdom until it comes in fulness. What we see around us is not how things should be. The despair and self-destructiveness that has grown like a cancer in our nation must end and there is only one answer. Not politics, not philosophy, not technology, the only true hope lies in Jesus and his return. The church is not a warehouse for converts or a waiting room for an ethereal future. It is a nation of disciples discipling the world, propelled, sanctified and directed by hope. To quote Tom Wright, “people who believe in the resurrection, in God making a whole new world in which everything will be set right at last, are unstoppably motivated to work for that new world in the present.”
It's time to reclaim hope. To give our faith shape and substance and to inspire us to pray and work for the coming of Jesus.