HOPE

“Our hope is in Christ!”

  A wonderful, well known phrase. However, have you ever wondered about the word hope? When we hope for something, doesn’t that imply a chance of it not happening? We want something to happen, and it might not? And isn’t Jesus a definite?

  Before I go into what this means, let me give a verse. Our hope being in Christ, according to this verse, is actually biblical.

“Guide me in your truth and teach me, for you are God my Savior, and my hope is in you all day long.”-Psalm 25:5 NIV

  I love this verse. But we reach the problem I brought up earlier. Our hope is in God, but God is a definite. This doesn’t make sense!

  In order to understand this, you must look at the original Hebrew. Hope, in this verse, actually means “to wait eagerly for”. In fact, the NASB version phrases it this way:

“Led me in your Truth and teach me, for you are the God of my salvation; For You I wait all the day” –Psalm 25:5 NASB

  In the original Greek, the word for hope is elpizō. This word is pretty much the same as the Hebrew one; it means to “wait for salvation with joy and full confidence”.

  So when we say our hope is in Christ, we are saying we are waiting eagerly for Him, with joy and confidence! There are no variables here, God is a constant, and He always keeps His promises! And He has promised us salvation in the form of His own Son that He sent down from Heaven to bear our sins so that our hope is in Him and now we eagerly, joyfully, and full of confidence wait for His return! Amen!

  

Footnotes

Greek and Hebrew references from www.blueletterbible.com