Is there anything worth hoping for?
We live in an age of short-term hopes. We hope for a better job, a better home, better health. But is there anything to hope for beyond these things? Is there anything that gives us real purpose and encouragement?
Christians, of course, claim to have real hope. What is this Christian hope that our world so sorely needs? And could it change how we live?
Hope and sight
Those thinking about the object of Christian hope often find help in 1 John 3:2. There we find the promise that one day we will ‘see’ God face to face. Our hope is that our faith in God – whom we do not see now – will one day give way to seeing God.
Scripture connects our sight closely with knowledge. What kind of knowledge are we talking about? When we see God we will love Him rightly and will ‘be like him’. This sight and transformation, Scripture promises, will be a source of happiness unequalled by anything else. This vision is connected to being blessed and satisfied. That is why it has sometimes been called the ‘beatific vision’. Seeing God will fulfil us. Why has the vision of God been so closely linked with happiness? The answer is that God has made human beings for relationship with Him.
We can see this in the opening chapters of Genesis. In Eden the week culminated in the sabbath, a day of rest specially dedicated to God. We are given glimpses of a special closeness between God and His human creatures. The tree of life (2:9; 3:22) is a symbol about the future: one in which the relationship Adam and Eve have with God would be intensified.
Scripture speaks about happiness, sight, and the tree of life again in Revelation. In Revelation 2:7 Jesus promises the tree of life to those who follow Him. The tree is located in ‘the paradise of God’; it is planted in God’s holy city. In that city there is healing and abundance and the curse is gone (22:2-3). Here is where vision comes up again. We are promised that we will see God’s face. But there is something else about seeing in the heavenly city that is a bit unexpected. There are no lamps. And there is no sun.
What is going on here? Verse 5 says that the light of lamps and the sun will become unnecessary because God Himself will be the source of all light. Everything that we see will be seen through the light that God gives. Seeing God will give us a deeply God-shaped relationship to everything else. What could be better than that?
Hope in the present
Sometimes this portrait of Christian hope attracts criticism. Some fear that a focus on happiness and sight in the next life could make Christians devalue important things in this life. Does the expectation of seeing God lead us to denigrate the world now?
Not at all. Revelation’s picture of God as our light involves seeing things in the ‘light’ of God. This helps us think about how we see other things now, too. If we aren’t seeing in the light of God, Paul says in Romans 1, we are somehow living a lie. We can work now at seeing everything around us in the light of God. Nothing is more practical than that! In thinking about the things of this world, the early church theologian Augustine reminds us that ‘God doesn’t forbid you to love those things’. However, He warns us not to ‘love them in the expectation of blessedness’. Instead, we should see them as gifts from God so that we come to ‘love the creator’.
Hoping in God helps us to rightly value the things of this world. God’s creatures are good but none of them can make us ultimately happy. Only God can do that. So, let’s set our hope on the One who can truly fulfill it. One day our loves will be perfected and our hope realised as our faith becomes sight in the face of God.
