Highlights in Hebrews
(with Roger Kirby)
Part 17 - Hebrews 6:18-19
Hope is an anchor
God did this so that, by two unchangeable things in which it is impossible for God to lie, we who have fled to take hold of the hope set before us may be greatly encouraged. We have this hope as an anchor for the soul, firm and secure. It enters the inner sanctuary behind the curtain,
Hope is the desire for something longed for. At school it was perhaps to be in the top team; then it became the hope that our new computer would be as good as we hoped; then we hope for a good and loving life mate; for a happy and enriching family; for a satisfying and rewarding job. In all probability it is only when we reach old age that we begin to think of hope in terms of what might happen when we die. Hope stands out in the New Testament as something to be sought and it is about the last of those things. We, in the more developed parts of the world anyway, are little concerned with such thoughts. They, in the writer’s days, had a life expectancy probably only in the 40s or 50s and a good chance of dying at any age. We, with all the modern medicine available to us, can expect to go on in a reasonable state of health much longer than that. It is therefore no wonder that we are less concerned with hope than they were. They will have been much more used to seeing people die young or not very old. We hide the thoughts away for many years until we come to the point where we begin to hope we shall not get dementia, or will not only die until after a long and painful illness. And what happens next is not a major consideration until we are so set in our ways and beliefs that we have no real hope.
New Testament hope is quite different. Paul talks of “the glorious riches of this mystery, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory” (Colossians 1: 27). It is that part of hope that, I am guessing, does not come much into your thinking until you are fairly old. In a way that is not surprising because our natural hopes exist with vast gaps between them. When we are younger that final hope is something that flits in and out of our thoughts at quite rare intervals. But this - hope in our future beyond this life, and in our Lord Jesus - is another matter. If we are members of the Kingdom here on earth we have a great and wonderful hope that we shall still be members after we die.
What guarantee do we have that this will indeed be the case? Our writer says it is as secure as an anchor that is firmly embedded amongst rocks on the sea bottom.
Going back a couple of verses he has said that there are two unchangeable things. It is not obvious what these were but he must be referring to what God said to Abraham after Abraham had passed the terrible test of being prepared to sacrifice his son and thus appearing to destroy the previous promise of God that he would have many descendants. “I swear by myself, declares the Lord …” (Genesis 22: 16). Nothing we experience will ever be as bad as what happened to Abraham. The Lord gave his great promise to Abraham and confirmed it ‘by himself’. In other words our God is totally trustworthy, whatever may be happening to us that seems to prove otherwise. This is our hope. Then, mixing his references up in quite a confusing way our writer says that our anchor is in ‘the inner sanctuary behind the curtain’, which is where the Lord God was thought to reside more than anywhere else.
The rocks between which our anchor is so firmly wedged that it can never be pulled out are our Lord, his person, his Word, our Lord and Master.
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