Waiting in hope? Or waiting for apocalypse?

Dark clouds loom! Increasingly devastating news about climate; wildfires, historic heat waves, devastating droughts and floods, climate refugees; all converge with political news to create an “apocalyptic feel”. With each wave of destruction, it seems as if the earth groans; a “birth pang” moving us towards the birth of some kind of world we haven’t known before; as St. Paul wrote: “For we know that the whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth until now.” (Romans 8:22) It’s obvious that the entire created order is being subjected to the decay caused by human greed: sin, as Paul says in that chapter. And the remedy was already muted in verse 19: “For the creation waits in eager expectation for the children of God to be revealed.”(NIV)

If “nature”, or “the Creation” as the Bible calls it, is nothing but dead matter and non-intelligent energy, then why would it “wait with eager longing” for anything at all? It wouldn’t.

Paul describes a more helpful response than is common in today’s world. It is neither bravado, nor cowering in fear. Hope is trust that God will make sense out of our actions, even if the results of this action are not seen quickly (see verse 24). Earlier in Romans, Paul wrote: “endurance produces character, and character produces hope” (Romans 5:4).

Thus, all our responses are fitting for bearers of the gospel; “good news”, not a counsel of despair, or anger, or hatred. The source and model of hope is Jesus himself. The good news is that Jesus has come and has fulfilled all the hopes written in the Law and the Prophets. Jesus said: “Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them.” (Matthew 5:17.) He does not cancel them, but fulfills them, he “fills them up” – that is, he fills up the original intention of what the Law and the Prophets were truly getting at.

Since we believe that the Old Testament spelled out clearly our mandate to “till and guard” the garden, the understanding of the continuation of that mandate is suggested strongly by St. Paul’s message that “the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God.” That is: those who show themselves by their conduct to be true offspring of the Holy God. From them we shouldn’t expect to find any greed or selfishness in the way they do their work. Paul isn’t talking about multiple Messiahs here. His epistles spell out clearly that all who follow Jesus are “sons” (or daughters) of God; but there is only one Messiah.

Jesus trusted that the church would be the epicentre of God’s kingdom. Yet He did not at all limit the Holy Spirit to the confines of a church or Temple. The Acts of the Apostles disrupts any neat patterns for the order of events for belief, water baptism, and baptism in the Holy Spirit. The Bible gives us reasons to expect that signs of hope will crop up in places where the church does not expect to find them.

Today there is an increasing sense of hopelessness. An increasing number say: ‘everything we do to make the environment better only ends up making things worse.’ Many among them are ‘Generation Z’ in their 20s. Despair is in the ‘zeitgeist’, the spirit of the age. The counsel of despair is the natural human tendency when sources of hope decline. Also, there is increasing backlash against all experts, and with every wave of bad news there is an equal and opposite backlash against bad news bearers, as if they were the cause of bad news. People will generate reasons for “shooting the messenger” in such a time. St. Paul wrote in his first letter to the church in Corinth: “What do I gain if, humanly speaking, I fought with beasts at Ephesus? If the dead are not raised, ‘Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die.’” (1 Cor. 15:32)

He recognized that despair doesn’t lead people to more or better action, but rather to inaction and self-destructive behaviours. The resurrection of Jesus gives all a hope for new life to come. In the verses following he compares the resurrection body to a plant growing out from a seed.

I see several reasons for the sort of hope that can and should guide our own individual choices, and way of life.

The ground of hope is God, not technology. Any technological change that merely tinkers with the 20th century’s ways of doing things will not move the needle enough to make the kind of difference we need to see. If all we do is exchange one technology for another, without challenging any fundamental ideas about how we choose to live our lives, then even a massive technological transformation is unlikely to help, ultimately. However, this is not a reason for despair, as some would make it out to be. Instead, we should see it as a challenge to our current assumptions and values. If we are ready to change those basic assumptions and values (and this is what New Testament Greek calls metanoia, ‘to change your mind’, usually translated: ‘to repent’) then we may stand a chance. There is good reason to hope that ‘Gen Z’ finds better ways to live in cities, and makes that the ‘new normal’. In the next article I will go into more specific detail, with examples that give us added hope. Biblical hope is better than simple optimism, and it is better than ‘making lemonade’ out of life’s ‘lemons’ there is a God-given creativity that inspires some to do that, and do better!

Next issue: Part 2 specific reasons for hope.