What Kind of Hope?

How Jesus Changes Everything

Michael Ots

• Publisher: IVP
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781844746040
• eBook ISBN: 9781844748037
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christianity

* What does the Bible say about the future?* What evidence do I have that this is true?* If my beliefs influence my actions, then what difference does the Bible's teaching make in my life?
There is something wrong with our world. Everyone knows that - clearly, things shouldn't be the way they are. The Bible makes many claims about the future, a future in which we can have real hope. Michael Ots helps us unpack these claims, showing why real and radical hope doesn't have to be beyond our grasp.

1. What are you waiting for?

‘What do you think it’s like?’ asks Thomas J. in the classic film My Girl.

‘What?’ asks Vada.

‘Heaven.’

Vada thinks for a minute and then muses, ‘I think...everybody gets their own white horse and all they do is ride them and eat marshmallows all day. And everybody’s best friends with everyone else. When you play sports, there’s no teams, so nobody gets picked last.’

‘But what if you’re afraid to ride horses?’ asks Thomas J.

‘Doesn’t matter...’cause they’re not regular horses. They’ve got wings. And it’s no big deal if you fall ’cause you’ll just land in a cloud.’

What’s heaven not like?

Many people’s concept of heaven, if they have one at all, is rather cloudlike and fluffy. It may sound quite nice in a film like My Girl, but, compared to the physical realities of this life, it does sound rather unreal and, quite frankly, rather boring too.

In an episode of The Simpsons, Homer is given a guided tour around heaven while standing on a cloud. Along with a water slide and a pedicure, he’s offered anything he wishes for. This may sound more appealing than winged horses but it still seems totally unreal.

These rather fluffy ideas of heaven are not confined to films and TV. Look at some Christian art and it would appear that the choice at the end of life is between being burned alive or attending an eternal church service. To most normal people, neither option is particularly appealing!

Even Christmas carols have got in on the act. Speaking about heaven, the end of one famous carol contains the lines:

Where like stars His children crowned

All in white shall wait around.1

Heaven has just become the staff canteen at the local hospital.

Whatever way we put it, the idea of eternal choir practice on a cotton-wool cloud, dressed in white pyjamas and surrounded by harp-strumming cherubs, doesn’t do it for many of us.

Now it’s worth noting that a lot of our imagery of heaven has little to do with what the Bible says. But even taking that into account, I want to let you into a secret...

I’m hoping not to go to heaven.

No, that wasn’t a mistake. I’m really hoping that I don’t have to go there.

It’s not that I don’t believe that heaven exists. I do. Nor is it because I think heaven will be as dull as in the examples I have just given. It won’t be. But I’m hoping not to have to go there because it’s not the final destination.

Heaven – not our final destination

I have flown to Romania many times. On some of my first trips I flew via Amsterdam. I was always excited as I set off from Heathrow, but that wasn’t because I was going to Schiphol Airport! That was just the stopover. I was looking forward to getting to Romania, breathing the mountain air and seeing my friends.

The Bible never says that this heaven is our final destin­ation. The Bible does say that those who die now may go to heaven but this is just a stopover. It’s a much nicer stopover than Schiphol Airport, but the best is yet to come. Our final destination is actually much closer to home. We see this in the Bible passage below.

But is the Bible true?

Before we go further, I am aware that you may not think that the Bible is even true, let alone relevant. Don’t stop reading though. The fact is that most of the people I have met who think this have never really read the Bible as an adult. If you haven’t done so, then for the sake of intellectual credibility it would be worth knowing exactly what you have rejected! It may even be that the reason why you have rejected the Bible is that you don’t want it to be true. You think of it as an out-of-date rulebook designed to spoil your enjoyment of life. If that’s what you think, then please keep reading because I reckon you will be pleasantly surprised.2

The following passage comes from a book of the Bible called Romans. It is a letter written by an early Christian leader called Paul to a group of Christians in the city of Rome. In it he explains some of the core teaching of Christianity:

I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us. For the creation waits in eager expectation for the children of God to be revealed. For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the freedom and glory of the children of God.

We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time. Not only so, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for our adoption to sonship, the redemption of our bodies. For in this hope we were saved. But hope that is seen is no hope at all. Who hopes for what they already have? But if we hope for what we do not yet have, we wait for it patiently.3

Groaning

Some of the concepts in this passage may appear rather strange to us, but twice we read of something that is familiar: groaning. This isn’t to be confused with moaning, nor is it to do with our reaction to bad jokes. Groaning is what we do when words are inadequate to express our sense of ­frustration or pain.

We are told that the whole of creation groans and that it was ‘subjected to frustration’. Something has gone badly wrong with the cosmos. It’s true that sometimes the world seems a wonderful place to live in, but at other times it can be the exact opposite. Tsunamis, earthquakes, droughts, famines, hurricanes and flooding are tragically all part of our world today.

But it’s not just creation that is described as groaning. Romans also says that we groan too. Our bodies are amazing things. The human eye alone is staggering in its intricate detail and far more complex than even the best digital camera. But, though they are wonderful, our bodies are also weak and fragile. They get sick, broken and fatigued. They are susceptible to disease. Bits start to wear out and have to be replaced. In fact an old friend of mine (in both senses of the word) has had so many parts of his body replaced that he’s not sure what’s original any more! Ultimately, all of us will die. At times we can be all too well aware of our own fragility and mortality.

So in the face of a broken world and broken bodies, what is the hope that the Bible offers? What would you expect? Most of us naturally think that it would be to leave our existing bodies and this world and float off to a cloud called ‘heaven’ to live a bodiless existence.

But we’d be wrong.

That may be what The Simpsons says. It may be what My Girl says. It may even be what many Christians have said in the past. But it’s not what the Bible says. So what exactly does it say?

New bodies

A friend of mine told me how, when films are translated into other languages, the titles sometimes get distorted. One version of The Shawshank Redemption got called The Shawshank Escape. It tended to ruin the ending somewhat! ‘Redemption’ sounds to us like a religious word. But really it is quite simple. It is to do with being set free, just as the film portrays. In biblical times a slave could be redeemed and set free from captivity. Paul says that ‘we wait...for...the redemption of our bodies’. Notice that he doesn’t say redemption from our bodies. We might think that our hope is to be set free from these decaying bodies to live a non-physical existence. But it’s quite the opposite – the hope is that these bodies will be set free from what causes them to decay.

When I think of redemption, I remember my failed attempts at baking as a boy. I would try to follow the recipe book and do everything right, but invariably I’d muck something up along the way. I’d end up with a whole load of ingredients mixed into what looked like an unappetizing slop. I’d be about to throw it away and start again when my mum would come to the rescue. Rather than chucking away the valuable ingredients, she would redeem them – by adding a bit of this or that, she’d make something new out of the mess I had made.

Christian hope is not for the rejection of our physical bodies but their redemption. God is not going to throw away this world but redeem and make it good again. This is very different from other religious and philosophical systems. For instance, the Buddhist hope is to escape the endless cycle of reincarnation and cease to be a physical being. In Greek thought there was a strong divide between the physical and the spiritual. The body was evil but the soul good. This idea influenced an early sect of Christianity called the Gnostics who also thought that the body was bad.

The reality is that, far from rejecting the physical world, the Bible embraces and endorses it. God created a physical world and declared that it was good. But even more than that, right at the centre of the Bible there is the claim that God himself became physical. In the person of Jesus, God didn’t just take on the appearance of humanity – he became fully human and lived on planet earth. God stepped into space and time.

Jesus – our prototype

The biggest clue as to what happens to Christians after death is what happened to Jesus after his. We’re told that Jesus is like a prototype, an example of what will happen to all who trust in him.4 Jesus didn’t rise from death simply as a ghost or a disembodied soul. He had a body. It could be seen, touched, hugged and heard. He ate food like a regular human being. His body was in some ways the same as it had been – he was recognizable.5 Yet in other ways it was different. He wasn’t just a resuscitated corpse in need of medical treatment. His followers were convinced he had conquered death, never to die again.

Now you may not be convinced that Jesus’ resurrection actually happened. (We’ll think more about that in chapter 7.) But do you see the significance of it all if it did? If this is true, then Christian hope is not about leaving our bodies but getting new ones. These same bodies but set free from sickness, pain, decay and death. This existing body transformed and made new.

And this isn’t just an interesting idea. It can bring incredible hope, especially to those who are only too well aware of the weaknesses of their bodies now. Take for example Joni Eareckson Tada who, after a diving accident in her teens, has spent decades as a quadriplegic. She writes,

I still can hardly believe it. I, with shriveled, bent fingers, atrophied muscles, gnarled knees, and no feeling from the shoulders down, will one day have a new body, light, bright, and clothed in righteousness – powerful and dazzling. Can you imagine the hope this gives someone spinal cord-injured like me? Or someone who is cerebral-palsied, brain-injured, or who has multiple sclerosis?...No other religion, no other philosophy promises new bodies, hearts, and minds. Only in the Gospel of Christ do hurting people find such incredible hope.6

This amazing hope can affect all of us. All of us care about our bodies. We want to stay healthy and look good. We might imagine that the Bible says that this is a bad thing – that we should be concerned only for the ‘inner soul’. But Christian hope is not about the rejection of our bodies but the redemption of them. The Bible affirms that our phys­ical bodies, far from being evil as some early Christian sects believed, are good. It is not so much that we have a soul, but we are a soul. So we should care about our bodies, and it is perfectly natural to care about how we look.

Our problem is not that we care too much about our bodies but that we don’t care enough. We are content to place our hopes in Nivea or Oil of Olay which, despite the advertising claims, are severely limited in their powers! They may keep us looking younger for a few more years but not forever. The hope of the Bible is that these bodies can one day be made new. If we really care about our bodies, then we should be seriously interested in what the Bible has to say.

A new world

Christian hope is not about leaving our bodies, but ultimately getting new ones. If heaven was about sitting on a cloud, then we’d have a problem. We’d fall through! Real bodies need a real world to live in, real food to eat and real things to do.

Many Christians have mistakenly thought that our world is waiting to be destroyed and that God will take people away to heaven. (Often the reason behind this is a certain passage in the New Testament: 2 Peter 3. For an explanation of why I don’t think this is the case, see the appendix.) But that would be quite different from what we read in this part of the Bible. We read that all creation is longing to be set free. And if being set free means being blowtorched into oblivion, then that would seem a very strange type of freedom indeed! God is not going to destroy the world, but transform it, with all that causes decay, destruction and death taken away.

Elsewhere the Bible talks about there being a ‘new heaven and a new earth’.7 That would seem to imply that this old world will end. But there are two ways in which you get something new. You may get a new car, in which case you sell or scrap your old one and get a brand new one. Nothing of the old car remains (except perhaps the fluffy dice hanging from the rear-view mirror). Or you might get a new kitchen installed. It would also be new, but in a different kind of way. For example, it is still the same room. There may even be some good parts of the old kitchen that are kept. But it is renewed. You rip out the rubbish and make it better. That is the way in which the Bible speaks about a new world. It’s not that God gets rid of the old one and starts again, but that he renews and transforms it. However, just in case you’re worried, I can assure you that it will be a whole lot more exciting than a new kitchen!

C. S. Lewis was an atheist before becoming a Christian through the influence of fellow Oxford University professor J. R. R. Tolkien. He used his brilliant imagination and literary skill to capture this biblical idea in his famous children’s stories that formed The Chronicles of Narnia. In the final book of the series, The Last Battle, the children have gone from Narnia into a new world and they are discussing where they think they are.

‘If you ask me,’ said Edmund, ‘it’s like somewhere in the Narnian world. Look at those mountains ahead...surely they’re rather like the mountains we used to see from Narnia...?’

‘Yes, so they are,’ said Peter. ‘Only these are bigger.’

‘[And] those hills,’ said Lucy, ‘...aren’t they very like the Southern border of Narnia?”

‘Like!’ cried Edmund after a moment’s silence. ‘Why, they’re exactly like...’

‘And yet they’re not like,’ said Lucy. ‘They’re different. They have more colours on them and they look further away than I remembered and they’re more...more...oh, I don’t know...’

‘More like the real thing,’ said the Lord Digory softly.

Suddenly Farsight the Eagle spread his wings, soared thirty or forty feet up into the air, circled round and then alighted on the ground.

‘Kings and Queens,’ he cried, ‘we have all been blind. We are only beginning to see where we are. From up there I have seen it all...Narnia is not dead. This is Narnia.’8

The new world that the children have entered is actually the same as the world they have just come from – just better and more real than the old one ever was. Our problem is that this world seems real and the future seems fluffy. But Lewis shows that, far from being less real, the world to come will be even more so. He goes on to say,

It is hard to explain how this sunlit land was different from the old Narnia...Perhaps you will get some idea of it if you think like this. You may have been in a room where there was a window that looked out on a lovely bay of the sea or a green valley that wound among the mountains. And in the wall of the room opposite to the window there may have been a [mirror]. And as you turned away from the window you suddenly caught sight of that sea or that valley, all over again, in the [mirror]. And the sea in the mirror, or the valley in the mirror, were in one sense just the same as the real ones: yet at the same time they were somehow different – deeper, more wonderful, more like places in a story; in a story you have never heard but very much want to know. The difference between the old Narnia and the new Narnia was like that. The new one was a deeper country: every rock and flower and blade of grass looked as if it meant more. I can’t describe it any better than that: if you ever get there you will know what I mean.9

God’s plan is so much bigger than taking a few people to heaven. It is about the whole universe being made new and set free. It is so much better than we think.

Vinoth Ramachandra, from S...

Table of contents

• What Kind of Hope?
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. What are you waiting for?
• 2. What’s wrong with this world?
• 3. Back to the future I
• 4. Back to the future II
• 5. Back to the future III
• 6. All hell breaks loose
• 7. Wishful thinking?
• 8. Why not now?
• 9. It makes all the difference in this world – and the next
• Appendix
• Notes