Advent: Hope

Last time I talked about the fact that Advent is about waiting. I mentioned that just like Abram waited for a son, and Israel waited for a savior, we wait for the second coming. This week I want to talk about something that goes hand in hand with waiting. I want to talk about hope.

Hope is an interesting thing. I'm sure we have all heard that hope kills. Typically the idea is that people become complacent or don't fight when they have hope to be delivered. This might be true. I can see a scenario where people do nothing because they have hope, but the same could be said for desperation. Those people give up and do nothing because they feel it is worthless.

This is not the hope of Abraham.

See Abraham trusted in a God who never breaks his promises. This may seem cliché, but it certainly wasn't for Abraham. Read Genesis 22. That will change your mind. See here we have Abraham being asked to do the unthinkable. He is asked to kill his son. If that were not enough, this is the son of promise. This is the son that he waited 25 years to have. This is the son that is going to become a great nation. And the God who promised this son is now asking Abraham to sacrifice him.

At this point most of us would be asking why God would do this. The simple answer is God wanted to know if Abraham trusted Him more than the promise. Or for those of you that do not hold to open theism; God wanted to show Abraham that he trusted God more than the promise. In either case what we see happen is that God is faithful to the promise. But I want to focus on one thing that God says in 22:16.

“By Myself I have sworn, declares the Lord, because you have done this thing and have not withheld your son, your only son,"

Did you catch that? God swore by (or on) himself. Now there are some cultural things I need to explain here. In the time of the Old Testament when someone swore on something they were swearing on something greater than they were. But more than that they were declaring that if they break their promise that they should lose what they swore on. So if I swear on my family and I break my promise you can come and kill them and receive no repercussions, because that was my bet if you will.

So here we have an amazing thing happen. There is nothing greater than God so what does he do? He swears on Himself. It might seem odd, but what this means is that Abraham could trust that God would make good on His promise. And this is the fact that makes Abraham's hope so different from people who hope in themselves or money or power. Our God will NEVER break a promise.

Let's turn to Hebrews 6.

There is a beautiful passage that happens in this chapter. It begins in verse 13. Here the author (probably Paul) references the entire story of the promise to Abraham in a few verses. I talked about this more extensively in my last post. But the author goes on to talk about this promise of God. He talks about how because God swore on Himself and kept His promise, that we can have hope that God will keep His promise about Jesus. Namely that are sins are forgiven and we can come before God. That Jesus has made a way for us to be relationship with God. That we will be raised to incorruptible bodies and that we will spend eternity with our creator.

This hope is the central hope of Christianity. It is the hope that helps us persevere. It is the hope that gives us freedom to love. It is the hope that enables us to be the body of Christ. And it is the same hope that we should share with the world.

This is our hope.

My favorite theologian wrote an entire book on this. It is called Surprised By Hope. His central focus is that the church has put too much emphasis on life after death. The Bible teaches about resurrection, or life after life-after-death. For N.T. Wright the point of Christianity is not to just save souls, but to work with God for the kingdom. It is to show the in-breaking of the kingdom that has already happened. It is to bring this hope to others. Wright puts it like this:

"Salvation, then is not 'going to heaven' but 'being raised to life in God's new heaven and new earth.'"

This is the hope born at Christmas. This is the hope that we have in the second coming. This is the hope of our entire religion. A hope that all will be made right. A hope that the things we do here and now will be glorified by God in the new creation. A hope that we do not labor in vain. A hope that is firmly planted in the God who cannot lie. This is our hope.

May you hope in your waiting. May you remember the hope of Abraham. May God remind you that He cannot lie. And may your hope encourage you as you work with God in His mission.

Amen!