July 17

What is our hope? - 1 Thessalonians 2:19.

ALL men have hope, or they could not enjoy pleasure by day, or repose by night. If hearers of the gospel were individually asked, Do you hope to be saved? “Surely I do,” they would answer. And if we were to inquire of such, On what does your hope depend? we should find many depending alone on the mercy of God. Well, he is merciful; but then he is also just. “He is righteous in all his ways, and holy in all his works.” Another would say, “Oh, I hope to repent at some future period.” And are these sure, then, that that period will ever arrive? Does sickness always forewarn the approach of death? Can any be sure their disorder will not be such as will preclude the exercise of reason? Will they not find, when they come to that period, that repentance is impossible without the influence of the Spirit, of God? And can they suppose that after resisting his Spirit in thousands of instances, God will, in some extraordinary manner, interpose to save them, and by a kind of miraculous agency work in them to will and to do? We know sinners can do nothing to merit his grace, but they may do much to deserve his wrath, and “he that, being often reproved, hardeneth his neck, shall suddenly be destroyed, and that without remedy.”

Well, there is a hope that is not good. There is the hope of the hypocrite. Men may deceive their fellow-creatures, but God is not mocked, for “what is the hope of the hypocrite when God taketh away his soul?” Job compares the hope of such to a spider’s web, which is curiously wrought but easily broken, or swept away by the besom of destruction. There is the hope of the Pharisees,-a hope derived from their worthiness or works, from their not being so bad as others, having always paid their fellow-creatures their demands and been regular in all their forms of devotion.

We do not depreciate these things: they are good in themselves, but bad as substitutes for Christ. They are good as parts of our duty, but bad enough as the foundation of our hope for salvation. God has previously made known to us the way of salvation, and commanded us to believe in the name of the only-begotten Son of God. If, after all this, they should seek salvation in any other way, they rob him of his glory, frustrate his grace, and make Jesus Christ to have died in vain.

There is the hope of the Antinomian. This is a rebellion against common sense, and blasphemy against every chapter and verse and letter in the Bible:-“For without holiness no man shall see the Lord.” There is the hope of the worldling. Here all is vanity and vexation of spirit. What has it done for its possessors? Has it made them happy? Has it made them free indeed? Were we to allow that the worldling’s hope was in every respect very good, need these be told that they are always going away from it? while, as to the Christian, he is always advancing towards his hope:

“Yet a season, and, we know,

Happy entrance will be given;

All our sorrows left below,

And earth exchanged for heaven.”

But are any asking, “May I aspire after this good hope?” Unhesitatingly we reply, and that too without presumption. It would be presumption indeed if it were not a good hope through grace. Worthiness has no claim here, and unworthiness is no bar before God:-

“All the fitness he requireth

Is to feel our need of him.”

Those to whom the Lord has given this grace cannot be too thankful that he has so highly distinguished them. They cannot be too zealous in endeavouring to bring others into the same state with themselves. They know the wretchedness of a state in which they once were, “without hope, and without God in the world;” and they know the blessedness of the state in which they now are, having a good hope, and God with them in the world. They are the very persons, therefore, to go to others and to address them from their own experience. They can say, with Eliphaz, “Lo, this, we have searched it, so it is; hear it, and know thou it for thy good.