For I consider the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed into us. For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God. For the creation was subject to futility, not willingly, but because of him who subjected it in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to corruption and obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God. For we know that the whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth even to now. And not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for the adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies. -Romans 8:18-23.
For in this hope we were saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what he sees? For if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience.
There are two kinds of hope. The common hope everybody is familiar is in this fleshly physical world. This kind of “hope” is defined in our public dictionaries. These are things we touch and feel in our material bubble.
The second kind of hope is Spiritual. These are unseen things experienced only by those born-again through grace and our indwelling Holy Spirit. This kind of hope requires Spiritual discipline to grow into substance. Spiritual hope grows in the pursuit of knowing God within His own agape love and our faith. Worldly hope attacks Spiritual hope! Worldly hope is a satanic weapon used by spiritual forces in this world of darkness against our holy creator God … and us!
Spiritual Hope is one of the red Biblical threads binding together the whole context of our “born-again” salvation in Christ Jesus. Life in Jesus is in direct conflict to our physical culture of corruption, condemnation and sin. This is by divine design and Godly purpose. Romans 8 brings into view, for our Spiritual eyes to see, the Spiritual Hope of our salvation. It is part of our salvation package of agape love and grace for our faith to unwrap.
Our growth, in grace, requires changing out from a human hope culture with a perspective on tangible things. We are given Spiritual sight and discernment when we are born-again! Our task is learning to see with spiritual eyes the unseen, spiritual truth from God’s point of view. We must consume grace through His Word in the fellowship of our indwelling Holy Spirit. This task takes personal time and intention!
Our Spiritual hope is defined by our Spiritual knowledge! Our Holy Spirit within us reveals into our understanding God’s point of view! Our goal is to grow our Spiritual Hope and grow into His divine presence, that we might know Him and the power of His resurrection.
We don’t often perceive hope on a divine level but the scripture does! In our minds, it separates us, the creation, from God Himself as the Creator. But in verse 20 we find God subjected the creation in “hope” that the creation itself will be set free from its futility obtaining rather the “glory of the children of God.” Notice here, God subjected the creation in His hope that creation would be set free into the glory of the children of God!
Glory is contained within our “hope.” This is God’s “Hope” for us and His total creation. Born-again people must live within their Spiritual hope while growing in grace! That is, experiencing God’s daily presence in life’s routine of living gives dimension into our Hope.
This raises our idea of “hope” to God’s own divine level! This upgrades our understanding of Spiritual hope into the context of our life in Jesus Himself. We not only have “hope in Christ Jesus,” and are waiting for “hope in righteousness,” we also rejoice in the “hope of the glory of God.” But now we are confronted with the idea that God has “hope” in our freedom from the bondage of corruption. This is one of the “mysteries” of the gospel we have access to grow into via God’s grace.
In other words, our certitude, our level of conviction, our “hope” is available in the absolute divine level of God Himself. In fact, when “hope” is used as a verb in scripture, it sometimes is translated “trust.” When we are created new in Christ Jesus, we become Spiritually minded with the consciousness of union in Jesus Himself through the indwelling work of the Holy Spirit. God’s hope in us allows our participation in Him, so that, His “hope” becomes our reality!
“May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that by the power of the Holy Spirit you may abound in hope.”
-Romans 15:13
We need to be contemplating our personal circumstances into this larger context of God’s perspective; we now have the mind of Christ, capable of understanding things from a Spiritual point of view. God’s grace culture is now in our daily life; our grace culture is Spiritual but within the fleshly container we are wearing. God is Spirit, and now, so are we; we must shed the old man of sin while putting on the person of Jesus Christ who is our new man! This Spiritual culture is not available to those who are not in Christ Jesus, those who are not born-again!
The author of Hebrews puts it this way: “For though by this time you ought to be teachers, you need someone to teach you again the basic oracles of God. You need milk, not solid food, for everyone who lives on milk is unskilled in the word of righteousness since he is a child. But solid food is for the mature, for those who have their powers of discernment trained by constant practice to distinguish good from evil.”
Since we are created new as a Spiritual creation in Jesus Christ, we need to change our daily worldly focus, divorcing the “cares of this world” and growing, rather, in faith. This is our trek, consuming God’s grace by ingesting Spiritually the Person of our living Trinity, participating in the “hope” He is providing and becoming familiar with His resurrection power within us; we are already redeemed on the inside but not redeemed on the outside!
“We ourselves, whom the Holy Spirit indwells, are groaning inwardly because our bodies are subject to worldly corruption, while we, being now Spiritual, still labor in the sun of time while growing in grace!”
There is a sharp and deep contrast between the world walking in the corruptness of sin and its condemnation, while on the other hand, we, in Christ Jesus, are both set free and being set free, from the condemnation of sin, being brought back into the holiness of Jesus Himself as His own personal possession to be set free. There is no condemnation to those who are in Christ Jesus! We are dead in the world but alive in Jesus!
We are holy in our Lord Jesus, we are in His Light; we possess within us His Light while the world is blinded in the darkness of self-orientation or sin. The world cannot see what we see but even if our light is dim, if we do not “put on Jesus,” our new man, we cannot mature our understanding of the “hope” that is already established in us, awaiting our consumption of it! This brings us to the very, very great need within us to understand our HOPE in Christ Jesus; it is part of our “Light.”
For in this hope we were saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what he sees? For if we do hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience.
Paul through the Holy Spirit is providing the contrast and separation of the hope of the flesh against the hope of the Spirit. Worldly hope is temporal and visible while our Spiritual hope is eternal and not of this world but can be seen with born-again spiritual eyes. In Christ, we are already in the Kingdom of Christ. Each born-again person now living physically in this world is already in the Kingdom of God but not of this world. Our citizenship is Spiritual, already in heaven, even while we are waiting for the redemption of our bodies on earth!
Breathing earthly air reminds us our temporal contradiction to our eternal born-again reality. We, however, have been given the glorious vision of divine truth “rooted” in agape love into our own soul through grace. The continuous cultural pressure from the world will erode our truth in Jesus if we are not intentional and calculating about our personal fellowship on a Spiritual level! Our daily choices of faith within His redemption will build us into our Spiritual hope!
The story of human history is just the opposite of being “grounded” and building Spiritual hope. It is, rather, one of falling away from our creator God. This is the Biblical picture God has painted for us from Genesis through Revelation. God provides and man falls away! Such is the power of the world when we don’t mature the resurrection power of Jesus within our own soul.
We see dimly now what is yet to be revealed in our redeemed bodies. This is why hope is so important to our faith. As we grow in grace, our hope gains substance and we begin to see more clearly with our Spiritual eyes and hear with our Spiritual ears. Our contemporary life in Christ Jesus may seem dim through our natural perception of the flesh. We do not see the reality of God and His Trinity of Persons with natural eyes; we can be lured away by the shallow tingle of bells and colors in a petty world. But using our Spiritual eyes, our Holy Spirit will show us what our natural eyes cannot see! We will learn Spiritual discernment.
Maintaining our fellowship with God, through His working Trinity, who is our literal Spiritual Father, is our test of faithfulness and endurance. This was the test of Job and it is likewise the test of every believer in Christ Jesus.
After Adam, mankind degraded itself to the point where God was sorry He made man but Noah found favor in the eyes of the Lord. Then the population grew again, and man became proud in their own eyes they built the tower of Babel so they could make a name for their own selves. God dispersed them over the whole earth by changing their single language into multiple languages. Then God chose Abram so that God would have His own people among the people of the earth. God made a covenant of circumcision with Abram giving him the land from the river in Egypt to the great river Euphrates. The story continues as Hagar, the servant of Sarai, bears Ishmael who becomes banished from Abraham’s home. Abram at 99 becomes Abraham confessing his faithfulness to God as God renews His covenant not with Abram but with Abraham.
The narrative continues through-out history through our present conflict in Israel with Humas; it is becoming more and more global as we are seeing the closing signs of worldwide control with AI while the The Constitution of the United States is being violated everyday, in every way, throughout the US of A.
Our risen Lord God asked Jude to address this issue in his letter addressed to: “To those who are called, beloved in God the Father and kept for Jesus Christ:”
Let’s turn briefly to this letter of Jude, just before Revelation in our Bible. Jude is writing directly to you and me! He tells us he wanted to write, not this letter, but a letter about our “common salvation.” But the Holy Spirit pressed upon him the need to speak to this specific issue instead. Today’s believers, just as in ancient Israel, are diverting their Spiritual ears to hear contemporary, temporal muse. Thus, our hope becomes comprised!
“I found it necessary to write appealing to you to contend for the faith that was once for all delivered to the saints. For certain people have crept in unnoticed who long ago were designated for this condemnation, ungodly people, who pervert the grace of our God into sensuality and deny our only Master and Lord, Jesus Christ.” -verses 3-4
Perverting the grace of our God into sensuality is exactly what we have been talking about. It is taking our focus off our Spiritual hope, in Jesus, with the sensuality of physical hope in a self-saturated hub of activity!
Look how Jude describes these people who hinder hope in Jesus for hope in the world: “These are hidden reefs at your love feasts, as they feast with you without fear, shepherds feeding themselves; waterless clouds, swept along by winds; fruitless trees in late autumn, twice dead, uprooted; wild waves of the sea, casting up the foam of their own shame: wandering stars, for whom the shame of utter darkness has been reserved forever.” -Jude 22-23.
These same people are in our fundamental church congregations of today. They are comfortable with people who love and forgive. They fit in by observing the Ten Commandments and the Sermon on the Mount but their hope is earthy. We are reminded in Hebrews 5:14 that Spiritual discernment comes only with continual practice in Christ Jesus.
“But you must remember, beloved, the predictions of the apostles of our Lord Jesus Christ. They said to you, ‘In the last time there will be scoffers, following their own ungodly passions.’ It is these who cause divisions, worldly people devoid of the Spirit. But you, beloved, building yourselves up in your most holy faith and praying in the Holy Spirit, keep yourselves in the love of God, waiting for the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ that leads to eternal life. And have mercy on those who doubt, save others by snatching them out of the fire; to others show mercy with fear, hating even the garment stained by the flesh.
Now unto him who is able to keep you from stumbling and to present you blameless before the presence of his glory with great joy, to the only God, our Savior, through Jesus Christ our Lord, be glory, majesty, dominion, and authority, before all time and now and forever. Amen
-Jude 17-25.
Our born-again reality is Christ Jesus who by the Spirit has set us free from the law of sin and death. Through Him we have obtained access by faith into this grace in which we stand and we rejoice in the hope of the glory of God. So we must consider ourselves dead to sin and alive to God because sin will have no more dominion over us since we are not under law but under grace! If the Spirit of Him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in us, He who raised Christ Jesus from the dead will give life to our mortal bodies through His Spirit Who indwells us. -Romans 5-8.
“And we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another. For this come from the Lord who is the Spirit.” -2Corinthians 3:18.