Now the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing,
that ye may abound in hope,
in the power of the Holy Spirit.
God of hope. Fill you. That ye may abound in hope.
As you know, the apostle has worked his way up to that point through a very great mass of things, covering the whole course from Adam’s sin, tracing all its consequences and its outworking through all the generations.
Then, placing at the end of all that the cross of the Lord Jesus, and from that height opening up an entirely new prospect and future. The cross is the terminal point, up to which everything led, and from which everything takes a new rise.
Through all that history, explanation, and teaching, the apostle comes at length to this all-comprehending and all-governing title: the God of hope.
As we view this great situation presented in this book and in the New Testament, we find ourselves faced with a strange thing which looks like a paradox. It is this.
God has written over the whole course of history the meaning of the cross in this way: that the answer of God to sin, to evil, to disobedience, and to all the fruit and results thereof, is travail, passion, despair, and death.
And withal, He is the God of hope. Travail, passion, despair, and death are the only way of hope—the only way of hope.
That is written deeply in the whole history of God’s dealings with men. Ever since Adam’s sin, and in him the race’s fall, God has had to work on the basis of the cross of Christ.
The cross has been implicit in all God’s dealings with men, and not only in general, but with His own people in particular. I will repeat: the cross has been implicit in all God’s dealings.
The cross means suffering. It is the very symbol of suffering; we know that. The cross means travail and anguish; we know that. The cross means passion.
The cross means despair—the great cry at the end of that ordeal, the cry of despair:
My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me?
The cross is death. It is death.
But with all that, in God’s desire and God’s intention, it is unto joy. It is unto sheer thankfulness. It is unto hope and new hope. It is unto life—all the things which are exactly the opposite to what the cross seems to say.
God is the God of both. Even when you look at Calvary, and look at the One there and hear His bitter cry, see all that is going on there, if you understand it.
And if you look at history—Adam’s sin, and all that in which the race was involved thereby; all the tragedy, the anguish, the passion, the evil, the generations—and see why God not only allowed it but had to establish that regime, issuing in despair, the answer is: He is the God of hope.
A strange thing to say, but that is His way of hope, and His only way of hope. The cross has always been God’s way of salvation.
It is a very drastic remedy, a very terrible remedy, but it is God’s remedy. And if it is an effective remedy, then it produces hope. It is something with hope as its issue—new hope.
The cross is not a symbol. The cross is not an object. The cross is a mighty power—a mighty power, a perpetual power.
It was in action once in history, but it is a power running through all the ages. We have said: implicit in the old dispensation, explicit in this dispensation; but from the first sin to the last, the cross is a power at work.
Now, there is one thing, with many aspects of course, against which the cross stands. That is, a state which is other than God intended there should be.
The cross always stands over and against a state other than God fully intended to be. I say that has many aspects. We are going to look at one or two of them this morning. They are perfectly apparent in the Bible.
Firstly, the cross stands over the nature of things when that nature has become different. Whenever the nature of things has changed from what God either made it at the beginning or intended it to be, God has brought in the cross in some way or another.
Once He has introduced the cross, the nature of man has changed. At the beginning, his nature was changed. He became something different from what God intended in nature. We all know that by our inheritance.
And immediately God introduced the cross in the law of travail, passion, adversity, and ruin; and immediately over that state, despair, and death, the cross stood over against a changed state.
The only hope for recovering the divinely intended state, or condition, or nature of things lay in the cross.
The cross is the great purifying thing. And purifying simply means getting rid of mixed things which do not correspond and tally. There are two natures, two realms, impurity, adulteration, two opposing elements. The cross stands foursquare against anything like that, to purify.
Dear friends, one of the very first things with God, in the individual, in any company of His people meeting locally, and in the Church universally, is its purity—its cleanness, its separation from all iniquity and all mixture.
Our Christian life is based upon the cross, individually, locally, and universally. It is based upon the cross in the first instance in this very way: that the cross is God’s terrible, mighty, eternal declaration against impurity, contamination, and corruption that has come in to make a state in man and in this world which He never intended to be.
The only way of purification is by making very effective and real the hopelessness, from God’s standpoint, of that which is not pure. How true that is as we look out in a general way—how hopeless is an impure, unclean, mixed state of things.
The God of hope demands, therefore, complete cleansing in that realm, and the constituting of something pure, something clean, something unmixed, untainted.
If you look into the Bible, all its wonderful symbolism of what God’s thought is, you will find it is that transparency, crystal clearness. The end of God’s work in this creation, as we have it at the end of the book of Revelation, is a jasper stone—something pure, clear as crystal.
And it is the cross and the blood of the Lamb that lead to that.
If the Lord, therefore, sees any state that He never intended to be, and that contradicts His mind in this matter, He will bring in the cross as a working power.
And where that is found, there will begin to arise a situation: we have come to a standstill; God is not going on; we are in distress; we are in travail; we are in anguish; we are in despair; we are coming to death.
You see, the cross is working in that way in order to produce a situation full of hope, full of prospect. I think the law is very clear.
The first thing, then, is that of a state that is not according to God’s intention, which has got to be cleared up by the application of the great principles of the cross. That is hopeless. That is hopeless. There is no hope for anything that is not pure in His eyes.
Next, when things have become less than God intended they should be, they have become smaller. God intended something great, and things have become smaller than He intended.
And the history of things is the history of that tendency—more than a tendency, a real working—in men reducing both God and God’s things to their own human measure, bringing everything of God, and God Himself, within the compass of man.
Reducing God to man in measure, making God less than He is, and the things of God less than they really are. We can see how that has gone on, and is all the time going on, as a trend, as a tendency, as some working.
And always, always, we are near that peril of things becoming less than God meant them to be. God intended something great—something very great.
And here is loss, or the peril of loss: reduction, things becoming smaller, losing something. Whenever the Lord sees that working, or that peril becoming very real, He introduces the cross, and travail begins, and distress, and suffering.
Everything comes into a realm of uncertainty and weakness and question. The cross is introduced, and a sense of failure and despair is written: “We are not going on. We are not going through.”
God intended something great, and it has lost something of that greatness, or failed to go through to that greatness. It has become something smaller than He intended.
He is not going to allow that. I repeat, He reacts; and, oh, what tremendous reactions in this very connection history shows.
You take just the illustrative case of Israel. While Israel was a chosen people, taken out of the nations for God, God never, never intended Israel to become something in themselves.
He never intended that Israel should be the beginning and the end of all His work. He intended Israel to be a light to the Gentiles, to be a testimony to all the nations of God, to be a ministry, a missionary instrument, to all people.
All the nations should walk in their light, or come into the light of God as amongst them. They were raised up not for themselves as an end, but for the whole world—God’s apostolic nation to evangelize the nations with the knowledge of God.
What did Israel come to? To despise the nations, call them dogs, shut them out, and shut themselves in from the nations; to have nothing whatever to do with them; to look upon them as something to be despised, rejected, and cut off.
“We are the people. Everything begins and ends with us.” Something smaller than God intended. And there is no hope in that direction.
The end of that story is Israel. That mind must be put aside, broken, smashed, brought to despair, to hopelessness. And how true it was—how true it was. Something less than God intended, and becoming something in themselves.
Here is a large lesson for us to learn and ever bear in mind, dear friends. With all that God gave to Israel, and all that God is willing to lavish upon us, it is not for ourselves. It is not to end in ourselves. And it is not to be allowed to make us just something in ourselves—that we are the people.
It is a trust—a trust for all men.
The apostle Paul recognized that, and what a tremendous thing his recognition of that meant in his own case, when you think of him as a typical Israelite.
His vision and ministry were for all men: “That we may present every man perfect in Christ”—not every Jew, but every man.
He is the man who brings in the immensity of things, is he not? The immensity of Christ, the immensity of the Church.
If there is one thing about the Church that is so evident in the New Testament, it is its greatness—how great it is—taking its character and its dimensions from the Lord Jesus.
Any who have seen the greatness of Christ can never tolerate a little church, a little fellowship, a little exclusive thing that is an end in itself. It must have a universal vision and a universal heart.
Get that. Any tendency to become something less will be met by the cross, and there will come in hopelessness, despair, arrest, a sense of no way through, and a great deal of inward suffering and trouble and perplexity.
The cross is the way of salvation. It is the way of salvation from something being smaller than God intended, but it is a painful way. It is a painful way—the way of travail.
The cross releases from all smallness. The Lord Jesus made that clear in His own words:
I came to cast fire upon the earth;
and what will I, if it is already kindled?
But I have a baptism to be baptized with;
and how am I straitened till it be accomplished!
How am I straitened! But the baptism of the cross, the passion being accomplished, He is released from all His straitness.
This is no national movement now. This is no limited thing, either to Palestine or to any other spot. He is released into the universal by the cross, from the smallness of Judaism, Israelitishness, and Palestinianism.
He is released by the cross. But it is a painful way, that release. It is a breaking.
So the Lord would ever have us remember that He does react, and react very painfully, if anything that He intended to represent His greatness and His fullness becomes less than that.
Once more, when anything becomes governed by human wisdom, by the minds of men, it is brought into the bondage of the cross. The Lord has always brought in the cross over against that.
You see it again in Israel. The cross was introduced over against that situation. The scribes and the rulers of Israel gave to divine things their own human interpretation, and imposed upon the things of God their own minds.
They created this great and intolerable burden to which Christ refers—simply the mind of man imposed upon divine things. And it always means bondage, always means bondage.
The Lord is not going to allow that. So He acts again, and there comes an impasse.
And in the impasse, what is the nature of this new crisis? Absolute bewilderment: a situation where you do not know what to do, where to look, in what direction to move, or how the situation can be resolved.
No, it is altogether beyond human wisdom. It is an impasse of confounding confusion and despair. “What can we do? What shall we do? How is the situation to be met?” And every effort is defeated.
The Lord has got to rescue out into the realm of divine revelation from merely human mental holdings of divine things.
It is a tremendous thing. The Lord must have, you know, this realm where He is perfectly free to give new light if He wants to—perfectly free to give new light that may seem to upset all our interpretations.
Oh, the mental power of the scribes and the Pharisees, to upset the whole thing! That is what you find in the New Testament, in the book of Acts.
Here is Peter, a representative of this. Here is Paul, one of those interpreters of the law who held everything within the limit of their own minds and said, “Our word is final. Our interpretation is the authority. There is no more to be said about it.”
What is the Lord doing with men like Peter and Paul and others in that book? He is bringing them up against situations where, if God does not now come in with some new light and some new revelation, there is a standstill.
But He was doing that: taking them altogether beyond their best traditions, their strongest convictions, and their settled interpretations, and making them see that the Bible meant far more than ever, with all their learning and knowledge, they had realized it to mean.
Yes, Leviticus 11 stands true about unclean creatures and reptiles not to be eaten. Does the Holy Spirit contradict that when He tells Peter, “Arise, kill, and eat”? Not at all. But Leviticus 11 had a meaning that Peter had never seen.
Now he is up against something that seems to contradict his knowledge of the Scripture, but in principle it does not. It just does not.
And one can only hint at that because, you see, we bind the Word of God, and we do not leave God free to enlarge the range of His meaning, to give new light.
And if that is a peril, or if that is where we come to—our interpretations are made binding and limiting—He will bring in the cross and bring us to utter confusion.
Well now, if God does not give us some new light, we are finished. We have not got the wisdom for the situation. What is He doing? The God of hope is getting rid of a hopeless situation.
And it is always hopeless when man is the last word in anything. Always hopeless.
Finally, when things become, or have become, a legal system, bringing anything of God into bondage, God has reacted with the cross. And it has been a terribly devastating reaction.
The whole matter of the law—legalism—the breaking of that was a terrible business, a terrible business. And it always is.
The Lord is not going to tolerate anything like that: making His things of the Spirit a tyranny of law. Not a bit. He will react for the Spirit’s complete liberty in all things.
Now you see what the situation is. The cross stands between a pure, unadulterated, unmixed state and an impure condition. The cross stands between those two.
The cross stands between the full intention of God and something less than He intended. Yes, the cross demands fullness, not imperfection, not something less even in degree.
Believe me, dear friends, that if the cross really is a working power anywhere, it will never allow a standstill. It will always demand that going on, and ever on, because it opens the way for that.
The cross stands between a knowledge or a wisdom that is without life, and spiritual knowledge which is life.
The cross stands between a knowledge or a wisdom that is without life, and spiritual knowledge which is life.
Adam made his choice, his bid for knowledge, and he got it—without life, free of life. Knowledge without life: God does not stand for that.
Knowledge—oh yes, how even religious knowledge can be lifeless and dead! It may be true. We may have a lot of knowledge, but where is the commensurate life? The commensurate life.
The Lord, against that, says, “I cannot go on. We must have some trouble about this. We must have some anguish, some pain about this.” All the knowledge must have a corresponding life.
Knowledge must be living, must be linked with life. You can eat of the tree of knowledge, but remember—not the tree of knowledge of good and evil; I mean that other tree of knowledge, the knowledge of the Lord, of heavenly things—you can eat of that.
But even so, you must have the tree of life to keep the balance. Knowledge and life correspond; they go together. The Lord is against any state other than that.
Again, form—exact form, perfect form—in teaching and in practice, without power, is something that God will not allow.
Yes, perfectly right in teaching and in practice, but what about the power? What about the power? You see, Israel had the oracles, had the law, had all the truth; but where is the spiritual power?
The cross will act to put that right. There is nothing to be said against correct procedure, accurate and sound teaching; they must be. But the Lord will see to it that, by keeping things on the move, in exercise, in travail, in trouble, the whole question of power becomes a very, very real one.
We have got so much teaching, practically so little power, and that must become an anguish—oh, real anguish. All that we have, and all our way of doing things which we think to be so right, the New Testament order—has it a corresponding power and impact?
So the Lord will not allow rest in that. In all these ways, you see, He is the God of hope.
By travail there is hope. By despair, there is hope. That is His way.
May He give us understanding.