Hope - Jeremiah 33
Written by Ed Allen
Sunday, 05 December 2010 00:00
Hope - Jeremiah 33
Author and speaker Lee Eclov offered a great illustration about how illusive hope can be.
“Someone dear to me once gave me a little cross adorned with roses. It bears the inscription, ‘Hope raises no dust.’ I looked at that phrase and tried my best to penetrate its mystery. I didn't want to look stupid, so I didn't say anything. After pondering it for a little while, I just had to get to the bottom of what it meant. It had been written on a cross, so it had to mean something! When I typed ‘Hope raises no dust’ into the Google search engine, I found out that the phrase was originally uttered by Paul Éluard, a French poet associated with Dadaism. When I looked up Dadaism, I found this definition: "The Dada movement tried to express the negation of all current aesthetic and social values and frequently used deliberately incomprehensible artistic and literary methods." I then read some of Éluard's other famous quotes—quotes like "Elephants are contagious" and "Earth is blue like an orange." All of this brought me back to ‘Hope raises no dust.’ Everyone believes hope is vital to people, but for many of us, hope is about as vague as the Éluard quote that is painted on that little cross.”
I think we know surprisingly little about where real hope comes from. We don’t know it’s source; we don’t know it’s fuel. We swing wildly at it, oftentimes trying to work our way into it. But God offers us something much more specific. Our passage gets at it.
Read Jeremiah 33:14-16
Real Hope is not connected to current circumstances.
- We often try to build hope on our current circumstances don’t we? “I hope I pass my driving test.” “I hope I make an A.” “I hope I get the promotion.” “I hope I don’t get sick.”
- But real hope is immune to current circumstances.
- Historical setting
- Hope isn’t blind – Jerry isn’t blind to current conditions. He’s the one who has been telling them these conditions were coming. But he still has hope because real hope is immune to current circumstances.
- Romans 5:3-5
- In his book, Hope and Suffering, Desmond Tutu communicated real hope in the midst of apartheid in South Africa. Interview:
- After all you've seen and endured, are you really as optimistic as your book says you are? (Zelalem Dawit, Addis Ababa)
- Tutu: I'm not optimistic, not. I'm quite different. I'm hopeful. I am a prisoner of hope. In the world, you have very bad people— Hitler, Idi Amin—and they look like they are going to win. All of them—all of them—have bitten the dust.
Real Hope lives with the end in mind
“days are coming”
- Prophets
- Like rap stars in that they have their own language; one example is “day of the Lord”
- Forthtelling and foretelling
- When foretelling they see at a distance but lose some depth perception (age of Messiah would be long and final wouldn’t come right away)
- “days are coming” is like prophetic shorthand for a great day of reckoning where God establishes His ultimate authority over all things.
- Real hope lives with the end in mind
“Professional golfer Paul Azinger was diagnosed with cancer at age 33. He had just won a PGA championship and had ten tournament victories to his credit. He was doing well.
He wrote, "A genuine feeling of fear came over me. I could die from cancer. Then another reality hit me even harder. I’m going to die eventually anyway, whether from cancer or something else. It’s just a question of when. Everything I had accomplished in golf became meaningless to me. All I wanted to do was live."
Then he remembered something that Larry Moody, who teaches a Bible study on the tour, had said to him. "Zinger, we’re not in the land of the living going to the land of the dying. We’re in the land of the dying trying to get to the land of the living." “Zinger” recovered from chemotherapy and returned to the PGA tour. He’s done pretty well. But that bout with cancer changed him. He wrote, "I’ve made a lot of money since I’ve been on the tour, and I’ve won a lot of tournaments, but that happiness is always temporary. The only way you will ever have true contentment is in a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. I’m not saying that nothing ever bothers me and I don’t have problems, but I feel like I’ve found the answer to the six-foot hole"
(Robert Russell, "Resurrection Promises," Preaching Today, Tape No. 151 cited on www.preachingtoday.com).
Real Hope is based on God’s (promise) word to us.
- Real Hope is hope in God, and what God has said.
- Ps 42:5, 11; 43:5 (the refrain: “put your hope in God.”)
- There are certain outcomes associated with hope, but the fuel for real hope is God. The outcomes cannot fuel real hope.
- Listen: hope + expectation = demand
- If I say some cuss words and laugh at dirty jokes, I will be more popular and then I’ll be happier.
- If I do the right things and be a nice person, I will be happy in my marriage and then I’ll be happier.
- We come to expect, without even knowing it really, that if we do certain things, then we are guaranteed another set of things happening. We hope in those outcomes. We expect those outcomes. We demand those outcomes.
- There are certain outcomes associated with hope. Jeremiah tells the people, “Judah will be saved in those days and Jerusalem will live in safety.” There is a certain kind of future that they hope for, but the foundation of their hope and the fuel for their hope is God’s word to them.
Real Hope focuses on Christ.
- READ PASSAGE
- He is our righteousness
One of the universal stress generators is self-righteousness. We try to get everything right. We try to earn our way into God’s good graces, doing the right thing, saying the right words, making the right choices, giving the right gifts, and eating the right amount. But, you can’t do it. It will add up a great deal of stress on you. The Bible says, we are fallen beings, and in Romans 3:10 it says, "There is no one who is righteous, not even one." But thank God, He is our righteousness.
think we know surprisingly little about where real hope comes from. We don’t know it’s source; we don’t know it’s fuel. We swing wildly at it, oftentimes trying to work our way into it. But for Christians, hope is not vague. We have a hope that is historical, personal. In Jesus, God came for us to make our hope real and to give it life.
During the Second World War the US Army was forced to retreat from the Philippines. Some of their soldiers were left behind, and became prisoners of the Japanese. The men called themselves "ghosts", souls unseen by their nation, and were forced on the infamous Bhutan Death March, forced to walk over 70 miles, knowing that those who were slow or weak would be bayoneted by their captors or die from dysentery and lack of water. Those who made it through the march spent the next three years in a hellish prisoner-of-war camp. By early 1945, 513 men were still alive at the Cabanatuan prison camp, but they were giving up hope. The US Army was on its way back, but the POW’s had heard the frightening news that prisoners were being executed as the Japanese retreated from the advancing U.S. Army. Their wavering hope was however met by one of the most magnificent rescues of wartime history. In an astonishing feat 120 US Army soldiers and 200 Filipino guerrillas outflanked 8000 Japanese soldiers to rescue the POW’s. Alvie Robbins was one of the rescuers. He describes how he found a prisoner muttering in a darkened corner of his barracks, tears coursing down his face. "I thought we’d been forgotten," the prisoner said. "No, you’re not forgotten," Robbins said softly. "You’re heroes. We’ve come for you." Often in life we can start to give up hope, to feel that God has forgotten us, abandoned us to dark and hurtful experiences, but the cross of Christ reminds us, "No, you’re not forgotten" and the resurrection gives us the assurance that some day we too will see our rescuer face to face and be liberated from the distresses of this life. When he returns we too will hear him say, "I’ve come for you." (Scott Higgins, OzIllustrations)