Wednesday 18th March - Hope Brings Heaven Home

DAILY BYTE

The amazing thing is that Jeremiah’s act of hope, although tucked away in a corner of the Old Testament, is by no means unique. The whole of Scripture is one long testimony of people holding onto hope – holding onto hope even when it makes no sense to do so and against quite ridiculous odds.

G.K Chesterton asserts that hope is nothing but mere sentimentality when times are easy because anyone can hope then. Hope only truly becomes real and life-giving when it is exercised against the odds, when we are hanging on by our finger-nails.

Like buying a field that an enemy army was camping on.

Did you know that around the time of Jesus and the Apostle Paul, predominant Roman-Greco thought rejected hope because it was believed to be nothing but a set-up for potential disappointment? It was better off keeping your expectations low their philosophers counselled, don’t make the mistake of getting your hopes up too much.

The Bible, in chronicling thousands and thousands of year’s worth of hope against the odds disagrees profoundly. It doesn’t, interestingly enough, disagree with the fact that life involves disappointments and potential let-downs, and that events won’t always work out as we would like them to. It just disagrees that we should ever lose hope because God has a remarkable way of transforming disappointing circumstances.

For without hope we die. We enter through hell’s gates.

Viktor Frankl tells the story of his rather harsh life in a concentration camp during World War 2. Life was awful for the prisoners of that camp. They had to contend with rats, fleas, beatings from guards, freezing weather, freezing fingers, freezing toes, freezing barracks and freezing outhouses.

The only hope for these prisoners was that the Allied Forces would arrive to set them free. For some unknown reason, in Frankl’s particular camp, this hope became connected with Christmas. The prisoners started to believe the freedom would come for them at Christmas and so they clung onto life. They endured all those hardships because they had hope.

Finally, Christmas came … and then went again. No Allies arrived, no release, no freedom and no hope fulfilled. Almost immediately, in the days that followed Christmas, the first of the suicides began. Six months later, when the Allies finally arrived, half of the prisoners had died. They died because they lost hope.

For when we lose all hope for tomorrow, something dies within us today!

Dante was right … to lose hope is to truly be in hell.

Jeremiah lived among a people who were in hell, clutching their stomachs with fear and anxiety because tomorrow held no promise for them. Jeremiah lived among these people, he walked the same streets and sampled the same food, but he seemingly breathed a different air and gazed upon different scenery. For Jeremiah trusted in a God who had always faithfully provided, and saw no reason to allow a Babylonian army camping on his field to cause him to doubt that.

Jeremiah walked in heaven whilst those around him languished in hell because he dared to hope in a God-filled tomorrow.

Jeremiah knew more of heaven than hell because that’s exactly what hope does within us.

PRAY AS YOU GO

Holy God, thank-you for the message the Bible brings to us – a message of thousands of years worth of hope exercised against the odds. We know that if we live without hope then we bring ourselves into self-imposed hells yet if we hold onto hope in you then we fill our lives with heavenly possibilities. Help us therefore to hope, both now and always. Amen.

FOCUS VERSE

Jeremiah 32 : 42-43 (MSG)

Yes, this is God's Message: 'I will certainly bring this huge catastrophe on this people, but I will also usher in a wonderful life of prosperity. I promise. Fields are going to be bought here again, yes, in this very country that you assume is going to end up desolate—gone to the dogs, unliveable, wrecked by the Babylonians.