Hope

“In hope he [Abraham] believed against hope. . . .” (Romans 4:20, ESV).

“When it was beyond hope, he had faith in the hope” (CEB)

“For he was past hope, yet in hope he trusted” (CJB)

Why hope?

We need hope. We need to hope. Even in our church today, as Jason Duesing points out in his little book Mere Hope, we need to remember hope rather than just recite it in the list of the fruits of the Spirit (Gal. 5:22). Our culture celebrates cynicism and doubt rather than hope and trust. (1) (Read my full review here--recommended!)

Nor are we Christians immune. Dubbing some of us “Evangelical Stoics,” we are good at toughing it out, proficient at getting by. “In the face of the decline of cultural morality we hunker down and huddle up. Yet, simple joy, faith, hope, and thankfulness are conspicuously absent as we ‘Keep Calm and Carry On’” (2). Instead of looking to hope (perhaps, in my mind, neither looking “to hope,” verb, nor looking to “Hope,” noun), we just focus on putting one foot in front of the other.

What more can we do? After all, our world--dire. Worse. Worser. Our own circumstances often see no light at the end of the tunnel--no financial breakthrough, no vacation from worries no matter which beach we may sit on, no cure, the parent’s dementia, etc.

Do we pick up daggers and fight?

Do we desert and flee?

Do we despair?

Daring to hope seems foolish. Are we scared to hope--again? In long battles against whatever each one of us faces. . . in the weariness that lowers our head with no energy left to lift it up. . .  while we are still picking up pieces of broken hearts and broken dreams? The edge of a vanishing dream may seem as ethereal as the edge of a cloud, yet it slices deep like shattered glass. Hope?

Yet, we have hope. We have Hope himself.

Nor does Jason Duesing let us forget that hope is not just otherworldly, not just “get out of here and get to a better place” (3).

Listen to Daniel. Daniel (ch. 7-12) recounts several horrifying visions of the world’s decline in godliness and increasing antagonism toward God: “but the people who know their God shall stand firm and take action” (Dan. 11:32).

Hope stands. Hope takes action. Hope propels.

Instead of daggers, we proclaim.

Instead of deserting, we persevere.

Instead of despair, we pistis (the biblical Greek word for faith, I just love alliteration too much).

Why? Daniel says because we know our God. The foundation of our hope is the character of the God who does the gospel. For what he does expresses who he is, and still is today. We may groan at the worldly news, but the God who literally stepped into the middle of history in clothing Adam and Eve with animal skins and a clothing their despair with the hope of a promise, in calling Abraham as a hope of nations, in the Exodus to the hope of a Promised Land, in Jesus Christ incarnated, in outpouring the Spirit is still over history and still in history. His second coming is not a “step in” after an absence, but the culmination of what he is doing now.

Like Abraham, we hope against hope. We are irrational in hope, not because we cease to reason, but suprarational. Our faith adds different facts to the equation, for we know our God.

NOTES

(1) Jason Duesing, Mere Hope (Nashville, TN: B&H Publishing Group, 2018), 9.

(2) Ibid., 119.

(3) See his chapter “Look Out.”