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future world, living hope

"Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! According to his great mercy, he has caused us to be born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, to an inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading, kept in heaven for you, who by God’s power are being guarded through faith for a salvation ready to be revealed in the last time." (1 Peter 1:3-5 ESV)

Here are a few excerpts from Geerhardus Vos, commenting on "a living hope" and the future orientation of Christians...  

"Sometimes we are altogether too much concerned with what the present world will say about us –- whether it will regard us as progressive and enlightened and liberal; while we but too seldom consider what would be the historic judgment passed upon us by the church of the former ages if its great figures could gather around us and review the part we take in the making of the history of the present –- whether they would be shamed or gladdened by our doings."

"The Christian is a man, according to Peter, who lives with his heavenly destiny ever in full view. His outlook is not bounded by the present life and the present world. He sees that which is and that which is to come in their true proportions and in their proper perspective. The center of gravity of his consciousness lies not in the present but in the future. Hope, not possession, is that which gives tone and color to his life. His is the frame of mind of the heir who knows himself entitled to large treasures upon which he will enter at a definite point of time..."

"Where are the few nowadays (we may ask it not excluding ourselves) who carry with them the consciousness of belonging to another world, of being heirs to an unbounded future?"

"...how imperative in view of it becomes the duty of every true believer in the present age to cultivate the grace of hope; to make himself remember and to make others feel, not so much by direct affirmation, but rather by the tone of life that the future belongs to us and that we belong to the future; that we are children of the world to come and that even now we allow this world to mold and rule and transform us in our thoughts and desires and feelings."

"Without a certain detachment from this world, other-worldliness is not possible. Hope cannot flourish where the heart is in the present life."

"And the [present] world makes the Christian suffer because it instinctively recognizes that the latter belongs to a different, to an opposite order of things than itself."

"For Peter looked upon the risen Christ as the beginning, the first fruits of that new world of God in which the believer's hope is anchored. Jesus did not rise as he had been before, but transformed, glorified, eternalized, the possessor and author of a transcendent heavenly life at one and the same time, the revealer, the sample and the pledge of the future realization of the true kingdom of God."

-- Geerhardus Vos, from Grace and Glory, chap. 6, "The Christian's Hope"



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