Against all hope, Abraham in hope believed and so became the father of many nations, just as it had been said to him, “So shall your offspring be.” Without weakening in his faith, he faced the fact that his body was as good as dead—since he was about a hundred years old—and that Sarah’s womb was also dead. Yet he did not waver through unbelief regarding the promise of God, but was strengthened in his faith and gave glory to God, being fully persuaded that God had power to do what he had promised. Rom 4:18-21
Have you ever tried living without hope? It’s a strange dilemma. Either you hope and you hurt, because hope means you have not yet received, or you lose hope and your heart begins to die slowly. Do you hope against all hope or decide it’s hopeless? Elsewhere in scripture it says, “Now faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see.” I guess when you put it that way, we all have faith in something, even if it’s not in God. Because you can’t just not hope, for without hope you die inside. So then the question becomes, where do you put your hope? What do you put your faith in?
You could put hope in your spouse, in your friends, or in your dreams for the future. It isn’t always obvious what you have put your faith/hope in until you hit an obstacle to that hope becoming a reality. When faced with an obstacle, feelings of anger and anxiety emerge. If you put your hope in your dreams for the future, what happens when you hit an obstacle? You will start to become angry and anxious because you have so much on the line.
The situation may be out of your control, but you have so much hope in what those dreams will do for you. So what do you do? You may grab for control, even if control means settling for something less than what you hoped for. That way you can ensure you have what you put your hope in. That’s what Sarah and Abraham did with Ishmael. If what we have put our hope in fails us, we have to find something else to put our hope in or else we become hopeless and life doesn’t seem worth living. Our hearts die slowly, leaving us as an empty shell. That is why hope is best placed in God.
It seems evident from the passage that hope is sabotaged by unbelief. And unbelief paves the way to sin. Not convinced? Before Adam and Eve sinned they started to waver in their belief about God and listened to another voice. The enemy planted unbelief by twisting Adam and Eve’s view of God, “God lied to you. He told you not to eat of the tree because He knows you will be like Him. He’s afraid of you. His intentions are not good.”
Satan deceived them about two truths. He said they would become like God; he made sin attractive. Then he lied in saying nothing bad would happen as a result of sin. In essence, he said sin is good and sin will not lead to death. He also cast on shadow on God's intentions - that God was really the Enemy, He was the One holding them back from true life. Deception came before the fall. The reality is that sin is not only bad, it does lead to death; like a poision, it slowly kills us inwardly.
To have hope is a battle. But without hope, how can we endure this life? Sometimes when you have hope you feel foolish. After all, what we want has not yet materialized, so how can we be so sure that it will happen? What evidence do we really have that it will happen? That our dreams will come true? In this sense, you have to be a fool to hope. And that’s what we all want to avoid, isn’t it? We want to avoid being a fool. We think, ‘why would you hope against all hope? When the evidence seems so contrary to it ever happening?’ But hope has a powerful effect. Hope produces perseverance and endurance. Hope means that we have something to look forward to and so enables us to press on; it lets us know life is worth living.
