Over the past two weeks we’ve been exploring this passage in Hebrews 10 that exhorts us to draw near to God, to take advantage of the reality that we can have a relationship with God that is more constant and immediate than even the Old Testament high priest enjoyed under the Old Covenant.
In the process of encouraging this access into God’s presence, our writer emphasizes their “full assurance of faith” (v. 22), the “confession of our hope” (v. 23) and considering “how to stir up one another to love and good works” (v. 24). Like Paul, the author of Hebrews sees faith, hope and love as key characteristics of the Christian disciple’s life. These three virtues are what we should aim for.
You must have noticed that Scripture links faith, hope and love, and groups them together again and again. Hope is the middle term between faith and love. Hope keeps faith from collapsing under the burden of disappointment and delay. Hope keeps love from dissolving under the acids of frustration. Hope fortifies love and lends it resilience. Hope stiffens faith and forestalls collapse. (You Asked for a Sermon on Hope, March 1999, www.victorshepherd.on.ca.)
These three virtues support each other.
Here is the passage we are exploring (Hebrews 10:19-25):
19 Therefore, brothers, since we have confidence to enter the holy places by the blood of Jesus, 20 by the new and living way that he opened for us through the curtain, that is, through his flesh, 21 and since we have a great priest over the house of God, 22 let us draw near with a true heart in full assurance of faith, with our hearts sprinkled clean from an evil conscience and our bodies washed with pure water. 23 Let us hold fast the confession of our hope without wavering, for he who promised is faithful. 24 And let us consider how to stir up one another to love and good works, 25 not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another, and all the more as you see the Day drawing near.
The readers of this epistle were in danger of forsaking their confession of Jesus Christ by going back to the Old Covenant system of animal sacrifices. The writer does not exhort them to hold on to their salvation, because their security was in Christ and not themselves (Heb. 7:25).
The second admonition is the one our author emphasizes so strongly in this epistle. Since Christ has consecrated a new and living way in which we can walk before people in the world (v. 20), we should continue in it. This exhortation to “hold fast the confession of our hope without wavering” has already been made in 4:4 (“Let us hold fast our confession”) and finds earlier echoes in the solemn admonition of 3:6, “if indeed we hold fast our confidence and our boasting in our hope,” and 3:14, “we have come to share in Christ, if indeed we hold our original confidence firm to the end.” He has already expressed the desire that his readers should show earnestness “to have the full assurance of hope until the end” (6:11) and has drawn their attention to the encouragement which is ours, who have found refuge in the promise of God, to seize “a hope that enters into the inner place behind the curtain” (6:19).
Humans seek after hope like moths seek after light. It’s intrinsic to who we are. Neuroscientists Tali Sharot argues hope is so essential to our survival that it is hardwired into our brains, arguing it can be the difference between living a healthier life versus one trapped by despair.
- Studies show hopeful college kids get higher GPA’s and are more likely to graduate.
- Hopeful athletes perform better on the field, cope better with injuries, and have greater mental adjustment when situations change.
- In one study of the elderly, those who said they felt hopeless were more than twice as likely to die during the study follow-up period than those who were more hopeful.
It’s pretty clear: hope is powerfully catalytic, and why Dr. Shane Lopez, the psychologist who was regarded as the world’s leading researcher on hope, claimed that hope isn’t just an emotion but an essential life tool (Drake Baer, “What Good Is Hope?,” The Cut (12-27-16)
Hope is vital to our emotional survival. In Man’s Search for Meaning, psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl articulates the necessity of hope through his time spent as a prisoner at various concentration camps during WWII. He supplied one particularly poignant example: between Christmas 1944 and New Year’s 1945 the camp’s sick ward experienced a death rate “beyond all previous experience,” not due to a food shortage or worse living conditions, but because, “the majority of the prisoners had lived in the naïve hope that they would be home again by Christmas.” When this hope was unmet, prisoners found no reason to continue holding on, nothing to look forward to. When a mind lets go, so does its body.
As oxygen is to the body, so is hope to the soul. Hope is like a trapeze artist who hopes the hands will be there to catch him. There is a confident assurance as he lets go his secure perch and flies through the air, but there is also a momentary gap as he hurtles through the air and just prior to the connection of the hands of safety and security. It is in that time of hurtling that you find hope.
Hopelessness, on the other hand, is the lot of the honest secularist. Bertrand Russell gave it famous expression in his book A Free Man’s Worship :
. . . the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man’s achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins . . . only within the scaffolding of the truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul’s habitation henceforth be safely built (Bertrand Russell, A Free Man’s Worship , in Mysticism and Logic (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1929), pp. 47, 48).
The “firm foundation of unyielding despair”? It doesn’t sound very firm to the ear, or to the logical mind.
Most people, however, are not as cerebral as philosopher Russell. They base their lives, rather, on a vague, shapeless, subjective hope. Professor William M. Marston of New York University asked three thousand people, “What have you to live for?” He was shocked to discover that 94 percent were simply enduring the present while they waited for the future . . . waited for “something to happen” . . . waited for “next year” . . . waited for a “better time” . . . waited for “someone to die” . . . waited “for tomorrow” (James S. Hewitt, Illustrations Unlimited (Wheaton, IL: Tyndale House, 1988), p. 291).
So many people live on so little, surviving in this world, just putting one foot in front of the other as they depend on unsubstantiated, ungrounded “hope.”
The most important thing about hope is the object of our hope. If we place our hope in things that are temporal and always changing, we will constantly be disappointed. Even other humans can frequently disappoint us. Our hope is built upon Jesus Christ and the unchanging character and promises of God.
But what is biblical hope? A Christian’s hope has objective substance. The hope that our text commends here in verse 23 is a conscious reference back to the writer’s statement in 6:19, 20—“We have this as a sure and steadfast anchor of the soul, a hope that enters into the inner place behind the curtain, where Jesus has gone as a forerunner on our behalf.” It is grounded in the life, death, resurrection, ascension, enthronement, and intercession of our Lord Jesus Christ. It is anchored at the right hand of God. It is so substantial and real that it is called an “anchor.”
No ancient or modern sailor who knows what can happen during an ocean voyage would go to sea in a ship that carried no anchor, even today and even if the ship were the greatest and most modern vessel afloat. Every sailor knows that situations might arise when the hope of the ship and all her company will depend not on the captain, the crew, the engines, the compass, or the rudder, but on the anchor. When all else fails, there is hope in the anchor. It was so easy for Christians to appropriate this as their symbol because its very shape uses the form of the cross.
The anchor that grounds the Christian’s hope and provides stability through the storms of life, are the promises of God, thus our author refers back to God, saying “he who promised is faithful.”
Christians can hold fast to their hope in this way because behind it is a God in whom they can have full confidence. God is thoroughly to be relied on. When he makes a promise, that promise will infallibly be kept. He has taken the initiative in making the promise, and he will fulfill his purposes in making it. (Frank E. Gæbelein, Expositor’s Bible Commentary, Vol. 12, 104)
Christian hope, biblical hope is “a confident expectation and desire for something good in the future.” And from that definition we can see three things that must be true about something if it indeed is to be the object of biblical hope. 1. What we hope for must be something good. 2. What we hope for must be in the future. 3. What we hope for must be certain, not doubtful, so that our expectation of its coming to pass may be confident, not wavering. (Sermon, Our Hope, Eternal Life, June 29, 1986, www.DesiringGod.org).
“Hope” points to the certain, but not yet realized, promises of God. Christian hope is not wishful thinking. We can be certain, because “He who promised is faithful.” Peter warns us that in the last days, mockers will taunt us, “Where is the promise of His coming?” But they fail to notice that with the Lord, one day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years like one day. The day of the Lord will come like a thief, bringing with it His inescapable judgment. Peter concludes that in light of these certainties, we ought to be people of holy conduct and godliness (2 Pet. 3:3-13). Even if we face martyrdom, we can still have hope in the promises of our faithful God.
We have a “hope” that is grounded in what God has revealed about his gracious purposes for us in Jesus. This “hope” entails not only our present salvation but our future glory in Christ.
It is because God is faithful to keep His promises that we can have hope. Wayne Grudem defines God’s faithfulness as meaning “that God will always do what He has said and fulfill what He has promised.” He does this without fail because He is faithful. God’s faithfulness is not affected negatively by our unfaithfulness (cf. 2 Tim. 2:13). A. W. Pink declares, “To every declaration of promise or prophecy the Lord has exactly adhered, every engagement of covenant or threatening He will make good.”
Pink goes on to say…
There are seasons in the lives of all when it is not easy, no not even for Christians, to believe that God is faithful. Our faith is sorely tried, our eyes bedimmed with tears, and we can no longer trace the outworkings of His love. Our ears are distracted with the noises of the world, harassed by the atheistic whisperings of Satan, and we can no longer hear the sweet accents of His still small voice. Cherished plans have been thwarted, friends on whom we relied have failed us, a profest brother or sister [ by that he means, someone who publicly claims their allegiance] in Christ [and a Christian at that!] has betrayed us. We are staggered. We sought to be faithful to God, and now a dark cloud hides Him from us. We find it difficult, yea, impossible, for carnal reason to harmonize His frowning providence with His gracious promises.
But God is ever faithful, so that Lamentations 3:23, in the very midst of the destruction of Jerusalem, the seeming failure of God’s promises, says, “great is your faithfulness.” And Jeremiah goes on to say in verse 24, “”The LORD is my portion,” says my soul, “therefore I will hope in him.”
Study the references on the word “promise” in this Epistle, and see what a large place they take in God’s dealings with His people, and learn how much your life depends on your relation to the promises. Connect the promises…with the promiser; connect the promiser with His unchanging faithfulness as God, and your hope will become a glorying in God, through Jesus Christ our Lord. (Andrew Murray, The Holiest of All, 391)
It is vital that we place our faith and our hope in the “promises” of God, he “who is faithful.” The promises of mankind will not last.
Thus, because God is faithful, we can hold on to our hope “without wavering” (Heb. 10:24). “The Greek word translated in this way is used only here in the New Testament and is based on the idea of an upright object not inclining at all from the true perpendicular. There is not place in the Christian experience for a hope that is firm at one time and shaky at another.” (Donald Guthrie, Hebrews, Tyndale New Testament Commentaries).
Because God is faithful “without fail,” we can hold on “without wavering.” We can hang on no matter how hard the winds blow or how high the waves get.
The most important thing that we can do, the way that we “stir up one another to love and good works” (Heb. 10:24) is by repeating to one another, reminding one another, of the promises of God. We remind ourselves of the narratives of Scripture in which, though all hope seemed lost, God kept His promises; though His people were unfaithful, yet He remained faithful.
The phrase ‘confession of hope’ is remarkable. The Apostle substitutes for the more general word ‘faith,’ that word which gives distinctness to special objects of faith to be realized in the future. Hope gives a definite shape to the absolute confidence of Faith. Faith reposes completely in the love of God: Hope vividly anticipates that God will fulfill His promises in a particular way. (Brooke Foss Westcott, ed., The Epistle to the Hebrews the Greek Text with Notes and Essays, 3d ed., Classic Commentaries on the Greek New Testament (London: Macmillan, 1903), 325–326).
Faith and hope ever go together. “Faith is the substance of things hoped for.” Faith accepts the promise in its divine reality, hope goes forward to examine and picture and rejoice in the treasures which faith has accepted. And so here, on the words Let us draw near with a true heart in full assurance of faith, there follows immediately, Let us hold fast the confession of our hope. Life in the Holiest, in the nearness of God, must be characterized by an infinite hopefulness. (Andrew Murray, The Holiest of All, 389)
The living God has promised, and for this reason Peter speaks of the “living hope” to which, by God’s great mercy, we have been born anew through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead (1 Pet. 1:3). Declension from the confession of this hope (the dire consequences of which are described in vv. 26ff) is eloquent both of the deficiency of personal commitment to our utterly trustworthy God and of deficiency of comprehension regarding the character of God and his unfailing faithfulness (Philip Edgecombe Hughes, A Commentary on the Epistle to the Hebrews, p. 414).
We are told not to lose hope nor waver because “He who promised is faithful”. We have no idea what will happen tomorrow or today, we do not know if things will get worse or better, but praise be to God, this one thing we know: “God is faithful” (1 Cor 1:9; 10:13), “Christ is faithful” (Hebrews 3:6), “The steadfast love of the LORD never ceases; his mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning; great is your faithfulness. “The LORD is my portion,” says my soul, “therefore I will hope in him” (Lamentations 3:22-24). “He who calls you is faithful; He will surely do it” (1 Thess 5:24), and “He who promised is faithful” (Heb 10:23). Our God is faithful; therefore let us continue in faith. Let us by faith hold fast to our confession of hope in Jesus Christ.
In his blog, Major Dalton dives deeply into the nature of hope:
Authentic hope is a hard thing to kill. In the heart of the one who knows that outcome is not driven by perception or circumstance, hope may just be immortal.
In the 8th installment of the Star Wars saga, Kylo Ren, son of Han Solo & Princess Leia, has embraced the Dark Side of the force and bowed to the power of a Sith Lord named Snoke. Donned in a black robe and helmet like his grandfather Lord Vader, Ren believes he has crushed the rebellion once and for all. But Snoke knows better.
Returning from an apparent victory for the Dark Side, Ren is chastised by his master.
Snoke: “You are no Vader. You’re just a child in a mask.”
Kylo Ren: “I gave everything I had to you; to the Darkside.”
Snoke: “Skywalker lives. The seed of the Jedi lives. As long as he does, hope exists.”
Rebellions will live as long as they are led. It is true in the Star Wars universe. It is true in ours as well.
Some people live as though hope is a concept reserved to the “long ago,” or relegated to a “galaxy far away.” Hate reigns, lies rule, and fear sits as a monarch in the hearts of those who have surrendered to despair. But there is a rebellion subverting hate, lies, and fear. A counter-cultural existence led by a lowly Galilean carpenter. Some believe he died long ago. But he lives! And because he lives, hope exists!
So, the real question is not; “Is there hope?” There is hope in the universe! We only have to ask; “Is there hope in what we are presently trusting?”
In what are you trusting—the promises of men or the promises of God? It makes all the difference.
Grace Still Amazes 