Eternal Hope
Notes
Transcript
Introduction
Introduction
This morning, we will be wrapping up the fall series on Christ our King and given the fact, that we are in the advent season, I wanted to address the topic of how Jesus gives us hope.
And Jesus went on with his disciples to the villages of Caesarea Philippi. And on the way he asked his disciples, “Who do people say that I am?” And they told him, “John the Baptist; and others say, Elijah; and others, one of the prophets.” And he asked them, “But who do you say that I am?” Peter answered him, “You are the Christ.” And he strictly charged them to tell no one about him.
And he began to teach them that the Son of Man must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders and the chief priests and the scribes and be killed, and after three days rise again. And he said this plainly. And Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him. But turning and seeing his disciples, he rebuked Peter and said, “Get behind me, Satan! For you are not setting your mind on the things of God, but on the things of man.”
And calling the crowd to him with his disciples, he said to them, “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake and the gospel’s will save it. For what does it profit a man to gain the whole world and forfeit his soul? For what can a man give in return for his soul? For whoever is ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, of him will the Son of Man also be ashamed when he comes in the glory of his Father with the holy angels.”
And he said to them, “Truly, I say to you, there are some standing here who will not taste death until they see the kingdom of God after it has come with power.”
1 Peter 1:21 (NIV) - Through him you believe in God, who raised him from the dead and glorified him, and so your faith and hope are in God.
If you remember from last week, we looked at what it means to have faith in Jesus in the midst of the storms of life and to trust Him as we are going through these difficult times. This morning, we want to look at the connection between faith and hope because as John Calvin famously wrote, hope in eternal life is the inseparable companion to true living faith. I think we have all learned just how important hope is during this past year. Hope provides the strength to carry on, the faith to believe that there are better days ahead of us, and gives us the perspective to see what God may be doing through all of this. As we go through this passage, we will see that:
Hope begins with a personal knowledge of Christ
Hope is based on His death and resurrection
Hope is established in our hearts by His ascension
Hope by its very definition is a desire for good things or at least better things in the future but it’s easy to confuse hope with optimism and the two are subtly different.
Hope is a strong desire for a positive outcome that is largely out of your control.
Optimism is more of an expectation of a good result because there is some control over the desired outcome.
Let me try to illustrate the difference. As we think about the current situation with the coronavirus, even as things seem to be getting worse, there is at least light at the end of the tunnel with the development of these very promising vaccines. By all accounts, we should be out of this pandemic by next summer and there is good reason to be optimistic about the future. The stock market is certainly showing that optimism as we hit record highs. However, the vaccine isn’t going to solve the many problems that have been exposed by the events of the last year. The problems in our society, in the church, with our families, and our own personal struggles won’t be cured as easily because there is no vaccine against the evil and sin that we have seen both from within and from without. Unfortunately, as much as we wish, we cannot unsee the things that we have seen and so its very possible to be optimistic about certain things and feel hopeless about other things, things that are probably more important. Before the pandemic, I think many people buried their lack of hope regarding the most important matters of life with this surface level optimism that quickly disappeared when all of life seemed to be spin out of control. That is where we saw all of the anger, fear, and despondency. Optimism is great and it works when life is manageable but hope is indispensable when all of life seems uncertain.
I don’t think people in the Bay Area do well in the category of hope, there is a lot of optimism in regard to human potential but real hope requires concrete faith in something outside of yourself. Hope is what is left when you have come to the limits of human potential and exhausted all reasons to be optimistic. As someone who grew up here in the East Bay with a non-religious background, I struggled with the concept of hope as an atheist. I knew that hope was important for my psychological well being but I also understood inherently what the philosopher Fredrich Nietzche meant when he said, “Hope in reality is the worst of all evils because it prolongs the torments of man.” And as an atheist, I had to agree that hope that is based on the random kindness of the universe is pointless and fruitless. It is a dead end. You don’t have to be an existential philosopher like Albert Camus to understand that in the absence of God, the only rational thing is “to think clearly and hope no more”.
But as I came to find out and as you may already know, that line of thinking drives you into madness becasue for some reasons, human beings have to hope in something. So we are left with what the Bible describes as a hope that believes against hope, meaning a hope that is greater than our man-made, wishful thoughts. I believe that one of the things that has happened in this year was the fact that this top layer of optimism was taken off of our lives and maybe for the first time, we have been confronted with the real substance of our hope. Where exactly have we placed our hope?
For the Christian, we know that our hope isn’t based on luck or chance or the goodness of humanity, it begins with the personal knowledge of Christ. In this world, we hear a great deal about who Jesus is. There are countless sermons and podcasts we can listen to, even more books that we can read, but none of those things can answer the personal question that Jesus asks of each of his followers, “Who do you say that I am?” And many of us have our Sunday school answers to that question: Son of God, Lord and Savior, and Messiah but is that something we truly believe?
When Peter answered Jesus’ question, technically, it was the correct answer. Jesus was the Christ, which means the Messiah, the anointed one of God chosen to save His people But Jesus also understood that his identity was open for a lot of misinterpretation and misrepresentation and hence the reason why Peter was forbidden to share this insight with others. Given the strong expectation for national liberation along with the spiritual restoration of Israel, this answer given my Peter was one that was loaded with political implications. Jesus didn’t want people to trip over these false ideas of himself and as it turns out, even Peter did not fully comprehend the identity of his Master. And oddly enough, we live in a country where similar misunderstanding of Jesus are rampant around us and it is very possible that we, ourselves, don’t have a clear view of who Jesus is. After all, if Peter could be mistaken about Jesus, who is to say that we are not in danger of these same errors?
And the question that we need to ask ourselves is whether or not our hope is primarily based on what we think that Jesus can do for us versus a hope that is based on his death and resurrection. Understandably prior to the cross and the empty tomb, Peter was more hopeful about what Jesus could do for him and the nation of Israel as a political figure because once Jesus started to share about how the Son of Man must suffer, be rejected, and killed, and then be raised from the dead on the third day, Peter rebuked Him. Think about this, Peter essentially rebuked Jesus for sharing the gospel. Peter sharply confronted Jesus and told him to put away this nonsense about his death and resurrection. Again the gospel was not yet a reality at this point but Jesus responds to Peter in the strongest of terms, “Get behind me Satan.” He accuses Peter of being in collusion with the devil because anything that stands against the gospel is cursed of God. The apostle Paul echoes these same sentiments in the book of Galatians.
But even if we or an angel from heaven should preach to you a gospel contrary to the one we preached to you, let him be accursed.
The gospel is the center point of our relationship with God because it is only through this message that we can come to correctly place our faith and hope in Him. Any hope that is placed in God without the gospel as its primary basis is merely a shot in the dark. We know that hope always has a future sense to it but the modern idea of hope is very different than the biblical understanding of hope. The theologian Jurgen Moltmann writes about the problem of trying to live for the future in this way:
“But how can anyone speak of the future, which is not yet here, and of coming events in which he has not as yet had any part? Are these not dreams, speculations, longings and fears, which must remain vague and indefinite because no one can verify them?”
As you could imagine, this is a very real hindrance to hope but Christianity provides the solution. The Greeks defined reality with the term logos, which refers to divine universal reason that transcends human existence. This logos is an eternal and unchanging truth that has existed since creation and is available to anyone who seeks it. Therefore, there can be no logical future unless that future is the continuation of some event in the past. So I could say, “Tomorrow the sun will rise in the east” and that would be logos or a logical statement. The Greeks were not big fans of wishful thinking and irrationally optimistic people and they saw it as one of the great evils in this world.
Along comes Christianity and it tells the Greek world that the logos isn’t some impersonal force but that Jesus Christ is this divine eternal truth, the same yesterday, today, and forever and you can put all your hope in him. From the very beginnings of the universe, God has been creating life by His word and the death and resurrection of Christ is the ultimate fulfillment of everything that God has ever said. The beginning verses of the gospel of John are a clear summary of these truths:
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
In him was life, and the life was the light of men.
Against all hope, Christians see life where there only seems to be death, we see good in the midst of evil, we see peace as turmoil surrounds us, we see light even as darkness seems to prevail. And the basis of this hope that beleives against hope is the death and the resurrection of Christ.
Jurgen Moltmann correctly points out that Christian hope isn’t based on some vague and indefinite ideas about the future but “It sets out from a definite reality in history and announces the future of that reality, its future possibilities, and its power over the future.”
Moltmann is talking about the resurrection of Christ as the defining event of human history which begs the question, “What would your life look like if you truly beleived in the the power of the resurrection and made that the basis of your hope?” Well, Jesus answers that question in this passage as he calls the crowd to himself and tells them, “Whoever tries to save his life will lose, but whoever loses his life for my sake and the gospel’s will save it.” I used to think that this was such a hard ask that Jesus was making until I understood it in its full context.
Anyone who is trying to hold onto their own lives, the 70-80 years that we have on this earth, doesn’t understand the power of the gospel and for that reason, they are trying to save the only reality they know. But if you really beleive that this life is just an opening act to all of eternity, you have no problem sacrificing this life for the greater life that is to come. When the missionary Jim Elliot said, “He is no fool who gives up what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose”, it first sounded crazy, then it sounded heroic, not it just sounds logical. It is a very rational statement from a man who knew that with absolute certainty that though we die, yet will we live, and it’s the second life that counts.
CS Lewis in an unpublished letter to a friend wrote these encouraging words about the hope that we were meant to live with. He tells this friend, “Think of yourself just as a seed patiently wintering in the earth; waiting to come up a flower in the Gardener’s good time, up into the real world, the real waking. I suppose that our present life, looked back on from there, will seem only a drowsy half-waking. We are here in the land of dreams. but cock-crow is coming. It is nearer now than when I began this letter.”
It seems that those men and women who truly lived for God, eternal life was a greater reality than the shadows of this present existence. And so how do we get to that point? We get there when we are able to establish our hope in the ascension of Christ to the right hand of the Father. Many Christians read the most important part of this passage incorrectly. When Jesus mentions that He will be ashamed of those who are ashamed of him when He comes in the glory of his Father with the angels, He isn’t actually talking about the second coming, it’s a reference to his ascension to the right hand of God after the resurrection. This is also why Jesus tells the crowd, “some of you will not taste death, until you see the kingdom of God after it has come with power.” That would be a false prophesy if Jesus was talking about the second coming. Now Jesus teaches on his second advent, his second coming in other passages but this is not one of them. The title that Jesus takes for himself and the language that he uses to describe coming into the glory of the Father ties this to the prophecies of Daniel.
“I saw in the night visions,
and behold, with the clouds of heaven
there came one like a son of man,
and he came to the Ancient of Days
and was presented before him.
And to him was given dominion
and glory and a kingdom,
that all peoples, nations, and languages
should serve him;
his dominion is an everlasting dominion,
which shall not pass away,
and his kingdom one
that shall not be destroyed.
When Jesus ascended to the Father, he didn’t just leave the world to its own devices, he left to sit on the throne with all dominion, glory, and power over every nation, every tribe, and every tongue. The Lord reigns over all the earth and in my mind, the year of our Lord 2020, is a firm but loving reminder of who sits on the throne of heaven. There is not only a great deal of comfort knowing that Jesus is King, there is an indefeatable hope because we know that His kingdom cannot be destroyed. This is the way it was meant to be, this world and everything in it will fade away as the Kingdom of God comes in power!
Conclusion
Conclusion
During this pandemic, many of us have experienced just how fragile hope is, that it can be lost in a moment’s notice. In this past year, I feel like the I have had to walk with more people dealing with suicidal thoughts and depression than in the last 5 years combined. This includes having to preside over a funeral of a young man who took his own life at the age of 19. This really hit home for us because, he was someone that Mira and I knew since he was a baby. In some ways, this sense of hopelessness can feel contagious and that funeral certainly made a hard year even more difficult. But the one thing that I realized in the midst of walking with people through these dark times is the real difference that faith in God and the support of Christians brothers and sister can make in the life of those who are struggling. Many of us have been fortunate to have this community of faith to lean on during this year including myself and I shudder to think about where we would be without the church.
