Hope Amidst All the Sorrows

Have any of you ever seen the movie Avengers Infinity War? In the final scene of the movie we see our favorite marvel characters slowly turn into dust. Bucky calls out to his best friend Steve one last time. Rhodes searches aimlessly for Sam, his teammate, not knowing he will never find him. Spiderman mutters his iconic line “Mr.Stark I don’t feel so good” as he fades to dust in Tony’s arms. Tony has to watch the boy he thinks of as his son become nothing. Those remaining are filled with a feeling of despair. The story continues into the movie Endgame where we see that time has passed and some of the Avengers have given up on ever finding a way to get their loved ones back. They have lost all hope.

Living without hope is a dangerous thing. It is a sad way to live. Going about each day with nothing to look forward to. A person’s reason to live is a powerful thing that can drive them to do more than just survive but without hope it can seem like there isn’t a reason anymore. It can seem like there is no point to living, no point to thriving. People without hope can go through life on autopilot. Nothing seems worth doing because there’s no greater meaning to life. Without hope, a sadness slowly creeps in. It will set in in a way that without a greater source, it will lead to drastic costs. As Christians, we have a hope that is much stronger than ordinary hope.  A biblical view of hope is tied so closely to faith. God has promised us something that we can hope in. He has promised us eternal life through his son, Jesus. We have a hope for a future that can allow us to live that way, that we can live a life that reflects that.

What is Hope?

Before we understand what we have to hope for, we need to know what hope is. Hope in the sense we are going to be talking about comes from the Greek word elpis. The dictionary definition of this word is a general feeling that some desire will be fulfilled.  A phrase that comes to mind when thinking of hope is wishful thinking. This word can also be translated to the word expectation. An essential quality of hope is that it is oriented to something in the future that one expects but does not yet possess. says “For in this hope we were saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what he sees?  But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience.” God gives us these promises that we expect he will fulfill. God promised Noah that He would never again destroy the Earth with a flood (). God promised Abraham that he would have more children than the stars in the sky (). God promised the Israelites that he would deliver them from Israel (). They waited eagerly yet patiently for what was to come even though they could not physically see it or have certainty it would happen. They had hope that it would be fulfilled, and it would be everything they thought it would be. In the same way, we must have hope that God will fulfill his promises about the afterlife.

“For in this hope we were saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what he sees?  But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience.”

What Do We Have to Hope for?

So, what do we have to hope for? I hear Christians say all the time “I just can’t wait to get to heaven.” I hear non-Christians debate over whether or not there even is an afterlife. What do we as Christians have to hope for? Is there even anything for us to hope in? First and foremost, we have been promised eternal life. says “in hope of eternal life, which God, who never lies, promised before the ages began” and is followed closely by “so that being justified by his grace we might become heirs according to the hope of eternal life.” in chapter 3:7. chapter 1:2 brings up the idea again of God’s promises. Before it says the word promised though it has the phrase “who never lies.” God has never once lied about one of his promises. He unlike us as humans, can’t make an empty promise. To this day, he hasn’t destroyed the Earth with a flood like he promised to Noah. Abraham has more descendants than you or I or the smartest person in the world could even begin to count. Even in their disobedience, God sent Moses to free the Israelites from slavery and eventually brought them into the Promised Land. Now God has promised us eternal life. Has he ever done anything to make us think he won’t fulfill this promise when he has fulfilled so many others? I think it is such a hard thing for us to understand because we fall short of our promises all the time. Before coming to college, I promised my mom I would text her every single night to let her know I was safe at the college. Sad to say but that only lasted about a month. These promises start from a very early age like when my best friend from 1st grade promised me we would always be friends. I haven’t talked to her in like 5 years. With the presidential election coming up, a lot of the decision is made on the promises that the candidates make, but how many of those promises are fulfilled. We live in a world where so many promises are left unfulfilled that it is almost expected. The thought of someone never breaking a promise, especially one that is as big as eternal life, is something that we can’t always wrap our heads around.

“in hope of eternal life, which God, who never lies, promised before the ages began”

“so that being justified by his grace we might become heirs according to the hope of eternal life.”

“in hope of eternal life, which God, who never lies, promised before the ages began”

What Does Hope Do For Us?

So great. We have the promise of eternal life. So what? How does that help us now? What does that do for us? We are living in a time between the resurrection of Jesus and the Second Coming, the time in which we will all have this eternal life. We also live in a world that seems to be getting worse and worse each year. We see school shootings on the news. Facebook is filled with arguments and statements over things that don’t really matter. The streets are lined with disease. It seems that everywhere you look there is another thing to bring you down. It’s hard to see things ever getting better. It's hard to think about this eternal life that God has promised us. However, it is going to be so much more than we could ever think of. says “For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us.” The glory of what life in heaven is going to be like is unlike anything we could imagine. These things that are happening right now will be just a blip when we finally get to see the glory of heaven. Think of it like this. In the dead of winter, when you go out and get blown away and it feels like your nose is going to fall off, when you think it is supposed to start warming up and you wake up to a layer of snow on the ground. You look at the weather forecast and it’s not going to start warming up for at least another month. You don’t think it will ever get warm again. You're just doomed to an eternal winter. Maybe that’s just me being dramatic but it can seem never-ending at times. Once summer hits, all of that is forgotten. The flowers have bloomed. The sun is shining. It’s better than you can ever imagine. I can’t tell you for sure what heaven will look like, what we will do once we get there, but I know that, like summer, it’ll be so much better than these gloomy skies. We are able to live our lives with this knowledge. In the deepest darkest moments, we have the hope that something better is still to come. 

“For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us.”

How Do We Live in Hope?

After all of this, how do we live in hope of a better future, of an eternal life? First, we can live our lives rejoicing. God gives us so much to rejoice in, both in the world we live in and the world we will get to live in. Amongst the suffering there is good. There is laughter coming from children playing in the park. There is joy in the street performer on the corner of the road. There is beauty in the sun rising every morning. Not everyone has the hope of things getting better. Some people believe that this suffering, that this pain is all that we get. They believe that after we die that’s it. There’s nothing else. We know that there is something after this, something better. That should show in how we talk, how we act, how we praise God. says “through him, we have also obtained access by faith into this grace in which we stand, and we rejoice in hope of the glory of God.” God is glorious and has given us the promise of something better. That is more than enough for us to rejoice in. The second thing we can do is share this with others. We as Christians know that God has triumphed over death. Once we are in heaven there will be no more suffering. We will get to spend an eternity with God in the most divine place we could ever imagine, beyond what we could ever imagine. That needs to be shared with as many people as possible. As I said, there are people out there who don’t think things will ever be better. They live in a world of darkness. They carry on with life in a daze. They deserve the knowledge of something far greater than themselves and the opportunity to choose for themselves. We shouldn’t hold onto this great blessing but should be giving it out like teachers give out homework. This idea of hope has changed my life. In the times when I feel like I can’t keep going, when there is a blanket of darkness covering me, when I get stuck in my head negative thought after negative thought shooting across my mind, the idea of a greater glory, a better future helps pull me out of it. It gives me a reason to keep fighting. There are people out there who are suffering, people out there who are living without hope, people out there who are surrounded by dread. People out there going through the same thing I have gone through. We can be the ones who introduce them to this sense of peace, this sense of joy, this sense of relief that comes with knowing what God has planned for us. I can help pull people out of this state of mind. If I have this remedy to all this pain, I want to share it with as many people as possible.

“through him, we have also obtained access by faith into this grace in which we stand, and we rejoice in hope of the glory of God.”

Hope Amidst All the Sorrows

In avengers Endgame, Tony refuses to help because he has no hope that they can win. He doesn’t think anything he does will bring back what he has lost. He was living in a world where if Peter was even brought up, he would feel despair. Without hope, we can fall into this same state of mind. We can become enveloped in a darkness, unable to find a way out. God gives us something truly amazing to hope in. In a world that is filled to the brim with sorrows, we need to have hope that there is something better waiting for us.