Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) notes that the 40 days of Lent lasts for 46 calendar days because Sundays don’t count … they are already holy but your “give up” applies.

Spirituality Column #474
December 15, 2015
Current in Carmel-Westfield-Noblesville-Fishers-Zionsville-Geist

By Bob Walters

“We have this hope as an anchor …” – Hebrews 6:19

“Hope” the verb indirectly suggests fear and doubt about pending outcomes.

“Hope” the noun is the forthright acceptance of God’s truth.

As action, hope the verb generally designates worldly reservation, akin to wishing, supposing, wanting, desiring, or even coveting.  We hope our ball team wins the game, we’d like to think the best of people, it’d be nice to get that raise, “Why can’t we all just get along?” and “Wow, that sure is a nice car!”   Even praying for healing – for ourselves or others – probably expresses more of a temporal wish (relief from pain and inconvenience) than assured, faith-filled forfeiture to God’s eternal will.

That hope, the noun identifying man’s faithful, intellectual, God-ordained understanding of the fact of God’s glory, love, eternity and Creation, is necessary hope.  It is far larger than merely wishing to dodge the discomforts, disappointments and dismay of this fallen world.

The word “hope” appears more times in the book of Job than anywhere else in the Bible except for Psalms.  Ironically, “hope” goes unmentioned in the Gospels.

Job, the Old Testament book depicting Satan’s mischief, worldly misery, man’s doubt, interpersonal frustration and God’s confident righteousness, exposes temporal human hope – the verb – as inadequate in this fallen world.  Divine hope – the noun – creates a personal, peace-bestowing glow when shared with the eternal being of God.

The Psalms offer great hymns and prayers of the faithful, the scared, the downtrodden, the exultant, the penitent, and most especially – overarchingly – the hopeful who desire to see God’s face, know God’s presence, and share God’s love.  The psalmists pray – they hope – for a day when God’s righteousness will be apparent.

Turns out, that day of hope wasn’t what anyone was expecting.

Certainly, hope arrives in the Gospels as God’s supreme gift to mankind, but in the humble, loving, shrewd, unwavering, truth-teaching, parable-spouting, miracle-working person of Jesus Christ.  Fully God and fully man, Christ is our hope.  Many souls miss that Godly message because Jesus isn’t the “fixer” we hoped for, humility isn’t what we wanted, and loving our enemies isn’t what we had in mind.

Fallen man’s typical expression of hope is focused desperation; a plea for favor. Godly, broadband hope anchors itself in the gift of Jesus Christ: eternity with God.

While the Gospels reveal the perfect image of God’s glory in Jesus Christ (Hebrews 1:3), Paul describes God’s gift of hope to the faithful human intellect, a gift that facilitates and illuminates God’s eternal plan: the Glory-to-come of faithful believers.

In the here and now, we fear, we doubt.

Life in Christ, that’s what hope’s really about.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) doesn’t “hope it’s true;” he’s thankful for truth.

Spirituality Column #405
August 19, 2014
Current in Carmel-Westfield-Noblesville-Fishers-Zionsville

By Bob Walters

For countless years innumerable scholars with immeasurably more Bible savvy than I possess have made the case for and against Who, exactly, Jesus says He is.

Christian doctrine is that Jesus of Nazareth, the fully-human child conceived in the Virgin Mary by the Holy Spirit, is the Messiah Christ, the fully-divine eternal son of God.  It’s easy to piece that together from the first chapters of the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, who go into some detail about the birth, person, and divinity of Jesus.

The Gospels of Mark and John blow right past the birth story.  Mark opens with the adult Jesus beginning His ministry.  John’s Gospel begins by clearly describing the Cosmic, eternal, heaven-stretching, Covenant re-writing magnitude of the human incarnation (worldly birth) of the eternal Word of God – Jesus Christ.

And yet, there are those who will dismiss the Bible as just an old book of stories about a mythic teacher spouting outdated, non-intellectual moral lessons; that the whole Jesus “thing” is just one of many fairy tales clung to by naïve people refusing to face the reality of an impossibly pointless, unfair, fallen world.

Honestly, I’ve always been more optimistic than “pointless and unfair,” but before coming to Christ in 2001 and years of study since, hanging absolute “truth” within the context of Jesus Christ and the Bible made no sense to me.  I’d point to little nuggets of “intellectual” insight about the Bible’s inconsistencies.  One of my favorites is, “Jesus never says He is the Son of God.”  HA!  That proves the Bible is wrong.

No … it proves I wasn’t expending the intellectual energy necessary to investigate what the Bible truly is and what the Bible truly says.

The Bible is, without argument, the most “proven” ancient book in existence.  Folks love to deny its inspiration, malign its authenticity, diminish its authority, ridicule its practicality and creatively misread even its most plainly clear information.  But better not say the Bible lacks an immaculate historical pedigree.

As for what the Bible says, understand it as God’s story, not ours.  When we think it is all about us, we start on the wrong foot, go in the wrong direction, and get lost in the wrong lessons.

True, Jesus never says, “I am the Son of God here to die for your salvation.”  But the Old Testament prophets tell us all we need to know about Him, and Jesus repeatedly agrees with those who ask if He is the Messiah (e.g. Matthew 27:11, Mark 14:62, Luke 23:3, John 18:37).  Most of the time Jesus answers, “I am.” 

And that agrees with the Old Testament.

Exactly.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) figures Jesus shouldn’t have to tell us Who He is.