Quotes about Hope

He was a Jew who believed in the goodness of the original creation and the intention of the Creator to renew his world. His gospel of "salvation" was about Israel's Messiah "inheriting the world," as had been promised in the Psalms. What God had done in and through Jesus was, from Paul's perspective, the launching of a heaven-and-earth movement, not the offer of a new "otherworldly" hope.

Our present experience, even our present Christian experience, is incomplete. But in Christ we have heard the complete tune; we know now what it sounds like and that we shall one day sing it in tune with him. Our present experience, with all its incompleteness, is meant to point us to the fact that we will one day wake up and arise from sleep. That, after all, is what resurrection is all about. It

In his appearing we find neither a dualist rejection of the present world nor simply his arrival like a spaceman into the present world but rather the transformation of the present world, and ourselves within it, so that it will at last be put to rights and we with it. Death and decay will be overcome, and God will be all in all. This

Romans 5—8 is, from one point of view, all about hope: the solid, sure hope that all those who belong to God through faith in his action in Jesus are assured of final salvation.

To imagine a world without the gospel of Jesus is to imagine a pretty bleak place

Paul's purpose, in any case, was not to encourage the Thessalonians' tendency toward lurid apocalyptic speculation, but to assure them that, despite fears and rumors, God was in charge. Jesus was indeed the coming world ruler, and they, as his people, were secure.

The main thing Paul wants to say in this paragraph is that God has done, in and through Jesus, what he promised and purposed all along.

the radically new thing God did was nevertheless the thing he'd always promised

And all of this can be summed up in the phrase "forgiveness of sins." None of it has to do with redeemed souls leaving the world of space, time, and matter for something better. All of it has to do with the strange, unanticipated fulfillment of the hope of Israel.

Conservatives have said that Jesus was bodily raised, while liberals have denied it, but neither group has seen the bodily resurrection as the launching of God's new creation within the present world order.

As our world shudders like a plane suddenly hitting a flock of geese, we badly need people who will learn that sense, and learn it quickly, not simply or even primarily for their own benefit but because our world, God's world, needs people at the helm in whom courage, good judgment, a cool head, and a proper care for people—and, if possible, faith, hope, and love as well—have become second nature.

What God had done in and through Jesus was, from Paul's perspective, the launching of a heaven-and-earth movement, not the offer of a new "otherworldly" hope.