The weakness of our earthly hopes is that they are fixed on things which
are contingent and are inadequate to make us blessed. Even when tinted
with the rainbow hues, which it lends them, they are poor and small. How
much more so when seen in the plain colourless light of common day. In
contrast with these the objects of the Christian hope are certain and
sufficient for all blessedness. In the most general terms they may be
stated as 'That blessed hope, even the appearing of the Great God and
our Saviour.' That is the specific Christian hope, precise and definite,
a real historical event, filling the future with a certain steadfast
light. Much is lost in the daily experience of all believers by the
failure to set that great and precise hope in its true place of
prominence. It is often discredited by millenarian dreams, but
altogether apart from these it has solidity and substance enough to bear
the whole weight of a world rested upon it.
That appearance of God brings with it the fulfilment of our highest
hopes in the 'grace that is to be brought to us at His appearing.' All
our blessedness of every kind is to be the result of the manifestation
of God in His unobscured glory. The mirrors that are set round the
fountain of light flash into hitherto undreamed-of brightness. It is but
a variation in terms when we describe the blessedness which is to be the
result of God's appearing as being the Hope of Salvation in its fullest
sense, or, in still other words, as being the Hope of Eternal Life.
Nothing short of the great word of the Apostle John, that when He shall
appear we shall be like Him, exhausts the greatness of the hope which
the humblest and weakest Christian is not only allowed but commanded to
cherish. And that great future is certainly capable of, and in Scripture
receives, a still more detailed specification. We hear, for example, of
the hope of Resurrection, and it is most natural that the bodily
redemption which Paul calls the adoption of the body should first emerge
into distinct consciousness as the principal object of hope in the
earliest Christian experience, and that the mighty working whereby Jesus
is able to subdue all things unto Himself, should first of all be
discerned to operate in changing the body of our humiliation into the
body of His glory.
But equally natural was it that no merely corporeal transformation
should suffice to meet the deep longings of Christian souls which had
learned to entertain the wondrous thought of likeness to God as the
certain result of the vision of Him, and so believers 'wait for the hope
of righteousness by faith.' The moral likeness to God, the perfecting of
our nature into His image, will not always be the issue of struggle and
restraint, but in its highest form will follow on sight, even as here
and now it is to be won by faith, and is more surely attained by waiting
than by effort.
The highest form which the object of our hope takes is, the Hope of the
Glory of God. This goes furthest; there is nothing beyond this. The eyes
that have been wearied by looking at many fading gleams and seen them
die away, may look undazzled into the central brightness, and we may be
sure that even we shall walk there like the men in the furnace,
unconsumed, purging our sight at the fountain of radiance, and being
ourselves glorious with the image of God. This is the crown of glory
which He has promised to them that love Him. Nothing less than this is
what our hope has to entertain, and that not as a possibility, but as a
certainty. The language of Christian hope is not perhaps this may be,
but verily it shall be. To embrace its transcendent certainties with a
tremulous faith broken by much unbelief, is sin.