Photo by Alex Shute on Unsplash
Introduction:
Philosophy as a subject gets a pretty bad wrap in our society. We think of philosophers as those who argue about absolutely meaningless questions, or who perhaps are busy wrangling complicated explanations for how to explain things like meaning or existence without accounting for the presence and reality of God. But the term philosophy is simply a compound of the Greek words phila and sophia - love and wisdom. Philosophy, at its best, is simply the pursuit of wisdom. And thus it is absolutely something with which Christians should be concerned. The entire point of the book of Proverbs, and the whole of Scripture at some level, is to instruct us in the wisdom of God. So we can appreciate that, classically, one of the chief concerns of philosophy is this question: what is the good life?
In answer to this question Aristotle put forward a set of virtues: wisdom; prudence; justice; fortitude; courage; liberality; magnificence; magnanimity; temperance. But, as admirable as those may be, we’re not here to talk about those virtues. The Christian tradition was happy to embrace or modify that list, but there were also additions: namely, the three so-called “theological virtues”: faith, hope, and love. You might recognize them from 1 Corinthians 13:13, where Paul writes:
“So now faith, hope and love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love.”
Paul says that these three virtues stand at the center and foundation of the Christian life. And while he points out that the greatest is love - echoing Jesus’ words that the greatest commandments are to love God above all and love neighbor as self - I think we can argue that true Christian love is not possible apart from both faith and hope.
Faith is the means through which we receive God’s gracious gift of salvation. Without trusting Christ is who he says he is, and has done for us what he has said he’s done, we cannot truly love him. Likewise, if we don’t rightly hope in him, if we don’t look forward to the eternal promises he has given and eagerly anticipate receiving their fulfillment, we are not loving him the way we are meant to.
So while we can distinguish and even rank these three virtues, we cannot separate them. Faith, hope, and love abide together.
Hope
So, then, why focus on hope specifically? Two reasons.
* I think of these three virtues, hope is perhaps the one we talk the least about. Faith gets a lot of play because it is, as already mentioned, the conduit through which the life-giving water of God’s grace and forgiveness flows to us. “For by grace you have been saved, through faith” writes Paul. We know that “without faith it is impossible to please God” (Hebrews 11:6). And love is, again, the greatest of all. Jesus told us so, and he’s quoting the law - that wasn’t new information. God has always made it clear that love is at the core of how he wants us to relate to him and to one another. So, while we can’t overemphasize these virtues, we can sometimes focus on them without speaking of the third. Hope, like the other two, suffers in our culture from having the word watered down. We speak of hope as a wispy wish, rather than a firm conviction of the future fulfillment of God’s promises. So we need to give the word back its biblical content. We need to define the term biblically. We might call this part the mind piece. We need to get our heads straight when it comes to hope.
* This is more subjective, but we’re going to focus on hope for the reason I discussed last week: I’ve been deeply convicted over the past several months that I need to be more hopeful. More confident in God’s power and purpose not only for myself, but for our church and for the world. And since I do most of the preaching, what is on my mind is what goes into the sermon. I’m trusting that, as I work through this subject and try to get my heart aligned with the Lord’s, he will work to shape our hearts along with our minds as we lean into what his word teaches about hope.
Our first stop
The first place we’re going to look when it comes to hope is 1 Peter 1:3-5.
Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! According to his great mercy, he has caused us to be born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, to an inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading, kept in heaven for you, who by God's power are being guarded through faith for a salvation ready to be revealed in the last time.
To give you the context of these verses, they are at the very front end of the apostle Peter’s letter written “to those who are elect exiles of the Dispersion in Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia, and Bithynia” which are a series of regions in what was then known as Asia Minor, and today what we know as Turkey. In that first verse and the next, Peter jumps right into high theology. He gives his readers an explanation of who they truly are: God’s elect exiles, elect “according to the foreknowledge of God the Father, in the sanctification of the Spirit, for obedience to Jesus Christ and for sprinkling with his blood.” He then blesses them, “may grace and peace be multiplied to you.” He wants them to know that God has known them from before the foundation of the world, set them apart and made them holy by the Holy Spirit, and brought them to obedience to Christ and salvation through the covering of his blood. In doing this, he’s giving them identity: they are children of the Trinitarian God who loves them, made them, and saved them.
He then turns in verses 3-9 and writes some of the most beautiful words in the New Testament; not to mention some of the most theologically and practically rich. Again, as with Paul in 1 Corinthians 13, faith, hope, and love all make an appearance. If I were coming to this text without an agenda we could pretty easily spend a month here. But I do have an agenda: I want to know what Peter has to say about hope. And in this text, specifically verses 3-5, we will learn four characteristics of hope.
The Cause of Our Hope: New Birth
First of all, we find in this text the source of our hope: being born again! This is what (to borrow some philosophical language again) we might call the immediate cause. When you were an unbeliever you were “without hope and without God in the world” (Ephesians 2:12). The only way to have true hope, biblical hope, is to have been born again.
We need to be born again because biblical hope, as we’ll discuss shortly, has specific content. And that content is totally unrecognizable to the natural man. Jesus tells Nicodemus in John 3:3, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born again he cannot see the kingdom of God.” So we cannot see that which forms and shapes our hope if we do not first have a new birth.
But what does that phrase mean? How can we be born again? When Jesus speaks of the necessity of being born again in John chapter 3, Nicodemus is left scratching his head. Mom might not like me trying to crawl back in so that I can come back out, he observed. But Jesus is clear that the New Birth we need isn’t a physical birth. Not only is Jesus not speaking of a ridiculous and impossible physical act, he’s also not talking about anything that can be accomplished by human activity. It’s not baptism, it’s not a prayer, there is no human action at work in this moment. Jesus says in John 3 that the New Birth is from above, that is, God is the initiator.
And this is precisely what we see taught here in 1 Peter 1:3. “According to his great mercy, he [that is, God the Father] has caused us to be born again to a living hope.” We see in this phrase the absolute sovereign goodness of God in salvation. “According to His great mercy” he has caused us to be born again. There was nothing in us that would compel God to love us, and there was no outside force constraining him to act a certain way toward us. It is His great mercy, His sovereign love, that is the root cause of our salvation.
The immediate cause of our salvation is the gift of New Life. But that New Life doesn’t just spring forth from the ether. It is the gift of a loving and merciful God. Thus we can also say that God’s mercy is the cause of our hope. He is the ultimate source, the One from whom all blessings flow.
And this birth from above truly does impart a new life to us. If anyone has been born again he is a new creation. 2 Corinthians 5:17, “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come.” If we have been born again we now have a new self, a self that is able to see and perceive spiritual things. A self that has been born with a nature from above. A self that, of its very essence, should be hopeful. Do you see that in our text: “he has caused us to be born again to a living hope.” Some people are born to poverty, others to wealth. Some are born to city life, others to rural. Some people are born in America, others in South Africa. These things pertaining to our first birth are beyond our control, but they profoundly shape us. Likewise, the new birth brings us to a country and inheritance we didn’t choose, but instead has been chosen for us: the land of living hope.
If you are a Christian, you did not cause this by your own power. To be sure, you made and are making a choice to follow Jesus. He commands us to leave whatever we have to leave to follow him. But you didn’t muster up the power or the wisdom to do that on your own. You were able to follow because he first gave you the gift of New Life through the New Birth. So the cause of our hope is God and his gracious gift of New Life.
But what does this hope look like?
The Nature of Our Hope: Alive!
As I mentioned earlier, hope is a word that suffers in our society from a severe watering-down. Have we been born again to wishful thinking? Is this what hope means? Not according to Peter.
Peter calls our hope “living.” Our hope is not like the hope of pagans “hoping against hope.” Our hope lives. Why does our hope live? Because our hope is in a living Savior. He caused us to be born again “through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.” Do you realize that on the cross Jesus wasn’t just atoning for your sins? He was certainly doing that, being made sin on our behalf that we might become the righteousness of God (2 Corinthians 5:21). But he was also purchasing a people for himself, paying a ransom price. And the acceptance of that ransom price was validated by his resurrection from the dead. Our hope, our resurrection, our life is entirely dependent upon the literal resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.
Though the content of our hope, as we will see, concerns things future and as-yet-unseen, the basis of our hope is alive. Jesus is the one who has made us alive, and because he rose victorious from the grave, we can have hope in his resurrection power.
This is why any description of Christianity as mere myth or useful ideas or inspiring story falls so flat. If it’s simply inspiring or enlightening without being literally true, then it is of no final value at all. Why face the troubles which Peter describes in verses 6-7 for a nice fable? I love the stories of Tolkien and Lewis, and derive deep and genuine benefit from them - I guarantee you I’d never suffer for them. Why suffer for Jesus’ sake? Because he is alive, and in his life I am given hope for those things which he promises to those who trust and follow him.
So, because Jesus is alive, our hope is present tense. Our hope is a living hope.
The Content of Our Hope: Our Inheritance
This brings us to the content of hope in 1 Peter 1:4, “an inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading, kept in heaven for you, who by God’s power are being guarded through faith for a salvation ready to be revealed in the last time.”
That part of the sentence is, to put it in technical terms, chock-full of good stuff. Notice that our hope is described in this sentence in terms of an inheritance. Again, what do you do to earn an inheritance? Nothing, it is simply given to you due to the fact of your family. Well, when you come into God’s family through New Birth, you are given this immeasurably valuable inheritance, about which we can note at least two aspects:
First, Nothing in this world can touch it. Peter uses three words, imperishable, undefiled, and unfading. These three words each have a different nuance. Imperishable speaks to an imperviousness to rot and decay. Our inheritance in Christ never breaks down, because Jesus’ resurrection life never breaks down.
Undefiled points to the continuing purity of this hope. Our inheritance in Christ is or surpassing worth. Sometimes we get squeamish about speaking of Christ’s benefits. Don’t we want to just love Jesus for Jesus? Sure, of course we do. But we want to love him for who he is, and who he is is the one who gave his life up for us so that we could spend an eternity of bodily joy with him, so why would we not look forward to that? That isn’t impure or selfish, it is undefiled. Hope in Christ isn’t selfish, because finding our ultimate satisfaction in him is what we were made for. And this is an inheritance that will never fade.
Unfading brings to mind paintings or pictures that fade over time. We sing in Amazing Grace that “when we’ve been there 10,000 years/bright shining as the sun/we’ve no less days to sing God’s praise/than when we’d first begun.” We’ll still have eternity in front of us - great. But won’t it get boring? No, our inheritance will never fade, it will never lose its luster. This is because it won’t be floating around on a cloud with a harp, it will be enjoying bodily resurrected life in the New Heavens and the New Earth, it will be better than the best part of this life, but it will not be wholly different. There will still be an earth for which human beings, bearers of God’s image, will be responsible. We’ll have an eternity of joyful work and activity in front of us without the spoiling effects of the curse.
Second, our inheritance is kept in heaven. That is, we cannot see it now. Paul notes this difficulty in Romans 8:22-25:
“For we know that the whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth until now. 23 And not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies. 24 For in this hope we were saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what he sees? 25 But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience.”
We wait patiently because that which we hope for (our ultimate salvation) is kept out of our sight. It’s stored up for us. But one day it will be revealed. The New Jerusalem, Christ’s Bride, will descend as pictured in Revelation 21, and the dwelling place of God will be with man.
The fact that the content of our hope - this salvation, which is being stored up and prepared in heaven (think John 14:3) - is unseen can really bother us. How can we keep on hoping for the unseen? Peter says this is the place of faith. God guards us through faith. That is, he exercises his power to keep our hearts trusting in him until we go to be with him in death or until Jesus returns. Our ability to patiently endure in faith is itself a gift of God, not of works, lest we find ourselves boasting.
The Response of Our Hope: Bless the Lord!
Peter began this paragraph by exhorting his audience to bless “the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.” Calvin notes that even in this description of God we see the kindness of God towards us: the Father of the Son has sent the Son into history, taking on flesh as Jesus of Nazareth, to be our substitute and mediator. Though the Old Testament showed and spoke of God’s kindness in dealing with his people, we could never have known the true extent of his love apart from Jesus coming to stand in our place. It is through Jesus that we have hope.
And so we say, “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.” Why? Because He is merciful, He has planned and effected our salvation, He currently guards and keeps us, and will one day bring us to His side, where He has stored up pleasures forevermore. Friends, this is our hope. It is a hope that nothing in the world can steal or destroy, no circumstance can alter: if you have Jesus, you have everything you need to remain hopeful in every circumstance this life can throw at you.
Do you know this hope? Are you blown to and fro by every article you read online or interaction you have at work or hard day you have with the kids? Lift up your eyes. Our hope, and therefore our joy, is not to be centered on the fleeting circumstances of this life.
If you don’t know Jesus, you won’t know this hope. You are still dead in your tresspasses and sins, a slave to this fleeting life. You need to repent of your sin and trust in Jesus’ work on the cross, where he atoned for your sin by paying the penalty due to us, and trust also in his victorious resurrection in your place. You must repent of your sins and follow him.
If you have done that, then this hope is yours. Eternal and sure hope is your inheritance as God’s child. Brothers and sisters, let us lift our eyes unto the hills - where do our help and our hope come from? The Lord, the Maker of Heaven and Earth.
