“If God be for us, who can be against us?”

(Romans 8:31)

At a Presbyterian Church General Assembly meeting where there had been heated discussion on the differences between the liberals and the conservatives, the young and the old, the rich and the poor – one speaker observed that the great cleavage between people in the world today, in the church and in politics and everywhere, is not between the liberals and the conservatives, nor between the rich and the poor, nor between the young and the old, but rather that the great and divisive polarization of people in our time is between those who have hope and those who are living without hope.

Think of the differences between us in America, living in the peace and freedom of this blessed land, and that great multitude of unfortunate people in Lebanon and Central America and Southeast Asia who have known nothing but warfare across 25 to 50 years.  We have hope but the vast majority of them live without hope.

Think of the difference between the well fed, or over-fed, millions of America and the starving millions of Africa where years of drought have brought famine and death.  They live in hopelessness, while we have hope for the future.

But closer to home there is an increasing number of people who daily must live in the chaos of increasing violence in our large American cities.  How many of them are growing hopeless because conditions in their neighborhoods don’t get better.  They get worse.

The number of people in our world who are living without hope is increasing.  The reasons for their hopelessness are many.  We can mention only a few.

But what of the hopeful – the hope filled?  Who are they and what are the reasons and grounds for their hope?

A theological movement in Christendom in our time is one called “The Theology of Hope.”  The theologians in this movement emphasize the Biblical teaching that the future is in God’s hands and not man’s hands.  The nature of that future God has for His world has already been revealed by the Christ event.  This is the basis of human hope.  World history is moving toward what Teilhard de Jardin called “The Omega Point” – that consummation of all things in the universe according to God’s plan and purpose.

“The Omega Point” for humanity must remain like the X, that symbol for the unknown in the Algebraic equation.  The time, on our earthly clocks and calendars, is an unknown.  The exact situation triggering the “Omega Point,” whether a military engagement with exploding nuclear warheads, or a collision of planets, or the last gasp of a completely polluted earth atmosphere, we can’t know.

A friend once asked me, “Do you think the Battle Armageddon is close at hand?”  I told him that I do not believe that the Book of Revelation is a prophecy couched in cryptic language predicting the exact date of a military struggle that will end the human adventure on this planet.  Jesus said that He did not know the time of the end – that it was hidden from all – and that only God in heaven knew.  Therefore it is futile for any human being to try to overcome the limitations of our finitude and predict the future.

What the Christian can know is that the essential characteristics of God’s future for his creation and his people have already been revealed in the Christ event: the life, the teaching, the death and resurrection of Jesus.  The future has already invaded time and is at work transforming human lives and human history.

Not only do we know the kind of human personality which has survival capabilities – the new man or woman in Christ, the new creature from above, the person animated and motivated by the love of Christ and the mind of Christ — but we know also the broad outlines of that society which possesses survival capabilities – the genuine Christian community where all people are respected as God’s children and cherished and accorded rights and shouldered with responsibilities for each other and for God’s purposes as Jesus revealed them.

This is the nature of Christian hope and these are the grounds for that hope anchored in the Christ event.

St. Paul, in his Roman letter at the 8^th chapter, tells of what in his own experience such Christian hope produced for him as solid spiritual dividends.

First, living with this Christian hope made Paul unafraid of the most formidable adversaries.  “If God be for us,” asked Paul, “who can be against us?”  Of course Paul did not mean that just because we have God on our side, or have tried to get ourselves on God’s side, that nothing and no one could ever after be against us.  Oh, No!  There will always be plenty going against us in this life: cancer, and crippling, and the downward tug of past moral lapses, and the desertion of friends, and law and order failures, and the collapse of economic structures, and the slow slipping away of all earth’s good and reliable supports.  But none of these can permanently defeat or discourage us because the God and Father of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ is for us.

But there is a second solid spiritual dividend, St. Paul says, for those who are living with the Christian hope – they find they can endure any suffering or setback because they know that “the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory that shall be revealed in us.”

Heaven waits, and life beyond the grave, and reunion with those we have loved here and lost awhile, and the transformation of our weak, worn-out and diseased bodies of this world – all this is a part of the Christian hope of the glory that shall be revealed in us.

Dr. John Millard told me, shortly after his wife’s death, of a telephone conversation he had with an unknown caller.  One evening, when the phone rang and Dr. Millard answered, he heard a female voice say:  “Is Mrs. Millard there?”  “No,” he replied.  “When do you expect her back?”  “I don’t expect her.  She’s left me.” “Oh,” responded the female voice sadly, “I’m so sorry.”  “Don’t be sorry,” said Dr. Millard, “We are going to be reunited.”  “Oh, I’m so glad.  I was just calling to ask what hospitalization insurance she had in addition to Medicare?”  “She doesn’t have any. She doesn’t need any, anymore.”  “Well, good-by,” said the female caller.

But the hope of heaven’s glad reunion does not exhaust the Christian’s hope, there is also that transformed and better world here for all people in God’s future – better than we have known in the past.

Reckon up for a moment some of the healing and liberating that has come into the world from God’s coming Kingdom that we have ourselves witnessed.  A few years ago polio was a dread crippler and killer.  No one knew how or when it came.  In 1945 when our two children fell ill with polio we took them to an isolation hospital 80 miles from our home and left them there.  We were compelled to.  We did not know whether they would get well, die, or be crippled.  We asked the doctor in charge what we should do to protect others from the contagion.  He shrugged his shoulders and said: “Swat all the flies you see.  Maybe that will help.  I don’t know.  The law requires that you remain in quarantine at home.”  That was all he could say.  Then in a few years the Salk vaccine was developed and polio has disappeared.

One of my classmates in high school died of pneumonia in the summer after his graduation.  For years there wasn’t much to do for a pneumonia patient except wait for the crisis to pass.  If the patient didn’t die then, he might begin to get well.   Then someone discovered penicillin and the threat of pneumonia was conquered.  So also with TB and malaria and scores of other destroyers of human hopes.

When Jesus came he healed the sick, restored sight to the blind, and made the lame to walk.  He advised his disciples that they could do even greater good things for men and women in the power of the coming Kingdom of God which he turned loose in the world.  His promise has been fulfilled and will continue to be fulfilled for those who live in His faith and in the obedience of His word.  They shall see the Kingdom of God coming in glory and power always, in every present moment, so that the sufferings of the present for them will seem slight compared with the glory to be revealed in them.

Shortly after his ordination as a minister, Dietrich Bonhoeffer was assigned a position as assistant minister at a church in one of the poorest and toughest sections of industrial Berlin.  He taught a group of young rowdies in a confirmation class.  There were about 50 boys and their classroom behavior was no small problem for their teacher.  But Bonhoeffer managed to win their attention, and ultimately their affection, by his complete identification of his life with theirs.

When they neared the end of their confirmation studies, he asked them repeatedly what they wanted him to talk to them about in his confirmation sermon.  They responded that what they wanted was a serious warning which they could remember all their lives.  Bonhoeffer knew from living with them how harsh their existence was – and the ominous events of those days in Germany made all aware of the dire days that might soon come.  So when Bonhoeffer addressed his class at its conclusion he said to them, “Today I bring you not a warning, but a message of hope.  Today you are to be given not fear of life, but courage.” And his text was: “If God be for us, who can be against us?”  And the Bible story with which he began and ended was the story of Jacob wrestling with the angel of the Lord through the night and saying: “I will not let thee go, except thou bless me.”

Bonhoeffer’s choice of his confirmation address was dictated primarily, not by the desperate needs of poor boys so soon to be thrown into the maelstrom of war, but rather was directed by the very nature of the gospel, and by the whole Biblical revelation of God’s dealing with His people, which says to all human beings: “Hope.  Hope thou in God.  I had fainted unless I had believed to see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living.  Wait on the Lord.  Be of good courage and He shall strengthen thine heart.  For he has begotten us unto a lively hope by the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, to an inheritance incorruptible, and undefiled, and that fadeth not way, reserved in heaven for you.”