Hope is Faith’s twin sister (Hebrews 11:1). Both are rooted
in the character of God, His goodness and His absolute ability to fulfill His
promises (Romans 4:19-21). It’s confident expectation in the favorable outcome.
Of course, for most of us, hope is little more than wishful
thinking, a good luck charm, as dependable and predictable as winning a
lottery. We attach this wishful thinking, our feeling-lucky to circumstances, people, governments, religious
systems, and ourselves. We anticipate
and predict the exact whens and hows of God’s carrying out of His promises, and
attach our hope to those predictions.
Sooner or later, however, we find ourselves flat on our faces, our hope
shattered. We are left hopeless, disillusioned and despairing in the world that
appears to be randomly governed by fickleness of chance and blind fate.
This despair, this hopelessness might very well be the best
thing that ever happens to us. Its
brutal reality forces us to be weaned from all other unworthy objects of hope,
lofty and noble as they may appear to be.
This includes gods of our imaginations, genies in a bottle, vending-machine
gods who deliver the products that we want when we want them, after pushing few
select buttons.
In his letter to the church in Corinth apostle Paul writes,
… we had the sentence of death within ourselves so that we
would not trust in ourselves, but in God who raises the dead (2 Corinthians 1:9)
This is as hopeless as it gets, but
there is purpose in such despair - so
that we would not trust in…. you fill in the blank… but in God who raises the dead.
Impossible is God’s modus
operandi. When we exhaust all our resources,
when all our human strategies fail, when we are left nowhere to go, nobody to
turn to, at the end of the rope, without any hope, we are finally in a place
where God who raises the dead – the God who raised Jesus Christ from the dead - can begin to work.
I find this indestructibly hopeful. How about you?
Now may the God of hope fill
you with all joy and peace in believing, so that you will abound in hope by the
power of the Holy Spirit. Romans 15:13
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