The grounds of our earthly hopes are for the most part possibilities,
or, at the best, probabilities turned by our wishes into certainties. We
moor our ships to floating islands which we resolve to think continents.
So our earthly hopes vary indefinitely in firmness and substance. They
are sometimes but wishes turned confident, and can never rise higher
than their source, or be more certain than it is. At the best they are
building on sand. At the surest there is an element of risk in them. One
singer indeed may take for his theme 'The pleasures of Hope,' but
another answers by singing of 'The fallacies of Hope.' Earth-born hopes
carry no anchor and have always a latent dread looking out of their blue
eyes.
But it is possible for us to dig down to and build on rock, to have a
future as certain as our past, to escape in our anticipations from the
region of the Contingent, and this we assuredly do when we take the hope
of the Gospel for ours, and listen to Paul proclaiming to us 'Christ
which is our Hope,' or 'Christ in you the Hope of glory.' If our faith
grasps Jesus Christ risen from the dead and for us entered into the
heavenly state as our forerunner, our hope will see in Him the pattern
and the pledge of our manhood, and will begin to experience even here
and now the first real though faint accomplishments of itself. The
Gospel sets forth the facts concerning Christ which fully warrant and
imperatively require our regarding Him as the perfect realised ideal of
manhood as God meant it to be, and as bearing in Himself the power to
make all men even as He is. He has entered into the fellowship of our
humiliation and become bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh that we
might become life of His Life and spirit of His Spirit. As certain as it
is that 'we have borne the image of the earthy,' so certain is it that
'we shall also bear the image of the heavenly.'
What cruel waste of a divine faculty it is, then, of which we are all
guilty when we allow our hopes to be frittered away and dissipated on
uncertain and transient goods which they may never secure, and which,
even if secured, would be ludicrously or rather tragically insufficient
to make us blessed, instead of withdrawing them from all these and
fixing them on Him who alone is able to satisfy our hungry souls in all
their faculties for ever!
The hope of the Gospel is firm enough to rest our all upon because in
it, by 'two immutable things in which it is impossible that God should
lie,' His counsel and His oath, He has given strong encouragement to
them who have fled for refuge to lay hold of the hope set before them.
Well may the hope for which God's own eternal character is the guarantee
be called 'sure and steadfast.' The hope of the Gospel rests at last on
the Being and Heart of God. It is that which God 'who cannot lie hath
promised before the world was' is working towards whilst the world
lasts, and will accomplish when the world is no more. He has made known
His purpose and has pledged all the energies and tendernesses of His
Being to its realisation. Surely on this rock-foundation we may rest
secure. The hopes that grow on other soils creep along the surface. The
hope of the Gospel strikes its roots deep into the heart of God.