WE ARE SAVED BY HOPE
WE ARE SAVED BY HOPE
In all dispensations, the people of God were practically sustained by hope. Though the hope might be different in all, yet its power, as a principle of action, was similar in all; and if we study the mode by which we are led along from one pursuit to another, and are sedulous in any, it is simply from hope. You enter on the drudgery of learning a language with the hope of being able to understand it; you sow your field with the hope of enjoying the fruits of it; and thus also in the details of life, there is always something in the distance which buoys up the spirit and encourages you to advance. It is the principle which begets all enterprise and is always active in a man, and never satisfied till shown by the Spirit of God what eye hath not seen nor ear heard. No present blessing has ever shut out hope. There is always, at all times, to the man of God something better beyond, and, if his mind fed not on it, things around unduly engaged him, to the prejudice of what was more blessed. Man is engrossed by some hope, and the nature of the hope gives him character. If christians are not led on by their proper hope, there must be failure in their service, as well as in personal blessing; for they are taken up with some other hope which distracts them, and prevents them from being engaged with their proper one. This, I believe, has been the cause of the church’s great departure from its proper character and path on earth. Abraham looked for a city which hath foundations, whose builder and maker is God. This hope did not save him (that is to say, if thereby be meant the remission of sins), but it made him turn his back on the stately structure of Babel, in the land of Shinar, for the city of God, which glistened in the [p. 2] distance. With his eye resting on it, he trod his weary way towards it through many a year, across this desert world. This made him a pilgrim and a stranger here; his hope was beyond this scene. Not so with Cain: his hope centred in his attempt to present this unredeemed earth pleasing to God by the fruits of his labour; and what have been the effects of his hope? Bitter disappointment on all hands, and worse! for with the same hands that gathered its sweet and beauteous fruits did he stain it with the blood of his brother. Philanthropist, he would mend the world and sacrifice his brother! How important, then, is it that we should ascertain distinctly the nature and range of our hope.
I fear the church has been looking for conversions and earthly extension, and the like, instead of that hope which, like a beacon-light, would not only encourage it to advance, but also guide it in its course. How seldom have christians examined into the nature of the place God has set the church in here below! Are we Jews? certainly not. Are we gentiles? Through God’s grace, we answer, No! We are of the church of God. The Jews are displaced. Israel is broken off that we might be grafted in, and here is our earthly place; but the question occurs, ‘How did we come there’? We were strangers to the covenant of promise. I believe the gospel of Luke is especially written to show us how God was preparing to disclose the mystery of the church. The language of Simeon is different from that of Hezekiah: earth is nothing to one as soon as Christ is seen, and he longs to depart. The prodigal son does not, on his reformation, get another living, but he gets a higher thing - even the father’s house and the glories of it; also Lazarus in Abraham’s bosom, for one who had been in no earthly blessings whatsoever; and, lastly, paradise opened out to Christ’s last companion in this earth, too bad for the men of this world, the first to be with Christ in heaven! As a Jew, he asked to be remembered in Christ’s kingdom, but he is taught there is higher blessing before that, where it is impossible for a man to utter the glories that surround him.
God made the last trial of Israel when He sent His Son. In His cry, every offer should be made to them. Hence, even the apostles were not instructed as to the destiny of the nation; their hopes were Jewish, and all their early ministration was to Jews. The stoning of Stephen, the witness of the Holy Spirit resisted, gave the grand blow to Jewish things. Samaria then hears the word of God and, stranger still, an Ethiopian eunuch, as he “was returning” from Jerusalem, is owned and received. Notwithstanding, the apostles were not prepared for the entrance of the gentiles into the root and fatness of the olive tree. The natural branches we see are broken off, and God is now about to bring in the gentiles. This is detailed in Acts 10 to Peter in a vision. He is shown a sheet knit at four corners, as comprising the whole world, in which were all manner of beasts (clean and unclean). It came out of heaven, and was let down on the earth, and was received up again into heaven. All these minutia are important, as instructing us in the characteristics of the new body about to take the place of testimony on earth. They were to be distinctly heavenly in origin and heavenly in hope: they came from heaven, they reached earth, but they returned to heaven. True, they were to fill up the hiatus caused by the breaking off of Israel and this only for a season, as we see in Romans 11. The error which has seduced the church into the world, was the idea that it was to take the place of Israel in respect to hope as well as in respect of testimony. Now, Palestine was never given to the gentile, and it alone God had claimed in a peculiar manner, but yielded into the hands of the gentile king when His people ceased to be witness for Him in it. The great power given over the wide earth to the gentile is not yet reassumed, because He,
[p. 4] whose right it is, has not yet come. He is gone to seek for Himself a kingdom, but is not as yet returned, and until then no portion of earth could be claimed by the church now. Hence, the place given to them is in heaven: like the prodigal, it is to the Father’s house and glories they are called. The word is “.. . blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenlies in Christ”. Man on earth had dishonoured God, and it had been cursed on his account; and the man who, like Cain, attempts to make it a scene pleasing to God, not only subjects himself to bitter disappointment, but his spirit must be opposed to godliness. Man on earth has been tried: Jew and gentile, all are found wanting. He who is Lord of heaven and earth tarries for a little season ere He shows Himself as King of kings and Lord of lords; and during that season He is gathering out a people for His name, and heaven is His locality, for earth is yet unsubdued.
I am insisting on this point especially, because if we know not our present calling, we must be ignorant of the hope to which we are saved, simply because if our proper hope engaged us, it would put us in our proper place here. If I am actually now a heavenly man as to calling, and if all saints are so, my eye must rest on them as such, and my hope is not connected with earth or earthly things. The hope of a man now, holding citizenship in heaven, is to look for the Saviour who shall change our vile body, that it may be fashioned like His own glorious body; Philippians 3. This is the first work of Christ on His return, and hence it is the hope of the saints, and it purifies them; 1 John 3. Christ is raised; then they that are His at His coming. He will manifest the sons of God. He will show the triumph over death in the thousands of His saints. Enoch, the seventh from Adam, the first in whom was arrested the power of death, at one and the same time gave Satan a presage of his final [p. 5] catastrophe, and the people of God, thus early in their history, an assured prospect of deliverance. For three hundred years he walked with God, and his testimony and hope ever was, “the Lord cometh”. He did not, like Cain, expect that anything could be produced from earth pleasing to God, or that he could by any process remove the evil and violence then gathering over the land. Cain had failed. Enoch left it for better hands. Daily the earth grew worse, and what Cain, with the best intentions, if you please, could not effect in its infant state of evil, how can we, who are now in the condition spoken of in Jude’s epistle? If Enoch had need in his day to look for the coming of the Lord, how much more have we? It is evident that the coming here does not mean Christ’s first coming, for then Jude would not have referred to it as it was past, and moreover, Christ’s first coming was not with ten thousands of His saints. The object of the apostle is to connect the minds of the saints with the only hope which could sustain as well as satisfy in the midst of evil and perplexity. If Enoch had not been walking in the faith of translation, would his hope have been in the coming of the Lord?
Thus it is we see that ascertaining my place now has much to do with my hope. If I am not looking to earth at all for blessing, but offering blessing to men on it from heaven, then I am not looking towards earth, but looking from heaven towards its Lord; and thus is the argument of the apostle in Philippians 3. He says there are certain persons “enemies of the cross of Christ”; and the summing up of their character is, that they mind “earthly things”. Christ has quickened us with Himself above all these - not delivered by Him to be again immersed in them, but risen with Him with our affections set on things above, not on earthly things. These are still the theatre where Satan acts, and they that set their minds on them are enemies to the cross of Christ. The spirit of Cain is [p. 6] in them; alas! how it clings to us. Cain was a seeker of God, but in earthly things; and many a seeker of God nowadays, whom one could love and value, is found seeking and expecting blessings to spring up and flourish in this evil world. This being their hope, they are labouring for the extension of Christ’s kingdom with an energy and assiduity which puts to shame the better taught. Cain’s labour did not sanctify his service; and no amount of self-sacrifice or serving others can hallow such work. If it be minding earthly things, it is the act of the enemy, not exactly of Christ, but of the cross of Christ. Many a man would assert very positively that he was not an enemy to Christ; but is he an enemy to the cross of Christ? That cross put everything on earth to death. If you revive anything, and maintain that anything here is not crucified (Satan’s great object), then you are an enemy. It matters little whether here, or there, or how I seek to produce an improvement in society, as making things and persons here more externally good and comely. If I am seeking for such a reformation either in a lesser or a greater degree, as bettering things here, I am minding earthly things; I am acting as a citizen of earth, and not as a citizen of heaven. The apostle says our citizenship is in heaven, and our hope is the return of Jesus. Let us not think of ourselves and the amount of good we are doing. So Cain thought. So said Saul, in sparing the beasts of Amalek for a sacrifice to the Lord. But let us honestly, in secret with the Lord, ask ourselves, ‘Are we happily in the place of the Philippian saints, namely in heaven in spirit’? and is our hope as theirs, looking for the Saviour to change the body of our vileness into the likeness of the body of His glory? O, that it were, and the track of our footsteps would guide many to blessing.