9. What Is Hope
Hope is neither faith's distant cousin nor love's poor relation … We may tend to think of hope as the least important of the biblical triad of faith, hope and love, but when we comprehend this quality more fully, we begin to realize just how broad and how vital hope really is.
In coming to understand the biblical concept of hope (Greek elpis), it is important to realize how different that is from our common modern use of the word. In the New Testament the concept of hope (like that of faith) carries three essential ideas. For hope, those ideas are expectation, persistence, and joy; and we will look at all of them individually. Expectation The first and primary meaning of hope in the Scriptures is that of expectation. Today, in everyday speech, when we say that we "hope" something good will happen, we mean that we don't know if it will occur or not – but we hope it will. Christian hope is far different – it is the firm confidence that God will perform what he has promised.
Notice for example, what Paul wrote to Titus: "… in the hope of eternal life, which God, who does not lie, promised before the beginning of time" (Titus 1:2). If this were just hope in the modern sense, it would be a contradiction or a doubting of what Paul also says in this verse. It is precisely because God does not lie that we have hope (in the sense of certainty) in his promises. So biblical hope is similar to faith in this sense – it has been rightly said that hope is the "future tense" of faith.
But the main point to remember is that hope in its primary sense means expectation. Christian hope is not just that we hope something will happen, but the confident looking forward to what we expect to happen. That certainty is what the writer of the Book of Hebrews referred to in saying: "We have this hope as an anchor for the soul, firm and secure" (Hebrews 6:19).
Persistence The second aspect of hope in the New Testament has to do with what we today call persistence or patience. We see this in what Paul tells Timothy: "… we wait eagerly for our adoption to sonship, the redemption of our bodies. For in this hope we were saved. But hope that is seen is no hope at all. Who hopes for what they already have? But if we hope for what we do not yet have, we wait for it patiently" (Romans 8:23-25). The relationship between patient persistence and hope is the reason we identified scriptures talking of "faith," "persistence" and "love" in Part One of this book when we examined how Paul often varies the expression "faith, hope and love" in his writings. This aspect of hope is the light at the end of life's tunnel – the thing we must continually keep our eyes on. Hope helps us carry on, and we might say that real hope is the "backbone" of our spiritual lives. Joy The final aspect of hope in the biblical sense is that of joy. Peace and encouragement are related qualities. This may not seem as obvious as the relationship between hope and patience, but notice how clear it is in what Paul writes in the Book of Romans: "Be joyful in hope …" (Romans 12:12); "May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace as you trust in him, so that you may overflow with hope by the power of the Holy Spirit" (Romans 15:13). Paul says that it is as we are filled with joy and peace that we overflow with hope – if we are filled with one, we are filled with the other! We see the same connection between hope and joy in what Paul wrote to Philemon about "love… faith… joy and encouragement" in Philemon 1:5-7. Aspects of Hope So, hope is neither faith's distant cousin nor love's poor relation. Biblical hope is a vital aspect of our spiritual life that embraces confident expectation, persistent patience, and even peace, encouragement and joy: spiritual qualities that are of inestimable worth in our lives! We will see more of the way in which these qualities are part of true hope in the following chapters.