For now, we acknowledge ourselves to be “strangers and exiles on the earth,” greeting divine promises from afar (Hebrews 11:13), recognizing we’re not at home. Not yet. But oh, do we have hope that we already taste.

Among the many hopes challenged, if not dashed, in the last year have been civic hopes. Perhaps we in Minneapolis have felt this more acutely than those elsewhere, but we’re not alone.

Between lockdowns and social unrest, cities have faced new setbacks and fresh threats. Cries for justice, directed at governing authorities, might, at best, find some earthly and human answer in this life—at best. But justice in this age does not make up for lost time, and even more, cannot bring back lost lives. The justice our cities hope for, and work for, is inevitably human, not divine.

The best of our cities are as deeply broken as their people. And they will not find real, though modest, healing and restoration without men and women of genuine hope. And perhaps no place in all the Bible pulls back the curtain for us, as it were, on the anatomy and psychology of Christian hope, as the epistle to the Hebrews. At the letter’s height (chapters 10-12), we see how hope worked in the life of Moses, Jesus, and the early church—and how we might hold on to real hope in the challenges we have faced, and that still lie ahead.

He Looked Past Wealth

The story of the greatest event in the Old Testament, the exodus, begins with the story of its greatest figure, Moses. God foiled the scheme of the serpent, who tried to eliminate the coming deliverer of God’s people by wiping out every male child under Pharaoh. God raised up the instrument of his rescue by first rescuing him from slaughter. Put in an ark, and found by Pharaoh’s daughter, the deliverer grew up in the very house of the one who tried to snuff him out.

And “when he was grown up,” this Moses made a remarkable choice: he “refused to be called the son of Pharaoh’s daughter, choosing rather to be mistreated with the people of God than to enjoy the fleeting pleasures of sin” (Hebrews 11:24-25). This he did “by faith.” How did that work? We read, “He considered the reproach of Christ greater wealth than the treasures of Egypt, for he was looking to the reward” (Hebrews 11:26).

This is what faith does: it looks around at the present treasures of the unbelieving world, and despite what’s visible to our natural eyes, it looks through and beyond. It looks past the secondary reality we see with physical eyes to the primary realities of God, his word, and its revealed purposes and promises. Moses had learned that God called Abraham out of unbelief, and promised to make him a nation, and fulfill through his lineage the ancient promise of an offspring to crush the serpent’s head (Genesis 3:15). And Moses was no stranger to the rearing of those ancient fangs. As he came of age, he had a choice to make.

Even so, how could Moses refuse the wealth and privilege and comfort and ease surrounding him in the palace of unbelieving Egypt? Only as he looked “to the reward.” Not the passing, nearby treasures of the present but the lasting, far-off treasure to come, in the future, based on the promises of God. This future dimension—faith applied not just to the present but what’s to come—is what we often call hope.

So, the life of Moses turned on hope. He looked through, and past, the short-lived joys that surrounded him in the wealth and unbelief of Egypt, and he embraced a path of immediate reproach and mistreatment for the greater treasures that he saw coming in Christ.

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