Existential loneliness and pain are everyday realities because I believe:

Behind every smile, there is emptiness;
In every embrace there is the reality of parting;
In every friendship, inadequate disclosure;
In all forms of light, shadows;
In every success, futility; in every toil, weariness;
Without God, His love, a sense of meaning;
Without the resurrected body and eternal life,
There is only abyssal darkness—journey into oblivion.

I wrote those words for my book, The Resurrected Body—Y2K and Beyond. In our post-September 11 world, fear and uncertainty grip the hearts of many. When certainty and security are illusive and illusory, these words perhaps take on an even greater poignancy.

This week’s lesson focuses on 1 Corinthians 15, the glorious resurrection chapter. The Messiah by Handel captures this chapter’s stirring words:

We shall not all sleep; but we shall all be changed in a moment.…The trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed.…O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory? But thanks be to God who giveth us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.

Indeed, the resurrection of Christ is the sine qua non of Christianity. On or with the reality of this singular event stand or fall the Christian faith and all its related structures. The Apostle Paul pinpoints this truth well when he says, "And if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith. More than that, we are then found to be false witnesses about God…," or "misrepresenting God" (1 Cor.15:14–15).

In the Old Testament, Job under inspiration adumbrates the resurrection of the body. Whenever I hear Elizabeth Harwood sing, "I know that my Redeemer liveth," I experientially know (I firmly believe and am convinced) that one-redeeming-me lives (is alive), and in the end he will stand upon the earth (dust of the grave). And after they destroy this my skin, yet in my flesh (or apart from or out of my decayed flesh and in my glorious resurrected body) I will see God (my translation from Heb. in Job 19: 25, 26).

In the New Testament, this Christian hope is a recurrent, major theme. It is a coping resource in the face of discouragement, despair, defeat, disaster, disease, and death. Hope bridges for the Christian the sufferings and imperfection of this world with the glorious eternal life yet to come. (See Acts 23:6; Rom. 4:18; 5:5; 8:24; 1 Cor. 13:13; 1 Cor. 15; Col. 1:27; 1 Thess. 2:19; Titus 1:2, 3:7; Heb. 6:19; 1 Pet. 1:3.)

Psychologically, hope is a strong human desire coupled with expectation for fulfillment. Its content includes cognition, thinking, emotion and affect, belief and faith. Hope is joy in anticipation. In the Christian context, the basis of all genuine hope is a loving, Almighty God who cannot lie. Hope is a powerful positive emotion that God uses to deliver us from depression and despair, to lift us to a higher plane, and to give us peace and joy.

For Christians, the hope of our hope—what is it?

Go with me to the hills of Golgotha that Friday evening. What could be more hopeless than to see that Jesus has died on the cross? God, who was to save us, is hanging on the cross, and the world goes back to do its own thing. All the followers have left by now. All you hear is the howling of wild animals. Where is God? Does he care? Why doesn’t he speak? Why doesn’t he do something? Where is justice? What is love? Quo vadis? (Whither goest thou?) Where do we go from here?

A Sabbath intervenes only with the silence of God—with only hope to hang on seeming hopelessness. But Christian hope is tenacious, firmly grounded in faith that God’s promise will not fail.

Then comes Sunday morning, hope against hope, he is risen, indeed! He lives, he lives! So shall we, since he is the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep, proclaims the Apostle Paul.

Sadly, for many Christians, the hope of our hope is at best vague, at worse an issue of secondary importance. In certain circles, the thought of resurrection, because it occurred on Sunday, is subconsciously suppressed lest it add validation to keeping other than the Saturday Sabbath. Such doctrinal insularity is unfortunate. No matter how one tries to memorialize creation, the old creation is fallen. Our hope is in redemption, in the restoration to perfect wholeness in the new creation vouchsafed to us by Jesus’ resurrection.

The Adventist faith focuses a great deal on Jesus’ Second Coming and the end of the world. The pivotal text is Jesus’ own saying, "No one knows about that day or hour, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son [while encumbered with human flesh living on earth] but only the Father" (Matt. 24:36; Mark13:32).

To take the guesswork and anxiety from parousial miscalculation, I propose the following: every one can know approximately the time span within which Jesus’ Second Coming will occur for him or her. Even with all the advances in medicine and geriatrics, 120 years probably would be the top limit of human life span. Thus you and I know for sure that we cannot live beyond the year 20__. You can fill in the last two digits by a number after subtracting your age in the year 2000 from 120. For example, if you are 65 years old at the dawn of the third millennium, that number will be 55 (120 minus 65). In other words, the end of the world for you cannot be later than 2055 A.D. It could be much sooner, of course—in fact anytime between now and 2055.

But what are we supposed to be doing here on earth while waiting to die—to be borne into eternal life, that is, for the believers.

Paul writes "Faith, hope, and love abide." It may not be coincidental that Paul mediates hope between faith and love. We are to be grounded in our faith, buoyed up by our Christian hope, and only then we can truly love. In faith, we hope for his soon return and for the consummation of the cosmic conflict. As Christians, we long for that eternal rest. We eagerly await our resurrected body for total fulfillment. In the interim, yes, we engage in loving service to others.

Thus, our hope is not idle, wasteful, or pollyannaish. It is constructive, purposeful, steady, sure, and secure. It is so because the basis of our hope is Jesus, who cannot lie. This hope of all our hopes does not make us ashamed because our God the Grantor of hope is faithful and will not renege on his promise. Our hope is authentic and affirmed because its Guarantor is the Holy Spirit, who is ever present with us and provides us with the inner confirmation that our hope is real and that God can be trusted.

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