Three major dynamics of the heart are brought together in the familiar closing verse of 1 Corinthians 13: “And now abide faith, hope, love, these three; but the greatest of these is love.” In a sense one might think of faith as the dynamic that looks back. Based on the Bible’s presentation of the gospel, we look back to the coming of Christ and His saving work and respond to Him in faith. In a similar temporal sense, we could say that hope is the member of the threesome that looks forward. As Christians we have a sure and steadfast hope of an indescribable future which serves as an anchor of the soul (Heb. 6:19).
A glorious future
Based on the Bible’s promises about a Christian’s ultimate destiny and eternal blessedness, we live out our days in anticipation of a glorious future. Love, which is called the greatest of the three, is the one of the trio that is the preeminent dynamic for living in the present. Love lies at the heart of the Christian life here and now. We love God because He first loved us and we love others just as the Bible commands us. Love is the supreme motivation for serving Christ through ministering to others.
Future events
Of these three dynamics, Theology 101 will focus for a time on Christian hope in terms of future events that await us. To the extent that God has revealed aspects of the future, we will explore what lies ahead.
When it comes to the details and sequence of future events, we see them somewhat through a dark glass; but what we can see through various Bible passages leads to living in hope and expectation. Good and godly students of the Bible have different understandings of many of the details of God’s end-time events. During theological studies in seminary I encountered for the first time fervent and sometimes fevered discussions about future events in terms of claiming a-millennial, pre-millennial or post-millennial views of the end times. Someone interjected a fourth view, termed “pan-millennial,” and explained that, differences aside, he believed it would all “pan out” just as God intends. A bit of seminary humor aside, our best way of looking ahead is to confess that in the Bible God has revealed truths about the future that we need to know, not necessarily all the details we would like to know. Human curiosity sometimes has a way of running ahead of divine revelation.
Study of eschatology
The formal way of speaking about hope’s future is to term it the study of eschatology. Eschatology is a theological term that conveys the idea of thinking or speaking of last things. Among the Bible’s passages that speak of the end times and its last things are such matters as death and resurrection, Christ’s Second Coming and final judgment, along with heaven and hell.
The goal of Theology 101 in dealing with these issues is not to map the sequence of these events as to their timing, but simply to allow thoughts about the future to fuel our hope in the present. A popular song of the past declared that what the world needs now is love. While this need is painfully evident in each day’s news reports, it also might be said that what much of the world needs now is hope. So next week begins the chase of the goal helping us lay hold on the hope that is set before us (Heb. 6:18).
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