HOPE

When we think about hope, we generally think of it as a kind of wish or desire. For instance, “I sure hope Mom is making meat loaf for supper tonight”—because we love Mom’s meat loaf. Or, “I hope it doesn’t rain tomorrow, so we can have the picnic.” We don’t know what’s going to happen, but we have strong feelings about what we want!

Or “hope” can be something a bit more like “preference”. For instance, “I hope it will be Pavarotti singing the role and not Domingo, because I like Pavarotti more.”

But when Holy Scripture, the revelation of God, raises the concept of “hope”, what’s being expressed is something different yet. Biblical “hope” is a confident expectation.

In the Bible, “to hope” is to wait actively. Not passively, but actively! That is, to manifest expectation by faithful obedience.

This is why hope is tightly connected with faith. Because if you don’t believe the Lord’s promises, then why manifest faithful obedience? But faithful obedience is the essence of the hope God’s Word reveals. And hope is the fuel of our constancy towards God.

Up to the time of David, we run across “hope” as a distinct concept surprisingly rarely in Scripture. With one impressive exception: the book of Job, where hope is mentioned about 18 times. That’s not surprising, of course. Hope became life’s crucial, essential question for Job—was there any hope left for him at all?

The highest expression of Job’s hope is found in Job 19:25:

²⁵ As for me, I know that my Redeemer lives,
and that as the last
he will stand upon the earth.
²⁶ And after my skin has been destroyed,
yet in my flesh I will see God,
²⁷ whom I will see for myself,
and whom my own eyes will behold,
and not another.
My heart grows faint within me. [NET Bible, here and following]

I think his heart is growing faint within him from longing, pining, hoping for that day, the day of universal righteousness, righteousness restored by the same One Who will restore Job’s own body from the dust of death. And therefore Job says further, to the “friends” who have come and done such a miserable job of “comforting” him:

²⁸ If you say, ‘How we will pursue him,
since the root of the trouble is found in him!’
²⁹ Fear the sword yourselves,
for wrath brings the punishment by the sword,
so that you may know
that there is judgment.

“There is judgment.” That, paradoxically, is precisely our hope—that there is judgment. Yes, that’s a frightful notion to most, but how can we expect—more than expect, press earnestly towards the ultimate restoration of righteousness without anticipating the righteous judgment of a holy God? It’s impossible! No judgment, no restoration.

We in Christ press towards the judgment, with no fear of condemnation. Because we unequivocally trust and categorically set our hope on the Redeemer prophesied so long ago by Job. That’s the great paradox of the faith of Christ: we press eagerly in hope towards the very thing that, to most of humanity, represents the extinguishment of hope. And there is spiritual sense in that. If our hope is not in God, then… it is not. So it has always been and so it always will be, and in every sphere of life, including the Last Judgment, the Judgment the Lord Himself has taken care of in love towards us, having taken human flesh upon Himself, having suffered, having atoned for the sins of a mutinous creation. That is the kind of love and grace we hope upon.

Such hope is no mere wish or desire, no mere preference. Rather, it is the concrete reception by faith of the fate God has appointed us in Christ. That is divine hope, and its source is the very heart of the Eternal, the Almighty.

Apart from the book of Job (which is a very ancient book, by the way), “hope”, as a distinct term, is rarely expressed in the history of Israel, until the time of King David, the “man after God’s own heart”.  And I find something ironic in that: Job, after all, lost everything, while David gained everything. But both trusted upon the Lord and entrusted all their hope to Him.

In the psalms of David we encounter a virtual explosion of hope! David’s whole life is defined by hope, by trust in God, and this hope is expressed over and over in the psalms.    

Psalm 25:1-5

¹ O Lord, I come before you in prayer.
² My God, I trust in you.
Please do not let me be humiliated;
do not let my enemies triumphantly rejoice over me!
³ Certainly none who rely [hope] on you will be humiliated.
Those who deal in treachery will be thwarted and humiliated.
⁴ Make me understand your ways, O Lord!
Teach me your paths!
⁵ Guide me into your truth and teach me.
For you are the God who delivers me;
on you I rely [hope] all day long.

And verse 21:

May integrity and godliness protect me,
for I rely [hope] on you!

Now, maybe will someone will object: “Well, it’s easy for David to rely on God. After all, he’s a king and has everything he could wish for!’

(Which,  oddly, is just what the devil protested to the Lord concerning Job: “Of course he reveres you! You give him everything. Just let him a suffer a bit and then let’s see how much he reveres you!”)

But--! But how many years did David, though already anointed king by the prophet Samuel, have to live as an alien, an outcast, rejected by his people. And even when he was finally recognized as king the schemes and intrigues against him didn’t stop—the worst of which was the uprising engineered against him by his own cherished son Absalom.

But, whether in battle or at peace, whether  in power or under persecution, the life of this “man after God’s own heart” was constantly characterized by hope.

The apostle Paul tells us that this kind of hope—divine hope—“doesn’t disappoint.” It doesn’t leave us in the lurch, doesn’t ditch us, doesn’t abandon us, doesn’t drop the ball or throw us under the bus!

But before we take a closer look at the place where Paul expounds on this hope, let’s take a look first at the very last mention of hope in the psalms.

We find it in Psalm 147:11. In the King James Version it reads “The Lord taketh pleasure in them that fear him, in those that hope in his mercy.” 

It is interesting to look at how this verse is translated in other versions:

(ASV) Jehovah taketh pleasure in them that fear him, In those that hope in his lovingkindness.

(CEV) The Lord is pleased only with those who worship him and trust his love.

(Contemporary Jewish Bible) Adonai takes pleasure in those who fear him, in those who wait for his grace.

(NIV) …the Lord delights in those who fear him, who put their hope in his unfailing love.

And in the NET it reads: "The Lord takes delight in his faithful followers, and in those who wait for his loyal love."

It’s surprising that the final word in this verse gets translated from Hebrew into English in so many different ways: grace, mercy, loyal love, unfailing love, lovingkindness. You would be justified in asking why: isn’t it just one word in Hebrew and doesn’t it mean just one thing? Why can’t the translators agree on a single translation?

Well, the answer is: the Hebrew word, khesed, conveys a concept to the Hebrew mind for which we do not have, in English, a single precise term. Khesed connotes something like ultimate, supreme, incomparable, sacrificial devotion and loyalty. You can see why many translators simply opt for the English word “love”—even though there is a different Hebrew word for “love”!

You could never have khesed without love, but you could have love, of one sort or another, with khesed. To put it another way, all khesed is love, but not all love is khesed.

In the New Testament, where the apostles tried to convey this Hebrew concept, they used Greek words that we translate as either “grace” or “love”.

But it is this khesed, precisely, that is in God, this divine motivation that constitutes the primordial, primal source and origin of all actual love. Because there is khesed in God, there is hope in us.

And so the apostle John tells us, in perhaps the best-known Bible verse of all, that God is love—to compel us to inextinguishable hope.

Those who hope on God have entirely entrusted their whole fate to His khesed, i.e., to His sacrificial faithfulness. They have entrusted their whole future to this incomparable, inextinguishable devotion of the Most High. That is the first and last lesson the Lord God desired to inculcate in the Israelite nation under the Old Testament. And many did indeed take the lesson in! They responded to God’s faithfulness with hope.

But—the lesson remained at best a glimmer of what was unveiled only in the face of Jesus Christ, the incarnate Redeemer foretold in antiquity by the God-faithful Job.

And it is about hope like this that the apostle Paul writes in the fifth chapter of the epistle to the Romans:

“Therefore, since we have been declared righteous by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ,² through whom we have also obtained access by faith into this grace in which we stand, and we rejoice in the hope of God’s glory. ³ Not only this, but we also rejoice in sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, ⁴ and endurance, character, and character, hope. ⁵ And hope does not disappoint, because the love of God has been poured out in our hearts through the Holy Spirit who was given to us.”

With such assurance, because of such undergirded expectation, in such compelling trust, we can endure and keep going on life’s path, fortified by “the hope of God’s glory.”

It’s interesting, even a bit surprising, that in the four Gospels we never hear the Lord Jesus pronounce the phrase “I hope.” Or even the word “hope.” But, the kind of certainty and decisiveness that testify to surging hope, we see everywhere and always in His words and deeds.

It says in Romans 5:3-4: “³ Not only this, but we also rejoice in sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, ⁴ and endurance, character, and character, hope.”

It is this kind of hope, hope issuing from proven character, character forged in suffering, suffering endured for love—this kind of hope that “does not (cannot!) disappoint”—that streams from the Person of Christ when, for example (Luke 9:51, KJV), “the time was come that he should be received up, he steadfastly set his face to go to Jerusalem.”

Perfectly knowing what awaited Him there, Jesus nonetheless set His face toward Jerusalem, where the Father’s will—the will Jesus utterly set His hope upon—was summoning Him. It is that all-transcending hope, divine hope, that empowered Jesus Christ to walk on. Past all the approaching agonies joy awaited Christ. This is what the writer of Hebrew directs our attention to: “…keeping our eyes fixed on Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter of our faith. For the joy set out for him he endured the cross, disregarding its shame, and has taken his seat at the right hand of the throne of God.” (Hebrews 12:2)

For the sake of that certain, fixed, promised joy, in the Father’s presence, Christ endured the cross, and likewise endured all worldly, passing trials, sorrows, pains and grief, right up to the Cross itself, knowing what HOPE was preserved for Him with the Father.

And the author of Hebrews exhorts us to fix our gaze on Him, so that we too, for the sake of that hope kept safe for us with our Risen Redeemer, might endure, not give up but press forward: “Think of him who endured such opposition against himself by sinners, so that you may not grow weary in your souls and give up.” (Hebrews 12:3)

How not to grow weary in our souls? Hope. Heavenly hope doesn’t say “Maybe…” but “Amen!” to all the promises verified and kept for us in Heaven, where our life itself “is hidden with Christ in God. When Christ (who is your life) appears, then you too will be revealed in glory with him.” (Colossians 3:3-4)

Again, the apostle Paul tells us in Romans 5:1-2: “Therefore, since we have been declared righteous by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ,² through whom we have also obtained access by faith into this grace in which we stand, and we rejoice in the hope of God’s glory.”

The believing reaction to this promise isn’t “Maybe…” but “Amen!” The only worthy answer is consecration that exalts the all-surpassing love of our living Hope and Redeemer, here on earth and for all eternity.