The Two Wolves - Pt 8

Therefore, since we have been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. 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. Not only that, but we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame, because God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us. (Romans 5:1-5 ESV). Our reading today shares Paul’s view of hope. It comes on the heels of his explanation of how God dealt with Abraham (cf. Romans 4:18-22). So the faith which justified Abraham was faith in the future work of God. Verse 21 makes this crystal clear: he was “fully convinced that God was able to do what he had promised.” In other words he had what the writer of Hebrews called the “full assurance of hope” (Hebrews 6:11). Verse 18 describes how faith and hope worked together: “In hope he believed against hope, that he should become the father of many nations.” “Wherever there is full assurance of hope, there is faith. Faith is the full assurance of hope.” “Against hope” means that from the ordinary human standpoint there was no hope: Abraham was too old to have a child, and his wife was barren. But biblical hope is never based on what is possible with man. Biblical hope looks away from man to the promise of God. And when it does, it becomes the “full assurance of hope” — the expectation of great things from God. It is not easy to describe exactly what Paul means in verse 18 when he says, “In hope Abraham believed … that he should become the father of many nations.” But from the whole context I think it is fair to say that Abraham’s faith was his strong confidence in the reliability of God’s word, and Abraham’s hope was his strong confidence in the fulfillment of God’s promise. In other words, whenever faith in God looks to the future, it can be called hope. And whenever hope rests on the word of God, it can be called faith. Hope in a Biblical sense is not the ordinary concept we use in everyday speech. It does not imply uncertainty or lack of assurance. Instead biblical hope is a confident expectation and desire for something good in the future. There is moral certainty in it. I count it a great privilege and delight to explore that even further as the next few weeks unfold. We will look at some of the different topics that impact our daily lives, however, it is this great hope we possess that allows us to function. This means at it means to say that our God is a “God of hope”; (Romans 15:13) and that the central exhortation of our Christian life is very simply and very profoundly, Hope in God! That’s the wolf we m must feed!