Wednesday, August 2, 2023 PM

We thank you for your mercies that were new this morning. Lord, thank you for the love and the unity that we have in Christ. And I pray that you would bless our lesson time, that as we take up your word, that we would consider it rightfully and that it would be a benefit to us, help us to praise our Redeemer more.

We ask these things in Christ's holy name, amen. So where would we be without hope? How could we make it through this life without hope? What carries us through the storms of this life when its breakers threaten to smash us against the rocks over and over again?

And how do we endure when enemies surround us on all sides, hurling their taunts and their threats and their insults? Or what if the enemy is within, a disease that marches relentlessly through the body without pity, promising to extinguish our vigor and our vitality?

How do we keep going when the suffering is not measured in days or weeks, but in months and years? What enables us to hold on through the dark nights of the soul, when the clouds of despair block out the light so thoroughly that we can't see anything rightly?

And how do we get up day after day when a loved one or even ourselves are failing, the body growing weak and the eyes growing dim? And what do we hold on to when a son or daughter is in deep distress and we can't fix it?

And all we can do is pray and weep and cry out to the Lord. Where would we be without hope? Now, these are important questions. They're questions that the world desperately longs to find answers for. But in the end, the world's answers heal only slightly and they treat merely the symptoms and those just superficially.

This is because they reject the cure. But we know the answer to these questions. We know that there is a hope that carries the weary soul into the very presence of God, where every trouble melts and every tear is wiped away.

It's a gracious thing that God cares about our hope. He knows that we need it. Therefore, the Bible is chock full of it. And he intends to fill up our souls to the brim.

With it.

May the God of hope, the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing so that the power of the Holy Spirit may abound in you. Romans 15, 13. God, our Father, the maker of all things, seated on heaven's throne, right now smiling down on our gathering in his son's name, he is committed to your abounding in hope.

That ought to blow us away. That ought to make us fall down on our knees in worship. So let's take some time to meditate upon the hope that God supplies, and Lord willing, it'll be an encouragement to us.

The Hope of the Righteous and the Wicked in Proverbs 10:28

And we're gonna begin by looking at Proverbs 10, 28, and that'll be our main text for the evening. You can turn in your Bibles if you'd like, or it's written at the top of the board. So Proverbs 10, 28 says, the hope of the righteous brings joy, but the expectation of the wicked will perish.

So the hope of the righteous brings joy, but the expectation of the wicked will perish. So here we have Solomon by the inspiration of the Holy Spirit using an antithetical principle of parallelism, so there's your $5 word for the day, an antithetical parallelism to make a point through two contrasting statements.

The first statement, the hope of the righteous brings joy. The contrasting statement, the expectation of the wicked will perish. So let's quickly break down these parallel statements to help us see what Solomon is getting at.

There are three things set in parallel. Each statement has a person who has a possession that produces a product or an outcome. So in the first statement, who is the person or persons?

The righteous.

And what does the righteous possess or have that produces something else? They have hope. And what does that hope produce?

Joy.

Okay, now who's the person in the second statement?

The wicked.

And what does the wicked have? They have an expectation. And what does that expectation produce or what's its outcome?

It perishes.

So this, notice that this expectation is just a synonym for hope. So we could just as easily read this, that the hope of the righteous brings joy and the hope of the wicked will perish. So what is clear from this passage is that, interestingly, the righteous and the wicked both have hope.

But what is also clear from this passage, and it's the main point of the passage, is that these two hopes are fundamentally and qualitatively different. And we see that in the two radically different and diametrically opposed outcomes.

Noah Webster's 1828 Dictionary defines hope as a desire of some good accompanied with at least a slight expectation of obtaining it or a belief that it is obtainable. Hope differs from wish and desire in this, that it implies some expectation of obtaining the good desired or the possibility of possessing it.

Hope, therefore, always gives pleasure or joy, whereas wish and desire may produce or be accompanied with pain and anxiety. So three things to note in that definition. One, hope has a future outlook, a desire for some future good, something of value.

And two, hope is driven by some amount of confidence, a belief that you will someday obtain this future good. And third, hope always produces joy. So to help illustrate our Bible verse further, let's talk about trees.

Okay, so this tree in the middle represents the righteous person from our passage. And I'm gonna start by putting hope right here in the middle. And so it's represented by some big main branch inside the canopy.

But that's not all that's inside of this canopy. There's other things like peace and long-suffering and gentleness and kindness and endurance. It's a very fruitful tree and there's a lot of good things in it.

Now, our passage tells us that from this hope springs joy. So I'm gonna put joy up here above it. So joy is growing out of hope. Now, there's one more relationship that's maybe not so easy to see, but it's implied in our passage.

And that's that hope stands on top of something else. Hope stands on faith. And so you may be thinking, where did you get that? So the hope of the righteous brings joy. I see the hope and I see the joy.

Where are you getting this reference to faith? So in Romans 4, Paul argues that everyone who is justified is justified by faith, including the Old Testament saints. And he uses Abraham as an example. For Abraham was not justified by works, but rather he believed God and it was accounted to him as righteousness.

So there's the connection between faith and righteousness. Righteousness is imputed to the one who has faith in God. So we don't need to be disturbed when we encounter the generic righteous person in the scriptures and think, oh, isn't that a contradiction?

Doesn't the Bible teach that there is none righteous? No, not one. Yes, it does. And no, it's not a contradiction because this is an alien righteousness, a righteousness that is a gift received by faith, a faith that produces hope and a hope that produces joy.

So over on the far end, we have another tree in parallel, we have the tree that represents the wicked from our passage. And Solomon tells us that this tree also has hope. So I'm gonna write it in here.

I hope you can all see that. And then Webster observes that all hope produces some kind of joy. And then the nature of hope necessitates that it's spring forth from some kind of belief. So I'm gonna write this as faith for the sake of the parallelism, but the Bible doesn't call this faith.

So we're just using the word in its generic sense of to believe something. And I'm writing these with lowercase letters to help us remember that there is a qualitative and a fundamental difference between the two, even though we're using the same terms.

So these are the main relationships of hope within our trees. But there are some larger relationships beyond the tree that can help us understand these fundamental and qualitative differences. So the first one is that our hope and our joy and our faith all have a foundation or a basis underneath them, a reason for existing, grounds to stand upon, something they are drawing their strength from.

And just like with a house, the integrity of the foundation is a key factor in whether the whole structure stands or falls. Now, some of the grounds given for our hope in the Bible are God's word itself, his rules and his precepts, God's promises, the faithfulness of God, and we could go on and on.

So you can see that this is very rich and sturdy soil, and it is able to supply this tree with all the nutrients it needs to grow and mature and produce all kinds of fruit. Now, the second relationship is that our hope and our joy and our faith all have an object.

Okay, so now we're going above the tree. They have a focus. They have something that they are looking to, something that they are growing toward. And if you've ever sat a little plant by a window in your house, you know that it starts off looking really nice with its leaves spread out like this, and after like a week or so, it looks like this because it's growing toward the sunlight.

And that's exactly what our tree is doing here. It is growing toward and basking in the glory of the sun. This is the object of its faith. The goal of its hope and the center of its joy. So what are some of the things that the righteous are hoping for?

What are some of the things that you, as believers, are hoping for? Just holler out if something comes to mind. That's right, amen. The appearing of Christ and the resurrection, the bodily resurrection of the saints.

We'll see red again. The Bible, now, I just wrote these for your reference. You can look them up later and check me if you want, but I just wanted you to see the plethora of verses that have to deal with these things, especially the object of our hope.

And it's not exhaustive. But some of the things that I saw in the Bible is we hope in God's salvation. We hope in his steadfast love. We hope in redemption, in light and truth. We hope in justice, like Brother Michael said, resurrection.

We hope to see the glory of God and to be conformed to the image of Christ. We hope in righteousness and a glorious inheritance. We hope to be not ashamed. We hope that Christ will be glorified in us and that others will know Christ and praise his name.

We hope for eternal life. We hope for God's blessing. So we've looked at the foundation and the object of our hope, but there's a third relationship that I see in scripture, and you can test me on this.

I'm going to call it the means of hope. When we read about hope in God's promises, we understand that our hope rests on his faithfulness to keep those promises. And that forms part of hope's foundation.

When we read about hoping in resurrection, for example, we understand that our resurrection is yet future and it is an object of our hope. But what does it mean when we read things like Christ is our hope?

Or we read things like about hoping in God himself. Does it mean that God is the foundation of our hope? Or does it mean that God is the object of our hope? I think it certainly implies both those things, but I think it also points to more.

Consider what it means to hope in a person. For example, someone says, I hope in the president of the United States. Yeah, that's a poor place to put your hope. But some people might say that. So they're not saying that the president is the object of my hope.

They're not saying that someday I think that I'm going to obtain the president. What they mean is, or the object of that hope would be something like tax reform or like a lower crime rate. That's what they're hoping for.

And the president isn't necessarily the foundation of that hope either. The foundation is more like the power and the authority and the resources of the office of president. And that certainly includes the president's integrity and his faithfulness to keep his campaign promises.

But hoping in the president, I think would mean something like, I believe that the president, based upon that foundation, will act to bring my hope into reality. He will be the active agent by which my hope will be realized.

And so as we read through the scriptures, we see a lot of verses that talk about God like this, that God is our hope, or to hope in God, or Christ is our hope, or hope in Christ, or how the spirit is an active agent in our hope.

So the point is that our hope isn't static. There's an actor behind it, and he will bring it to pass for the righteous. So all that said, I hope that we see the love and the care of the triune God for that tree.

So underneath it, we have the word of God. In the beginning was the word, and that word became flesh and dwelt among us. Here we have the promises of God. And in Christ, all of those promises are yes.

And here we have the faithfulness of God, which is mediated to us through King Jesus. And then you have up here, as the object of our hope, you have salvation, you have resurrection, you have eternal life in the presence of God forever and ever.

And all of those things are ours in Christ. And here in the middle, you have the power of God working through the spirit of Christ. And so it's like there's these two giant hands around this tree, guarding it and protecting it.

And this tree, it will be buffeted by winds and storms will come, and there may even be earthquakes, but who can separate us from the love of Christ? Who can snatch us out of his hands? Now let's talk about the wicked briefly by way of example.

So imagine that there is a man whose greatest hope in life is to win the lottery. So the object of his hope is winning the lottery. His joy is in money, in wealth, luxury, comfort, maybe fame. The foundation of this hope is maybe something like, he thinks that it's his destiny to win the lottery.

We'll go kind of mystical here. He thinks it's his destiny to win the lottery. And the actor here would be maybe fate or the universe. The universe is gonna bring this about for him. We immediately detect the deficiency of this scenario.

The wicked puts his faith in temporary things, and he sets his eyes on temporary things. And what does he get? He gets a temporary hope and a temporary joy, both of which will perish with him in the judgment.

Even if he got what he hoped for in this life, even if he ended up winning the lottery somehow, we know that he still loses. For what does it profit a man if he gains the whole world and loses his soul?

His hope is as good as dead. And this is the heart of the matter. This is the fundamental difference between the two hopes. The apostle Peter states it positively this way. It says, blessed be the God and father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who according to his abundant mercy has begotten us again unto a living hope, right?

Unto a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead to an inheritance, incorruptible, undefiled, and that fades not away, reserved in heaven for you who are kept by the power of God through faith for salvation for a time that is ready to be revealed.

We have a hope that is alive because our God lives, because our risen redeemer lives, and because his spirit lives in us. And the main qualitative difference that flows from this virtue of being alive is that our hope, unlike that of the wicked's will never perish.

It will live on until we receive every single thing that God has promised us in Christ in its fullness. Now, someone out there might be thinking, but my hope does not feel that robust. My joy feels so small.

Boy, howdy, I'm kind of getting choked up. What does all this mean for me? Well, first of all, we can thank God that our feelings and our emotions do not dictate ultimate reality. But at the same time, feeling like your joy and your hope is distant is a real problem.

So how do we get lost hope and joy back? If you have a lack of joy, in John 15, Jesus talks about how he is the vine and we are the branches. We are to abide in him and he will abide in us through his words.

And in verse 11, he says that he tells us this so that his joy might be in us and that our joy might be full. So examine yourselves. Is your joy absent because you're not abiding with Christ? Are you spending time in the word, treasuring it and meditating upon it?

Do you have a lack of hope? Check the foundations of the tree. Are you trying to stand on something besides Jesus Christ? Check the aim of your affections. Have worldly desires crept in and filled your heart with lesser hopes?

If you find yourself deficient in hope and love or hope and joy, ask your heavenly father to provide. Even the unjust judge gives to the persistent widow eventually. Even the wicked know how to give their children good gifts, but God is not like man.

He is not stingy and neither are his resources limited. He will not withhold what is good from his children when they ask him. So follow David's example in Psalm 51, where he pleads with the Lord, restore to me the joy of your salvation and uphold me with a willing spirit.

Also, preach to yourself. The psalmist says over and over again to himself, why are you cast down, oh my soul? Hope in God. Remember and believe his many promises. If you need help preaching to yourself, I suggest you study Lamentations chapter three and see how Jeremiah preached to himself when his hope felt weak.

And this last one is not so much a method of getting hope and joy back, but it's really a corporate safeguard against losing it in the first place. And that's care for one another. Exhort one another every day as long as it is called today that none of you may be hardened by the deceitfulness of sin.

Help each other to recall God's promises and his past faithfulness. Help each other to base our confidence on God's steadfast love rather than our own feelings. He will never leave you and he will never forsake you.

Help each other to see Christ as your most valuable treasure. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also. So I'll conclude by returning to our initial question. Where would we be without hope?

We can praise God that for the believer, there's really no such thing as being without hope. There are many times and seasons when we don't feel it and maybe we can't see it. And it might even be a lifelong battle like it was for William Cooper.

But the reality is that for the believer, there is always hope because our hope is alive in every sense of the word. Weeping may tarry for the night, but joy, the joy that springs from hope comes in the morning.

We have a couple of minutes. Any thoughts or questions real quick?

Okay.

Ken, would you mind to come do, take requests?