I Hope I Win the Lottery

“I hope I win the lottery.”  “I hope he asks me to go out.”  “I hope she comes back to me.”   “Hope for the best.”  

Hope is that word we use to express a wish for the good things which we want to happen.  Hearing this word from another person is to learn what they want, no matter how unlikely it is to happen.  Almost like rubbing a magic lamp, for many, to hope is to wish.  The hope may have no basis in reality; it may be impossible or wildly unlikely.  This hope is based on a desire, on a craving, nothing more than that.  And that is not a bad thing necessarily, but it is not an assurance that the hope will come to pass.

  
But look at the way the word is understood in the bible, what it means.  The word most commonly translated hope in the Bible means a favorable and confident expectation, the happy anticipation of good.  Certainly the expressions of hope noted above are happy anticipations of good but what is missing from those hopeful statements is a confidence in that hope. Confidence in the hope is more than simply wishing.  It is more than the strength of my belief in that hope, more than my power to envision the reality of the hoped for outcome.   The confidence in the hope expressed in the scripture rests on one thing only, the person of Christ.  It is important, therefore, to know if Christ is worthy of the trust we give Him, of the hope we place in Him.  So we look to see the evidence.

God has said many things about Himself; has He backed up His words with actions?   To see if there is evidence that His words are trustworthy we must see if he has come through on His promises.  A examination of this shows that  He has demonstrated the power to make His words real and true, actually doing what He said He would.  The whole of scripture shows this over and over.   His words have not been empty; they have the force of His works and actions behind them.    There is no dithering, wavering or hesitancy on His part; He says it and it is.

What this means for those who hope in Him is monumental.  To hope in what God says is to know that it will come about.  It is no wish, no waste of time and imagination.  Because hope is based on God; His being and His words, it is both the confident and the happy anticipation of good.   The hope of life eternal is real and assured.  The hope of being with God and of being like Jesus is sure to happen. 

 That is why the tomb in which Jesus lay was not the end; it was not over.  For every other person who died, the grave became the final resting place.  For Jesus there was nothing final about it.  There was no power to hold Him there, no reason for Him to remain in that grave.  For every other person, the debt they could not pay confined them to the grave.  While the fight for life in each of us is strong, the weight of the debt crushes the life and leaves us at a literal dead end.

 But hope remains. We have hope, as St Paul explained to Titus; “a faith and knowledge resting on the hope of eternal life, which God, who does not lie, promised before the beginning of time…”  Hope that is assured because Christ both died and came back to life by the power of God, by the plan of God, by the purpose of God.   It is this hope that sees the unseen and trusts.  It is this hope that endures through trials large and small.  It is this hope that sustains the child of God in all the waiting.  It is this hope that does not disappoint because God has poured out his love into our hearts by the Holy Spirit as Romans 5:5 teaches.  And it is this hope that is an anchor for the soul, firm and secure, (Hebrews 6:19).  An anchor that is connecting our souls and God’s promises revealed in the person of Jesus, as He lived, died and Lives Again.