Faith and hope

Would you like to support this ministry? Please click this link: http://jamesmcnaught.blogspot.com/ and then click “Follow” and encourage all your friends to follow as well. You could also visit http://jamesmcnaught.com and consider buying Gulf or Reclaiming the Bible from the “Enlightened”.

(The view expressed in this blog are my own and should not be taken as inspired in any way.)

“Now Sarai Abram’s wife bare him no children: and she had an handmaid, an Egyptian, whose name was Hagar. And Sarai said unto Abram, Behold now, the LORD hath restrained me from bearing: I pray thee, go in unto my maid; it may be that I may obtain children by her. And Abram hearkened to the voice of Sarai. And Sarai Abram’s wife took Hagar her maid the Egyptian, after Abram had dwelt ten years in the land of Canaan, and gave her to her husband Abram to be his wife.”

Even though we saw, in the last chapter, that Abraham believed God and he counted it to him for righteousness we find that Abraham has a crisis in hope. Hope and faith are different: in Heb 11: 1 we read that faith is the substance of things hope for, the evidence of things not seen. This tells us that hope has to do with things that we can see while faith relies on the facts, that is, things that we cannot see. There are some facts that we know by faith: God created the heavens and the earth and all things were created by the Word and without him was not anything created that was created. We know by faith that all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. We know by faith that the Lord Jesus Christ is the Lamb of God that taketh away the sin of the world. We know that His blood was shed to cleanse sinners from their sin. We know that after three days and three nights He rose again from the dead. We know that if we believe in Him we have everlasting life. All these things are facts to be believed by faith. However, hope has to do with feelings and we can struggle with hope. Abraham believed God but Abraham and Sarah (Sarai)  had trouble with hope. They didn’t have a child and they felt bad. We will always have trouble with hope when we wander through our wilderness periods and we may even do foolish things that lead to bad consequences in our lives but the facts will never change. We are relying on the Lord Jesus Christ and He has already done everything that needs to be done. A crisis in hope will not jeopardise our eternal salvation and it will not alter the fact that we are kept from day to day by the grace of God. After all we are relying on the Lord Jesus Christ and He declared that the work is finished and that He is satisfied with the work that He has done.