Father, I have in Christ the hope of glory. Hallelujah!
When I was a boy, I always looked forward with great anticipation to Christmas. I still do. Maybe I am still a boy (my wife says it is so), but Christmas is such a special time. I was talking with a guy at work last week. He and his wife are looking forward to a trip to Europe this summer, and we talked about their plans. Because I rub elbows with so many in the university, I often encounter people looking forward to graduation or to the beginning of their master’s or Phd in the fall. Looking to the future is part of life. You and I do it quite a bit; we know what it is like. Indeed, everyone does it at some point. We look forward to family trips, new jobs, summer break, big games, getting off crutches, wedding days, due dates, birthdays, holidays, Friday night and much more. We understand what it is like to look eagerly to the future.
For the people of God, this sort of experience is part of the fabric of life, for they live with an eager expectation of eternity. They have an inheritance awaiting them in heaven, and they know it. They have a future existence in which their pain will be gone forever and their joy will know no end, and they know it. They have an everlasting life with God, a real future, and they know it.
The term the Bible uses to describe this expectation of the future is “hope.” Christians live life on Earth with hope. They suffer from disease, injury, rejection, and persecution, but they have hope. They understand that while this Earth is temporary, their inheritance is not. Jesus’ followers live for the hope of eternity.
Now Biblical hope is somewhat different from the popular meanings of hope. Sometimes we say, “I hope it will rain tomorrow.” What we mean is “I would like it to rain.” This sense is not what Biblical hope is even though it does involve something we desire. We also say, “She has lost all hope.” By that we mean “she is in despair.” Hope and despair are opposites. This is getting closer, for Biblical hope certainly opposes despair, but even this is incomplete.
The hope we see in the Bible is not a wish but a confidence, and it does not just alleviate despair. It produces joy. Thus, when God’s people show hope in heaven, they are not just wanting it to be so. They are living with full assurance that heaven is their home, and such assurance brings them great delight. Like faith, hope entails a certainty of things not seen, and like joy, it brings great delight to the soul. Hope is in the same family as faith and joy; all three share the same spiritual DNA, but the focus of hope is always the future.
Hope rests in God. Followers of Jesus do not place their hope in the stock market, their bank accounts, their spouses, the hospital, or the next election. All those things will eventually fail to fulfill our deepest desires, but God does not.
Hope changes everything because, like faith, it changes our perspective of Earth. Diabetes looks different when we know it is temporary. Being spurned for a promotion looks different when our hope is not in our job. Even death looks different when we see it as the birth canal for glory.
Hope affects how we live in the world. If it never does so, it is not hope. The critique that Christians are so heavenly minded that they are of no earthly good is a misunderstanding of hope. Our hope of glory makes us want to live in purity now. Our knowledge that all tears will be wiped away makes us want to wipe away tears now. Our certainty of life after death gives us a greater boldness in life now. People who think on heaven do more good for God on Earth now than those who never think on heaven at all. Imagine being in an army and knowing you were going to win the war. It would change your morale now, and if you held such a hope properly, it would make you a bolder warrior now. The world does not suffer from people who think too much on heaven. It suffers from people who think too little on it.
When the hope of glory gets lost in the matrix of life, we lose one of the chief sources of richness in life. Hope for eternity makes life now truly alive. When our eye is focused merely on the daily shuffle of responsibilities, they lose their meaning. The same is true when we are focused merely on the next ten years or fifty. The hope of glory changes all that. A follower of Jesus sees eternity and knows the final outcome of his or her life, and that confidence changes everything. Now.
