God of Hope

Now may the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that you will abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit. (Romans 15:13)

I like to take time to make sure that I have the best mental grasp of the words I am reading in order to have a better context for the message embedded in the passage and for it to be most effective. I again looked up this word hope to make sure I understood what it meant and it still inspires me to be reminded. It means to look forward expectantly and with pleasure to something in the future and it also involves faith.

This verse says that my God is a God of hope. That tells me something very important about God that I want to have permeate every cell of my brain. God is just the kind of being that can cause me to look forward with intense pleasure to what He has planned for my life and my future. I do not have to know exactly what that is, for to know something fully is no longer hope. Part of the meaning of hope is the incompleteness of one's awareness of the fulfillment. But faith, which hope inspires, trusts the heart of the One who is the source of that hope more than the supposition about what might be coming.

When I think about what hope is I also try to imagine what the opposite of hope is. Comparing something with its opposite can bring added insight and depth to the meaning of something. In my view, I think the opposite of hope might be dread, which I have all too much experience with. In fact, when I am honest with myself I have to admit that my imagination tends to dwell on low-level dread much of the time. Sometimes this is called negative thinking or scenario thinking. I began to realize sometime back that my imagination has been hijacked by the enemy for many years tied up creating scenarios of dreadful things that might happen to me in the future and how I might relate to them.

Now that I think about this more clearly I suddenly realize that I was carefully trained to think this way from a very young age. The very same method is typically used in many religious circles in mistaken attempts to motivate people to “get ready” for Jesus to come. All sorts of frightening scenarios are created in the imagination as to what might happen in the last days – persecutions, threats, torture, pressure to change our minds about our doctrines – all sorts of scenarios calculated to induce fear and dread in supposition that these fears will somehow motivate me to stiffen my resolutions and entrench me more firmly in my beliefs so that I can make it through the trials ahead.

Yes, dread has been an all too familiar companion and still is in my mind. And that is likely why hope is something that almost has the sense of being a foreigner to me. Fear and dread I can explain and experience at a moments notice, but hope is something that I have to stop and analyze and grope through my intellectual mind to explain. This is a very sad state of affairs but not at all surprising considering the planet I was born on. I suspect I am not alone in this condition which is why Paul has written this passage for all of us who are so devoid of hope.

Hope and joy – particularly joy – are words that seemed almost distant and mysterious to me for most of my life. I can distinctly remember trying to wrap my mind around what joy might feel like or what the word was referring to when I was young but realized that, given the descriptions I read about it, that I must not have any idea of what it meant or felt like. To a lesser extent I still feel that way now, though I have a much better intellectual understanding of what joy should feel like. And I do have certain events or incidents in my experience that I have to confess were filled with intense encounters with real joy, though that joy involved no sense of happiness or euphoria.

For those who know me better or have read much of what I have written they will know that when I say joy I am talking about the nervous system's definition of joy which has been discovered by scientists recently studying how the brain functions. Joy, according to the brain's most basic function and craving, is the sense I experience when someone is glad to be with me, when I am the sparkle in their eye. This may be in spite of whatever emotions I may be experiencing at the time or despite circumstances I may find myself in. I may be buried in shame, in fear, even in anger – but if someone insists on wanting to be with me and love me and cherish me no matter what I do or how I feel or even how I treat them, I am in a position to know first hand the true experience of joy.

So what does joy have to do with hope? Well, because right here in this verse I am told that the God of hope will fill me with all joy and peace in believing. As I was writing the above paragraph about joy I remembered a particularly painful, shameful day in our life where another couple refused to leave us alone. They stayed until the wee hours of the morning during a catastrophic experience we were going through, and then took us into their small apartment to comfort and care for our bodies and our hearts. The effect on our emotions and psyche was unforgettable and intense under those circumstances and I have since told and retold this story – usually without being able to contain my intense emotions in the process – as one of the best examples of real joy. It is also a classic illustration of how joy is distinctly unique from the feeling of happiness.

But as I again revisited my feelings during that horrible experience and the effect of this young couple's choice to stay close to us through it all and their ministry to our hearts at the end of that day, I also am aware of the peace that we experienced as a result of the joy they created for us. As we lay down that night to go to sleep I remember commenting to my wife that I could not imagine the emptiness and sense of hopelessness we would be experiencing right then if this couple had not laid aside their own interests and comfort to put our needs first and to be very sensitive to our emotional pain. So what I see is that there is a very strong natural link between joy and peace.

What I also see here in this verse is that the source of all joy and peace is from the heart of this God, our Father in heaven who is called the God of hope. And according to the previous verses in this passage He can become our God of hope even more effectively as we allow Him to rule over us and as we engage in praise to Him.

What is becoming more starkly clear to me is the contrast between the assumptions of my past about how to prepare for end-times and for Jesus' coming by whipping up ever-increasing levels of dread and fear and this verse which tells me that God is the source of hope and joy and peace. To me those two ways of viewing God are simply incompatible. Hope is not inspired in the heart by inducing dread and fear. Love cannot be created in the heart by inducing dread and fear. And by extension, true obedience which can only be produced from a heart of love and devotion to God cannot be elicited in the life by inducing dread and fear.

It would be very easy at this point to move into a spirit of blame against all those who have hobbled me and handicapped me all of my life using these methods. But I also have to remember that they too were equally handicapped in their lives by others previously who passed it on to them and the cycle goes back all the way to Adam. It is sin that is the root cause and it is Satan who keeps the problem going and intensifying. My only hope is to focus on the God who is my God of hope. And as I believe this truth about Him my belief in His heart of faithful love for me will displace the dread and fears that are all too familiar to me and replace them with the freshness and freedom of hope, joy and peace.

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