Hoping
Then shall those powers, which work for grief,
Enter thy pay,
And day by day
Labour thy praise, and my relief;
With care and courage building me,
Till I reach heav’n, and much more, thee.
George Herbert, “Affliction IV”
Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and there was no longer any sea. I saw the Holy City, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride beautifully dressed for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Now the dwelling of God is with men, and he will live with them. They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God. He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away” (Rev 21:1–5).
There is nothing more practical for sufferers than to have hope. The erosion or loss of hope is what makes suffering unbearable. And here at the end of the Bible is the ultimate hope—a material world in which all suffering is gone—“every tear wiped from our eyes.” This is a life-transforming, living hope.
Who was John writing to in the book of Revelation? He was writing to people who were suffering terrible things. Verse 4 shows you the list. He was writing to people who were experiencing death and mourning and crying and pain. This book was written near the end of the first century when we know the Roman emperor Domitian was conducting large-scale persecutions of Christians. Some had their homes taken away and plundered, while some were sent into the arena to be torn to pieces by wild beasts as the crowds watched. Others were impaled on stakes and, while still alive, covered with pitch and lit afire. That is what the readers of this book were facing.
And what did John give them so they could face it all? John gave them the ultimate hope—a new heavens and a new earth that was coming. That is what he gave them to face it, and it is a simple fact of history that it worked. We know that the early Christians took their suffering with great poise and peace and they sang hymns as the beasts were tearing them apart and they forgave the people who were killing them. And so the more they were killed, the more the Christian movement grew. Why? Because when people watched Christians dying like that, they said, “These people have got something.” Well, do you know what they had? They had this. It is a living hope.
Human beings are hope-shaped creatures. The way you live now is completely controlled by what you believe about your future. I was reading a story some years ago about two men who were captured and thrown into a dungeon. Just before they went into prison, one man discovered that his wife and child were dead, and the other learned that his wife and child were alive and waiting for him. In the first couple years of imprisonment the first man just wasted away, curled up and died. But the other man endured and stayed strong and walked out a free man ten years later. Notice that these two men experienced the very same circumstances but responded differently because, while they experienced the same present, they had their minds set on different futures. It was the future that determined how they handled the present.
John was quite right, then, to help suffering people by giving them hope. Do you believe that when you die, you rot? That life in this world is all the happiness you will ever get? Do you believe that someday the sun is going to die and all human civilization is going to be gone, and nobody will remember anything anyone has ever done? That’s one way to imagine your future. But here’s another. Do you believe in “new heavens and new earth”? Do you believe in a Judgment Day when every evil deed and injustice will be redressed? Do you believe you are headed for a future of endless joy? Those are two utterly different futures, and depending on which one you believe, you are going to handle your dungeons, your suffering, in two utterly different ways.
We said there is one historical proof of this principle—the way the early Christians took their horrendous trials and suffering. But there’s another. In 1947 the African-American scholar Howard Thurman gave a lecture at Harvard University on the meaning of the Negro spiritual. He responded to one of the criticisms of these songs, namely, that they were too “otherworldly.” And indeed they are filled with references to heaven and to Judgment Day and to the crowns and the thrones and the robes we will wear. The charge was that African-American slaves did not need all that. In fact, the talk of heaven may have made them docile and too resigned to their condition. But Howard Thurman responded,
The facts make clear that [this sung faith] did serve to deepen the capacity of endurance and the absorption of suffering. . . . It taught a people how to ride high in life, to look squarely in the face those facts that argue most dramatically against all hope and to use those facts as raw material out of which they fashioned a hope that the environment, with all its cruelty could not crush. . . . This . . . enabled them to reject annihilation and to affirm a terrible right to live.393
Thurman argued that the slaves believed the Christian faith and therefore knew about the new heavens and new earth, and about Judgment Day. They knew that eventually all their desires would be fulfilled and that no perpetrator of injustice was going to get away with anything—that all wrongdoing would be put down. And that was a hope that no amount of oppression could extinguish. Why? Because their hope was not in the present but in the future. Some argued that it would have been better for the slaves to put their hope in some kind of concrete political action—but hopes in our own achievements can be dashed so that hopelessness engulfs us. But hope in the New Jerusalem can never be snuffed out because it is a certainty—it is based in God’s action, not ours.
Now of course, there were many in Thurman’s educated, secular audience who believed that while these things in the spirituals were wonderful symbols, you couldn’t take such things literally. But Thurman argued, rightly, that if you can’t take them literally, then they cannot be a real hope. He said:
In the end to reject the literal truth is to deny life itself of its dignity and man the right or necessity of dimensional fulfillment. In such a [secular] view the present moment is all there is—man . . . becomes a prisoner in a tight world of momentary events—no more and no less. . . . For these slave singers such a view was completely unsatisfactory and it was therefore thoroughly and decisively rejected. And this is the miracle of their achievement causing them to take their place alongside the great creative religious thinkers of the human race. They made a worthless life, the life of chattel poverty . . . worth living! They yielded with abiding enthusiasm to a view of life which included all the events of their experience without exhausting themselves in those experiences. To them this quality of life was insistent fact because of that which deep within them, they discovered of God, and his far flung purposes. . . . To know him was to live a life worthy of the loftiest meaning of life. . . .394
Thurman is completely right to reject the “symbolic only” interpretation of the Bible’s promises. Imagine you could go back in time and sit with the slaves and say, “Now, you know, I’m glad you get a lot out of your spirituals. But if you ever get the chance to go to a really good school, you will learn that this life is all there is. There really isn’t any heaven that will make up for all the suffering here. And there isn’t a Judgment Day that will put all things right and address all injustices. But I still want you to live with hope and fearlessness.” You can imagine some saying, “Let me get this straight. You tell me this life is all there is, and if we fail to achieve happiness here and now we never find it at all. And now knowing this, I am still supposed live with my head high under any circumstances? Give me my old hope back! It didn’t depend strictly on my political fortunes.”
None of us is likely to be thrown to lions and torn limb from limb as people cheer, and probably none of us will experience a life of servitude and slavery. We have things that are weighing us down, but nothing like lions and whips. So if this great hope helped these other people face their problems, shouldn’t it help you and me with the ones we are facing now?
But how can we be sure this future is for us? The answer is—you can be sure if you believe in Jesus, who took what we deserve so we could have the heaven and the glory he deserved. Donald Grey Barnhouse, who was a pastor at Tenth Presbyterian Church in Philadelphia for many years, lost his wife when his daughter was still a child. Dr. Barnhouse was trying to help his little girl, and himself, process the loss of his wife and her mother. Once when they were driving, a huge moving van passed them. As it passed, the shadow of the truck swept over the car. The minister had a thought. He said something like this, “Would you rather be run over by a truck, or by its shadow?” His daughter replied, “By the shadow of course. That can’t hurt us at all.” Dr. Barnhouse replied, “Right. If the truck doesn’t hit you, but only its shadow, then you are fine. Well, it was only the shadow of death that went over your mother. She’s actually alive—more alive than we are. And that’s because two thousand years ago, the real truck of death hit Jesus. And because death crushed Jesus, and we believe in him, now the only thing that can come over us is the shadow of death, and the shadow of death is but my entrance into glory.”395
We sing that song “Christ the Lord Is Risen Today,” and the last line of the last stanza is “made like him, like him we rise; ours the cross, the grave, the skies.” What does that mean? It’s almost like a taunt. It’s like saying, “Come on, crosses, the lower you lay me, the higher you will raise me! Come on, grave, kill me and all you will do is make me better than before!” If the death of Jesus Christ happened for us and he bore our hopelessness so that now we can have hope—and if the resurrection of Jesus Christ happened—then even the worst things will turn into the best things, and the greatest are yet to come.
There have not been many times in my life when I felt “the peace that passes understanding.” But there was one time for which I am very grateful, and it stemmed from this great Christian hope. It was just before for my cancer surgery. My thyroid was about to be removed, and after that, I faced a treatment with radioactive iodine to destroy any residual cancerous thyroid tissue in my body. Of course my whole family and I were shaken by it all, and deeply anxious. On the morning of my surgery, after I said my good-byes to my wife and sons, I was wheeled into a room to be prepped. And in the moments before they gave me the anesthetic, I prayed. To my surprise, I got a sudden, clear new perspective on everything. It seemed to me that the universe was an enormous realm of joy, mirth, and high beauty. Of course it was—didn’t the Triune God make it to be filled with his own boundless joy, wisdom, love, and delight? And within this great globe of glory was only one little speck of darkness—our world—where there was temporarily pain and suffering. But it was only one speck, and soon that speck would fade away and everything would be light. And I thought, “It doesn’t really matter how the surgery goes. Everything will be all right. Me—my wife, my children, my church—will all be all right.” I went to sleep with a bright peace on my heart.
C. S. Lewis wrote:
For if we take the Scripture seriously, if we believe that God will one day give us the Morning Star and cause us to put on the splendor of the sun, then we may surmise that both the ancient myths and the modern poetry, so false as history, may be very near the truth as prophecy. At present we are on the outside of the world, the wrong side of the door. We discern the freshness and purity of morning, but they do not make us fresh and pure. We cannot mingle with the splendors we see. But all the leaves of the New Testament are rustling with the rumor that it will not always be so. Someday, God willing, we shall get in. When human souls have become as perfect in voluntary obedience as the inanimate creation is in its lifeless obedience, then they will put on its glory, or rather that greater glory of which Nature is only the first sketch. We are summoned to pass in through Nature, beyond her, into that splendor which she fitfully reflects.396