The Amazing Resurrection of the Dead预览

Overflowing Hope

I really like the heart-warming prayer of Paul that ‘the God of hope will fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that by the power of the Holy Spirit you may abound in hope’ (Romans 15:13).

Note how he calls the Father the ‘God of hope’. All our hope is found in him. And then that we will ‘abound in hope’. The word ‘abound’ has a sense of abundance, overflowing, and lavishness. The image is of a cup spilling and splashing everywhere. So our hope is not just enough, it is far more than enough. And it particularly relates to the Day of the Lord.

The writer to the Hebrews describes it as a sure and steadfast anchor of the soul (6:19). He writes of ‘the full assurance of hope to the end’ (Hebrews 6:11) and encourages his readers to encourage one another as they see the Day drawing near. He urges us to hold fast to the confession of this hope’ (10:23, 25).

Christian hope is future-tense faith. Like faith, it is embedded in God, but it is faith not in what God has done but in what he will do.

In the fourteenth century, Dante Alighieri, an Italian poet and philosopher, completed a book-length poem entitled The Divine Comedy. In it, he describes the Inferno (Hell), Purgatory, and Paradise. Above the entrance to the Inferno, there is a sign containing one of the most chilling, bleak, terrifying messages ever written. It simply reads, ‘Abandon hope, all you who enter here.’

The prospect of existence (you could hardly call it life) without hope is worse than death itself. Every day, when we wake, we live with hope—that the sun will rise, that we will breathe, that there will be breakfast awaiting us, that loved ones and colleagues will greet us, that there will be tasks to accomplish, prayers to pray, conversations to engage in, new experiences to embrace and so on.

When any of these things are taken from us through sickness or imprisonment or isolation or any other things, our hope founders and the joy of living shrinks, although there is nearly always some kind of hope somewhere, even though it be slim. Hope springs eternal in the human breast, says the old proverb. And where there is life, there is hope, says another. But to enter a realm where there is nothing at all to hope for and to stay there indefinitely? That would be inconceivably desolating and unbearably tormenting.

On the other hand, to live in hope of a glorious future, where earthly pains and sorrows exist no more, where we are resurrected to a glorious existence in God’s presence, with ineffable joy and fulfillment, with imperishable bodies, with brightness and sunniness all around, with such treasures and true wealth as we never could imagine—what a hope! What an expectation!

No wonder the Bible exhorts us to confess and profess that hope and to hold on to that profession without wavering. So we pray for God to hasten that Day. Thank God, in Christ, we have a wonderful, encouraging, awe-inspiring hope that will see us through every peril until we stand boldly before the throne of God.

What next?

Google the original hymn by Edward Mote with the first line, ‘My hope is built on nothing less’. What does it tell you about Christian hope?

Read (aloud), record, repeat, and recall Hebrews 10:23.