Jason Alligood
I remember as a child when I would have a nightmare, I would run to my parents’ door and wake them. Usually, my mom would be the one to comfort me. These were her words: “Think about heaven and all that awaits us there.” She had a sense that all would not be well this side of glory and that my only true comfort and rest would come through what awaited me in heaven.
We need to be reminded that the hope of which we speak is not a wish, but a confident certainty. Our confidence is not in anything that we have done, but in what the triune God has done in saving us, not just in the sense of being declared in right standing with a Holy God through
the perfect life, death, and resurrection of the Son, not just in the way that God is currently conforming us to the image of the Son, but also in the reality of coming into the fullness of our salvation at glorification.
As the author of Hebrews states, “Faith is the reality of what is hoped for, the proof of what is not seen” (Heb. 11:1).
If we state that we believe something, it is not a hope that is dormant, but a hope that is alive. As Calvin says, “What would become of us were we not supported by hope, and did not our minds emerge out of the midst of darkness above the world through the light of God’s word and of his Spirit? Faith, then, is rightly said to be the subsistence or substance of things which are as yet the objects of hope and the evidence of things not seen.”
Since we are certain of this hope by faith in the God who has already justified us, is sanctifying us, and will glorify us, we live as those who truly believe such.
Hope that sanctifies
Our glorification is not dependent upon this purity, but God’s finished work in Christ guarantees our progress in being conformed to Jesus and thus continues to prepare us for our glorification. We gratefully obey the Lord out of our love for him because he has changed us, and we follow what he has given us as a way of life for our good now with a view of our ultimate joy in him in the future.
The way in which God sanctifies us is by the ordinary means he has given us—namely the preaching of God’s Word and the ordinances: baptism and the Lord’s Table. Each of these have an eschatological piece to them.
As Paul says, we “work out your own salvation with fear and trembling. For it is God who is working in you both to will and to work according to his good purpose” (Phil. 2:12–13). In other words, we are, by God’s gracious means submitting ourselves to him, by his Spirit with our eyes fixed on our future hope. These already realities point us to the future not-yet of our hope.
Hope shapes our present
Whatever we’re experiencing today is not the end. God, in his infinite grace and mercy, has not only redeemed us for himself in this life and is not only conforming us to the image of his Son currently, but is working all of these things out for our good and his glory, which culminates in our glorification which has the end goal of seeing the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ (Rom. 8:28–30; Matt. 5:8; 1 John 3:2).
This not only ought to be something we believe that is “out there” in the future. We should contemplate the reality of it as the truth of what motivates our hope today. Look heavenward. One day we will see the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. And when we see him, we will be like him. Hope in your glorification!
Jason Alligood pastored in Peoria and graduated from Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. He is an assistant professor of theology at Cedarville University in Ohio. This excerpt is from his new Lifeway Christian Resources study, Raised in Splendor.