Every day every Christian may, and surely should, renew his or her grip on the promise and the prayer, take a long look ahead, and say with Paul, “Yes, we are of good courage, and we would rather be away from the body and at home with Lord” (2 Cor. 5:8).

This post is adapted from Weakness Is the Way: Life with Christ Our Strength by J. I. Packer. Watch a series of videos in which Dr. Packer reflects on his life, ministry, and key doctrines for the church today at JIPacker.com.

“Where there’s life, there’s hope” is a deep truth. Deeper, however, is the converse: “Where there’s hope, there’s life.”

We humans are hoping creatures; we live very largely on and in our anticipations, things we know are coming and we look forward to. If the light of hope goes out, life shrinks to mere existence, something far less than life was meant to be. This is a fact that must be faced.

It was a Headmaster’s Conference boys’ school, one of England’s educational elite, and amid its quite brilliant galaxy of instructors the scholar who stood out was the man we called Bill (behind his back, of course), the headmaster. When I studied Greek and Latin classics at Oxford, I met up with no tutor who could hold a candle to Bill or could teach me half as much as Bill had taught me already. He was a clergyman’s son who had retreated from the faith and become a sort of Buddhist.

Decades later, chatting with one of my former pedagogues, I asked after Bill, by then retired and, as I knew, in his early nineties. The reply to my question, based on a recent visit, ran thus (I seem to recall it word for word): “He’s very low. I asked him what he was doing these days; all he would say was, ‘Waiting for the end.’” Remembering the sharp-edged, upbeat vigor of Bill’s mind in his heyday, I felt very sad for him. Buddhism, as we know, does not beget hope. So here was a long-lived man, brilliant in his day, now withering rather than blossoming as he aged. Is that the best one can hope for?

Hope At the End

“Hope springs eternal in the human breast,” declared Alexander Pope in his usual pompous way, but that is not all the story. For the first half of people’s lives, spontaneous hope does indeed spur them forward. Children hope to do this and that when they grow up; teens hope to go places and do things when they have some money; newlyweds hope for a good income, a good place to live, and good-quality children; established couples hope for the day when the children will be off their hands and they are free to cruise, tour, and see the world. But what then?

There comes a point at which the elderly and those who, as we say, are getting on realize that of all the things they wanted to do, they have done all they can, and the rest are now permanently out of reach (“life’s too short,” we say wryly).

Yet life goes on. Today, indeed, people live longer than once they did, but the common experience is that extended and extreme age brings only bleak boredom and a diminished sense of the good life as consisting merely of three meals a day, television to watch, and a bed at night. Whether, as bodily health fades and minds and memories run increasingly amok, any better, more enriching experience of old age is possible is a question that secular social theory has shown itself unable to answer.

But the Bible appears to have an answer.

Future Glory

What does the Bible give us that secular theory cannot match?

In a word, hope: hope understood not in the weak sense of optimistic whistling in the dark, but in the strong sense of certainty about what is coming because God himself has promised it. This hope is unique in the fields of both religion and philosophy. The philosopher Kant observed that the question, what may I hope for? is one of the most important questions one can ever ask, but he did not claim he could answer it.

The Bible, however, speaks directly to it, setting before those who are Christ’s a destiny that reaches beyond this world to a kaleidoscope of wonders, enrichments, and delights to which it gives the generic name “glory.” This destiny is big and exciting, and the New Testament writers show that they felt it to be so.

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