Is Your Kind of Hope a BIBLICAL Hope?

Mike Hosey, An Elder

God is a God of hope, and he wants each of us to overflow with hope (Romans 15:13).  Now for some people, that is an odd statement.  Hope, after all, is a word inherently and fully filled with uncertainty. For instance, we may say something like, “I hope dinner is ready when I get home,” or, “I hope my team makes it to the Super Bowl.”  When we say those things we are expressing our desire for a future outcome, while at the same time expressing our understanding that those outcomes may be different than what we desire. We desire a hot plate at the end of our workday, but we recognize that our spouse sometimes gets very busy and may only have a bowl of cereal for us.  That “hope” statement is odd for some people because God is an all knowing God, and as such he must be a God filled with certainty.  He is also a loving God, so it doesn’t make sense that a God filled with certainty who loves us would also want us to be filled with the anxiety of uncertainty. The problem lies in a wrong understanding of the word hope.  Biblical hope is not filled with uncertainty.  Biblical hope is certainty. One of the many places where this is clear is in Romans 8:23-25.  There, Paul argues that we eagerly wait for our adoption as God’s children. He argues that we are saved in the hope of our future, and that we wait patiently for it.  One cannot be saved in uncertainty, and one does not wait in it either!

Hope is like faith. We often think of faith as uncertainty.  But biblical faith is devoid of uncertainty. Biblical faith is certainty. Abraham’s belief in God’s promise to make a great nation from Isaac was so certain, that he reasoned that God would raise him from the dead if he sacrificed him like God had commanded (Hebrews 11:17-19). The opposite of faith is mistrust, and mistrust at its core is a problem of uncertainty. This is why faith produces behavioral results.  We act on what we believe to be true. The greater our belief that something is true, then the more certain we are of that truth, and the more likely we are to act -- even at great risk to our own well-being. Great faith is great certainty that what God has told us is true.  Great hope is great certainty that God’s future promise will be true. So faith is certainty in what God has told us in the past, and is telling us now in his word.  Hope is certainty about his future promises.  This is why endurance produces character and character produces hope (Romans 5:3-5). Our successful endurance shows us that God’s promises are true, which produces a character of trust, which in turn increases our certainty about the future.