Hope for an uncertain future – Part 8
A Pew Research Forum headline reads, “Far more Americans say they’d like to live in the past than in the future.” According to the survey, 45 percent of US adults say they would live sometime in the past, while 40 percent said they’d live in the present. Only 14 percent said they’d live sometime in the future.
Which would you choose today? Your answer could reveal more than you think.
A cross unlike any I have seen
If you need hope for the future, I suggest you look to the past.
Picture the scene: Jesus is on his face among the olive trees of the Garden of Gethsemane, pleading with his Father, “If it be possible, let his cup pass from me” (Matthew 26:39). It was not just his physical torture, I believe, but the fact that his sinless soul would soon bear the sins of all humanity. You and I literally cannot begin to understand the suffering he would soon endure.
But it was not just his horrific pain that night. His Father refused his Son’s request, choosing to send him to the cross so he could die for your sins and mine. He chose for his Son to die that we might live eternally.
On one of the study tours I led to Israel, we stopped at an olive wood shop in Bethlehem where a friend purchased for me a gift I will always treasure. Unlike any cross I have ever seen, it depicted the Father with his arms spread on the cross, sheltering his Son as he died for us.
As the famed theologian Jürgen Moltmann wrote, he is “the crucified God.”
My night inside an execution chamber
I thought I did not understand the cross. Then my wife and I had our first son, and I knew I did not. To sentence our precious child to die a tortured death for the crimes of others was incomprehensible to me. It still is.
To shift the metaphor slightly: Some years ago I spoke at a church in Huntsville, Texas, after which I was given a tour of the Huntsville Unit, the prison that houses the execution chamber of the state of Texas. The warden was a gracious and godly man who considered his work to be his ministry to men largely abandoned by society. He especially focused his compassion on those on death row, knowing that they were closer to eternity than anyone else.
On our tour, he allowed me to enter the execution chamber itself. It was roughly the size of a large closet, its cinderblock walls painted a light green. The gurney in the middle resembled a cross with extensions to which the condemned prisoner’s arms were strapped. Behind one wall was an even smaller room where the chemicals that produced death were secured. Lines from them ran through the wall into the chamber and into the veins of the prisoner.
Standing in that chamber, I imagined one of our sons strapped to the execution gurney. In my mind, I somehow arranged at the last moment for the warden to set him free, climbed onto the table myself, placed the needle in my arm, and died in his place.
Would our son ever have reason to doubt my love for him?
Tim Keller asked, “If Jesus Christ didn’t abandon you in his darkness, the ultimate darkness, why would he abandon you now, in yours?”
Why, indeed?
A hope we’re called to share
Across this series, we’ve looked extensively at both reasons why we need hope and reasons why such hope can only be found in the Lord. At the end of the day, though, all of the logical rationale and biblical exegesis pales in comparison to the basic truth revealed through Christ’s sacrifice and God’s enduring presence in our lives.
The creator of all that exists loves you and wants to spend eternity with you. He suffered and died to make that possible. And he continues to patiently endure the sin of the world because he wants as many of us as possible to embrace that truth and find salvation in him (2 Peter 3:9).
But for all that he’s done to show his love and call the lost back home to a personal relationship with him, history shows that it’s through the personal relationships with other people that the lost are most likely to be saved.
So while we can and should find our hope in the Lord, let’s remember that we’re not meant to hoard it for ourselves. Christ’s work through us and the presence of that hope in our lives is the greatest hope that this world has for a better future, both now and in the life to come.
With whom can you share that hope today?
