By Elliot Clark
Photo by Iuliia Pilipeichenko: https://www.pexels.com/photo/cake-with-the-inscription-happy-new-year-with-a-burning-candle-on-the-background-of-lights-and-confetti-16024997/
Our Real Stories
This proclivity to cynical gloom can be exacerbated especially this time of year, when we see the calendar flipping over for another worn-out rerun of our life story.
When we’re honest with ourselves, when we actually stop and take inventory of our lives, we may struggle to squeeze the last bit of hope out of our own stories. But hope is the optimal (and optimistic) word here. Because if you lose hope you’re surely worse off than a pessimist. And if you have hope, you’re in a far better state than the everyday, shining optimist. You don’t merely believe things will turn out all right. Instead, you have confidence they will.
Why Doesn’t God Deliver?
Do you have this confidence? If so, it will inevitably affect your disposition in the face of unchanging, and seemingly unending, failure and frustration. Yet even if we possess such hope, we may still wonder why God doesn’t deliver us from trouble and answer our prayers when we call.
Perhaps the answer is a lack of faith. Could be. But that answer, in many cases, will almost certainly lead us down the path to greater personal angst. And such anxiety is the very condition we wish to remedy. So, better to consider the fact that God’s chosen servants have often experienced negative situations for which they received slow—or no—deliverance.
The fact is, you don’t have to read too far in the Psalms to discover two interesting—and for the psalmist, frustrating—realities. First of all, struggles replicate themselves. And second, God’s deliverance often feels past due.
How Long, O Lord?
David faced the same types of trouble over and over. He needed repeated deliverance from his enemies, whether Saul or Absalom or the Philistines or whomever. And those enemies persisted in their opposition and prospered in their rebellion. Their threats continued, such that David’s burning question to God was, How long, O Lord?
At some point or another in the struggle of life, each of us will be tempted to throw up our hands in surrender to the repetition of suffering. We may mutter under our breath or shout into the night sky, “Things will never change!”
And in such torrents of emotional anguish, the Christian answer is: “This side of heaven, they may not.”
Which may sound incredulous to us as Christians in America, who live and breathe a cultural optimism that dreams of greatness, speaks of its land as a place of opportunity, and invests in its citizens the right to pursue happiness. But Christians around the world may not share the same buoyant outlook.
“How long?” is also a question that doesn’t expect its full answer until the resurrection. Sometimes, many times even, David experienced deliverance in his lifetime. But his psalms often concluded with an expectation beyond this life for a salvation that will be revealed in the last time.
Eternal Hope
This is the living hope of which Peter wrote to a suffering church. It’s a hope that rejoices in the midst of grief and trials. Not a glittery and thin hope, but a sober and deep one, fixed on the grace that will come to us at the revelation of Jesus Christ.
What we need at the start of a new year of the same old is the futuristic hope of a new creation. In the midst of our sin and suffering. When troubles replay. When God delays. Because such hope is a realism beyond this passing world, and it’s an optimism that is eternal.
Article excerpt taken from The Gospel Coalition (U.S. Edition). Read the full resource here: https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/article/hope-new-year-old
Comments