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Resurrection Hope

OK, Ive used this blog a lot in the past to talk about the doubts and anxieties that I struggle with concerning my faith....hence my last post on hell. So I thought I would shift gears and blog this time about something I have actually had a lot of clarity about lately. Despite the fact that I think the Bible presents more hermeneutical problems than you can shake a stick at and that it will never be impervious to the limitations that burden any collection of words written by human hands, I do think that the Bible is refreshingly clear in what it ultimately portends. The Bible has had a wide variety of authors and an even wider variety of readers, but its message has always been the same on one important point. It has always been, inarguably, a book about hope. Now the message of hope in the Bible does take on many different forms. It is not always about ultimate victory over death and the ushering in of a new kingdom of peace and eternal prosperity. Sometimes it is a much more temporal message dealing with the specific fate of Israel and of its assured triumph over its enemies. But either way, the Bible is about hope......and reading the Bible does the same thing to me every time no matter how much I fight it......it makes me want to hope.

This is why I am particularly thankful for the New Testament and more specifically for the writings of Paul. Paul boiled down hope to one thing. He stripped it down to its very essence. If you read the rest of the Bible, without reading Paul, I think you would find it difficult to find out what exactly we are supposed to be hoping for. A kingdom? A military victory? Mansions of gold? Property? Justice against our enemies? Progeny? Food? No what I like about Paul is that he made hope unmistakably about one thing and one thing only: resurrection.

The passage I think about more than any other these days is I Corinthians 15:13-19:

If there is no resurrection of the dead, then not even Christ has been raised. And if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith. More than that, we are then found to be false witnesses about God, for we have testified about God that he raised Christ from the dead. But he did not raise him if in fact the dead are not raised. For if the dead are not raised, then Christ has not been raised either. And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile; you are still in your sins. Then those also who have fallen asleep in Christ are lost. If only for this life we have hope in Christ, we are to be pitied more than all men.

I love the way Paul strips away all ambiguity about hope in this passage. Hope is about resurrection. If Christ was raised, we will be raised. If Christ was not raised, we are morons. Though I have many other questions about hell, the problem of evil, the inspiration of Scripture, the person of Christ, etc. I know that hope does not ultimately hinge on answering these questions. My hope ultimately hinges upon the question of resurrection. Did it happen? Or did it not? Now dont get me wrong. All of those other questions are inextricably related to the question of Christ's resurrection, but its still nice to be able to single out the most important question. My mind need that once in while, something to fall back on, a single point of inquiry that supersedes everything else. Was Christ raised? That is the question. "To be or not to be" is only a distant second at best. Paul understood this. If we have any hope at all in this life, it must rest on the resurrection of Christ.

So what do I think? What do I believe? Well let me just say this for now. I am a hopeful person. I really am. And when given the choice to hope or not to hope, I choose to hope.....and to pray.

Posted by todd at May 28, 2007 10:59 PM