Photo by matthew6910 on Unsplash

Hope

In September 2010 a baby girl was born to a young couple in the Atacama Desert area of Chile. They called her 'Esperanza' - Hope.

Nothing very special about that perhaps – except that at the time her father Ariel Ticona was trapped in a mine 2300 feet below the surface of the desert. For 69 days he and his 32 companions lived in hope. Hope was all they had. And when at last that hope was realised and they stepped out into the sunlight once again, many of them saw it as a miracle, and thanked God for it.

• Rescue of Miner (photo courtesy of Hugo Infante/Government of Chile)

For many of us thankfully, life is not so dangerous, but even so, life without hope hardly bears thinking about.

Even the dullest and most routine of days contains its elements of anticipated pleasure – the coffee break, the evening meal or the weekend away. However trivial such things are, without them life would be unbearable. Even though there is often more pleasure in the anticipation than in the reality, we continue to hope for better things in the future, continue to create objects to covet and ambitions to fulfil. To 'hope against hope' is a phrase that sums up man's almost inexhaustible capacity to manufacture hope, even when no real grounds for it exist - when his situation is in fact hopeless.

Hope Against Hope

That particular phrase is used once in the New Testament. The way it is used shows what a huge gulf separates the 'hope' of the Scriptures from 'hope' as it is commonly accepted in our everyday world. The passage where it occurs is a description of the life of Abraham, that great hero of faith of the Old Testament: "who against hope believed in hope..."

• Romans 4.18 Authorised Version

What was Abraham so hopeful about? That his ninety-year-old wife Sarah would have a son! What a hope! What possible grounds could he have had to believe it? One, and only one - God had promised it. And Abraham believed God.

The Real Meaning of Hope

There is a world of difference between this kind of hope and hope as it is usually understood. People may be hopeful for a number of reasons. They may be naturally optimistic, given to looking on the brighter side, come rain or shine. They may find quite adequate rational grounds for being hopeful about the future. They may have the capacity themselves to bring about the objectives they long for. Did Abraham have any such grounds for hope? Even the most optimistic individual could hardly anticipate the miracle which was obviously required. There was nothing Abraham himself could do to realise his dream. There was nothing in his circumstances which presented the slightest grounds for his hope, except one thing. God had promised: "Sarah your wife shall bear you a son."

• Genesis 17.19

Abraham believed that what God had promised he would perform. So he waited, full of hope, looking forward to that amazing day when at last he would have a son and heir. His hope was not disappointed.

Abraham’s hope and Biblical hope in general, is inseparable from faith in God. The one springs from the other. If faith is the conviction that God exists and that He will fulfil His promises to mankind, then hope is the inevitable result of that conviction - the eager anticipation of the future which God has promised.

Such certainty is impossible for a world that does not believe in God. In Biblical terms, the world of unbelief is a world without hope. So the Apostle Paul described the Christians at Ephesus before their conversion as being "without Christ...having no hope, and without God in the world".

• Ephesians 2.12

And he advised bereaved disciples at Thessalonica that they should not mourn like "others who have no hope".

• 1 Thessalonians 4.13

Of course, the pagan world in which the earliest Christians lived had its hopes, including a hope of life after death – but none of them could be guaranteed and many of them were illusory, as even their own poets and philosophers recognised.

The Foundation for Hope

The Christian was in an entirely different position. Paul said those at Thessalonica were not to grieve unduly, because Jesus Christ had conquered death – God had raised him from the dead and would one day send him back to raise all those who had died "in him", so that all believers could then share eternal fellowship with God

• 1 Thessalonians 4.13-18

That was their hope. It was not a fabrication, but based on God’s past performance, on the incontrovertible evidence that He had raised His Son Jesus Christ from the dead.

Many times when the Apostle Paul was called upon to defend himself before the Roman authorities, he used the word "hope" to sum up everything in which he believed:

One thing his words make very clear; Paul's hope and that of all the earliest Christians, was founded on the Old Testament. It was the hope that all God had promised to the fathers of the Jewish people would be fulfilled – through Jesus Christ.

It was Abraham's hope that one day all nations would be blessed through one of his descendants – Jesus Christ.

• Genesis 12.3 and Galatians 3.16

It was the hope of King David that one day, his people and all nations would be ruled in peace for ever by one of his line – Jesus Christ.

• 2 Samuel 7.12-16 and Luke 1.32, 33

It was the hope of Job, of David and the prophet Daniel that they would awake from the sleep of death, because the power of sin would one day be broken – by Jesus Christ.

• Job 19.25-26, Psalm 17.15 and Daniel 12.2

This was the hope of the Apostle Paul, and it remains the hope of all Christians worthy of the name. The linchpin on which it depends is the resurrection of Jesus Christ:

Paul had seen and heard the risen Christ on the road to Damascus and his conviction was unshakeable. Many who have not in a literal sense either seen Christ or heard his voice, have nevertheless been just as convinced that the resurrection is a historical fact. If it is not, the hopes of a Christian are as vain and illusory as any other. If it is, both faith and hope can rest upon its rock-like foundation.

A Life of Hope

With such a vision of the future, the Christian is well-equipped to face whatever life may throw at him. His hope does not offer present gain or advantage, although it does confer great spiritual blessings. Paul later wrote:

Contentment is a rare blessing in this greedy, grasping society in which we live. But in general, the experience of many Christians throughout the ages has been of difficulty, opposition and often outright persecution. In this respect, as in all things, Jesus showed his followers the way, looking beyond the hatred, the agony of his sufferings, to the glory which he knew would be his in the future:

In the same way Paul was motivated to endure the harassment of his enemies and the most acute physical discomfort as he travelled through Asia and the Middle East on his missionary journeys.

In the passage that follows, Paul pictures the whole of creation as being in a state of perpetual anticipation, eagerly waiting for the day when God’s glory will be revealed in the earth – when all the futility and frustration of the present will be removed and the whole creation liberated from sin and decay to enjoy the richness of God’s kingdom.

• Romans 8.19-22

He (Paul) longed for that day:

Hope for the World - A Hope for You

Who would deny that we need a hope like that?

Nothing could be more relevant to our needs as individuals and to the problems of the world in which we live. Nineteen centuries after Paul wrote these words, the creation remains as much subject to futility and frustration as ever, in spite of the near-miraculous advances of modern science. The problem lies not in man’s abilities or potential, which appear almost limitless, as one might expect of a creature made "in the image of God."

• Genesis 1.27

• Bengal Tiger – one of many species of animals facing extinction

No, the problem lies in man’s moral weakness, in his inability to control and direct his own ingenuity. So the miracle of modern medicine is accompanied by the horrors of pollution and the threat of nuclear destruction. The marvel of the printed word is expressed in floods of worthless and evil literature, at the cost of the measurable depletion of the worlds' forests every day and the disruption of the world’s ecology. Millions starve and die whilst improved agricultural technology produces ever higher grain yields – for those who can afford it. The insatiable appetite of a consumer society ravages the earth’s resources.

As long ago as 1972, the "Ecologist" magazine published a major study of the earth's resources and the present state of western society entitled "A Blueprint for Survival". The preface opened with these words:

• Recent catastrophic flooding in Queensland, Australia

In the years since that report, focus has shifted to the problems of global warming and the effect of carbon by-products in the atmosphere.

The developing world rushes headlong towards growth and greater industrialisation, and western nations fight to keep their consumer lifestyle unchecked. The symptoms are not good: extreme weather patterns, the rising price of basic foodstuffs, rising sea levels, the dramatic depletion of fish stocks in the world’s oceans, the extinction of thousands of species across the globe – all evidence of the intolerable strain that man is placing on this tiny planet. No government on earth has the will and the authority to bring about the radical changes which are needed.

The result – a collision with the inevitable. Sooner or later the world, as H.G. Wells predicted, will come to "the end of its tether". Jesus tells us what the world would be like immediately before his coming: "‘nations will be in anguish and perplexity... Men will faint from terror, apprehensive of what is coming on the world".

• Luke 21.25-26 NIV

But God has given us a real hope. He offers hope to this planet on which we live. He offers hope to each one of us as individuals. He has demonstrated His love for us in the most astonishing intervention on our behalf – the provision of His only Son as a sacrifice for our sins. He has given us all the evidence we need on which to pin our faith.

How can we fail to take hold of the hope He offers us?

Where else can we go for a hope like this? Nowhere – as Peter said to Jesus: