In my post titled Putting Others First I wrote about David Burge, who has a particularly nasty form of leukemia. Yesterday he received the test results that tell him what form of leukemia he has, and on his blog he said

Medically, my only hope is a bone marrow transplant

To put it bluntly, David will die if he doesn’t have a successful bone marrow transplant, so please pray for him, his wife, and his children. I found it very interesting that David qualified “my only hope” with “medically”. In other words, he is separating his hope of staying alive in the medical sense from his hope as a christian. So, what does ‘hope’ mean for a christian?

The biblical Hebrew and Greek words that we see translated as ‘hope’ involve meanings of waiting for something, expectation of something, and confident anticipation of deliverance (rescue) [1]. A child may say “I hope that I will be given a bicycle for christmas”. Is that christian hope? Certainly not. Christian hope is ‘looking forward to a certain event’.

Let’s now look at three aspects of what the Bible says about the hope that we have as christians:

1-> We hope for/expect eternal life

Eternal life in the kingdom of God is the most wonderful thing that anyone can look forward to. In some senses we have eternal life now, but the Bible also makes it clear that we hope for/expect eternal life, as Paul did:

Paul, a bond-servant of God and an apostle of Jesus Christ, for the faith of those chosen of God and the knowledge of the truth which is according to godliness, in the hope of eternal life, which God, who cannot lie, promised long ages ago, but at the proper time manifested, even His word, in the proclamation with which I was entrusted according to the commandment of God our Savior, (Titus 1:1-3 NASB)

As an aside, it is interesting to note that only christians have this hope of eternal life:

For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have eternal life. (John 3:16 NASB)

If David was not a christian he could only look forward to the second death, to being turned into smoke as the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah were:

In a similar way, Sodom and Gomorrah and the surrounding towns gave themselves up to sexual immorality and perversion. They serve as an example of those who suffer the punishment of eternal fire. (Jude 1:7 NIV)

2-> Our hope is an anchor

This hope we have as an anchor of the soul, a hope both sure and steadfast and one which enters within the veil, where Jesus has entered as a forerunner for us, having become a high priest forever according to the order of Melchizedek. (Heb 6:19-20 NASB. Context)

It is safe to assume that David’s hope is anchoring him in the storms of illness (more on that in the next point).

3-> We are born again to a living hope

Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who according to His great mercy has caused us to be born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, to obtain an inheritance which is imperishable and undefiled and will not fade away, reserved in heaven for you… (1 Pet 1:3-4 NASB)

Matthew Henry’s Concise Commentary says

But the hope of the sons of the living God is a living hope; not only as to its object, but as to its effect also. It enlivens and comforts in all distresses, enables to meet and get over all difficulties.

How much better to have a living hope, rather than a hope of death, the second death which is final destruction!

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