Hope in His Coming

The fulness of God is the fulness of hope. “That ye may abound in hope.” Hope in the New Testament is a Christian grace wrought in the soul by the Holy Spirit. It is to be carefully distinguished from our modern use of the word as equivalent to hopefulness, just as a mere matter of buoyancy of temperament. The Christian hope will undoubtedly produce hopefulness, but the two are never to be confused, much less identified. The one is the cause, the other the effect. Hope always looks on the future and is concerned with that great object which is put before us in the New Testament. The Christian hope is fixed on the coming of our Lord, and this is a very prominent element of New Testament teaching. It is to be feared that it does not obtain great prominence in much of present day Christianity. Most people look forward, not to the coming of the Lord, but to death; yet the one object of expectation set before us in the New Testament is the coming of our Lord. Now-a-days, the general idea is that death will come, and the Lord may come; but Scripture reverses this and says, “Death may come, but the Lord will come.” There is something in the very fact of dying which is abhorrent to the Christian man. It is not that he is afraid to die, but that he naturally shrinks from that which is ever spoken of in the Bible as man’s “enemy.” “The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death” (1 Cor. xv. 26). The Lord’s coming, on the contrary, is a subject of joy, satisfaction, blessedness, and the contemplation of it can do nothing but good to the soul.