In his letter to the Romans, Paul writes: For in hope we have been saved, but hope that is seen is not hope; for why does one also hope for what he sees? But if we hope for what we do not see, with perseverance we wait eagerly for it (Romans 8:24-25 NAS).
The hope which we have in this world for worldly things generally refers to something which we do, whilst the hope that we read about in the Bible refers not to something we do but to something we have. We have the hope of eternal life promised to us by Jesus. Our hope in Christ is inexorably linked to our faith in Him. The writer of the Book of Hebrews reiterates what Paul wrote to the church at Rome: Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen (Hebrews 11:1 NAS). It is through our faith that we find both the reality and proof of the things that we cannot see and yet nurture a total belief in the existence of.
The most important hope of which the Bible speaks is the resurrection hope that Christ has bequeathed to us. It is this hope on which the Gospel message is fully embraced. Because of it we can understand better the death of Christ upon the cross at Calvary, embracing the knowledge that His death was the ransom payment for the sins of the world, past, present and future. By accepting the personal nature of His sacrifice, in that His death paid for my sins and your sins, and our acceptance of Him as our Saviour and acknowledgement of Him as our Lord, we can, through repentance and acceptance, know the eternal hope that we have in Him.
This then is not a doing sort of hope, but a having hope. We have the hope of eternal redemption to God, in Christ, not by our own actions but by His actions and promise.
As Easter draws near so we are reminded once more of that which we should be reminded of every single day, that Christ died for us, and that through His death we can have life, and that life being life eternal. This is something for which we should be thankful every day.
Just as those with this hope can understand death as being the doorway through which we exit this life and enter the next, so there are many whose belief in the resurrection is confined to believing that it is simply a grand finale to the gospel, rather than the very real assurance of our forgiveness and salvation. Yet the truth is that, through the power of the resurrection promise, we are empowered to live lives transformed by the love of Christ, in hope of life eternal with Him after our earthly death.
This book will be my bed-time reading for the next few weeks, but more than that, it will be a book which I will periodically dip into in order to refresh myself in the truths it contains. From what I have read so far I can highly recommend it to you, dear readers. The ISBN is 978 184474 423 7, and it's a paperback published by Inter-Varsity Press at £6.99.
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