Hope of the Hopeless

We do what we do because we hope to accomplish something by our actions. All our actions are directed at the future. We want things to be different than they are now, and we plan and act in hope that we can make things come out differently than they otherwise would. Students work hard in school in the hope that it will benefit them in the future – help them get into the college they want, help them get the job they want, enrich their lives in less tangible ways. A young man plans his actions in the present in hope that he can get a girl in the future. People start businesses and labor in them because they hope that they will succeed.

We think that time moves smoothly from the past to the present to the future. In reality, we work the other way round. We start with a vision of the future, and then work back to figure out how we achieve that future. We work from the end to the beginning.

When we are truly hopeless, we don’t do anything at all. If we truly didn’t hope that we’d at least get a paycheck at the end of the month, why work? If we truly had no hope about our children, why continue to talk or disciple them? If you’re in the midst of a sickness or in the midst of business troubles or in danger of losing your house as your mortgage balloons, and have no hope, you just sit and do nothing.

In Scripture, thought, hope becomes a prominent theme particularly in situations of hopelessness. The first use of the word in the Bible is in the book of Ruth, when Naomi asks Ruth if she has any hope that she’ll be able to produce a son for Ruth to marry (1:12). She has no hope that she is going to have children, but then she does have a child, and even sort of provide Ruth with a husband and redeemer. Job talks about hope a lot, as does David in the Psalms when he is oppressed by his enemies. Jeremiah speaks of hope in both his prophecy and in Lamentations, going so far as to call Yahweh “the hope of Israel” (Jeremiah 17:13).

Hope comes into its own in the New Testament. Paul defends himself before the Sanhedrin with the declaration that he is on trial for the hope of his fathers, because he believes that the promises made to the fathers have been accomplished. Hope is a central aspect of the faith by which we please God, the faith by which we are made friends of God and righteous before Him. Paul describes Abraham’s faith as “hoping against hope,” hoping in God when everything else seems hopeless, when there seems to be no hope at all. And the writer to the Hebrews defines faith as the “substance of things hoped for, the certainty of things not seen. Paul can even say that we are justified in hope. The Father who raised Jesus from the dead is the “God of hope,” Paul says, the God in whom we can hope even when all seems hopeless.