Life's Inanities and Ironies

  Hope is not the opposite of tears. Hope is what keeps tears from becoming the whole language of the future. “…that you may not grieve as others do who have no hope.” — 1 Thessalonians 4:13 Christian hope is not optimism. Optimism is a weather forecast of the personality. Hope is a promise with a name attached. We are born again to “a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead” (1 Peter 1:3). If the tomb still held Him, Paul says we would be of all people most to be pitied. What happens to those who die in Christ. They are “away from the body and at home with the Lord” (2 Corinthians 5:8). That intermediate rest is real comfort. It is not the end of the story. The great hope is resurrection: “the redemption of our bodies” (Romans 8:23). Jesus is the firstfruits. His glorified, scarred, recognizable body is the pattern (Philippians 3:20–21). Love is not wasting itself on a person who has been deleted. Reunion will be in a redeemed creation, in bodies that ca...

In the final verses of Genesis , the Holy Spirit does not end the book with fanfare or fireworks. Instead, He closes the first book of the Bible with five simple, powerful verses that contain a coffin. Not just any coffin—a coffin in Egypt.   That wooden box, preserved for over four hundred years until Moses carried it out on the night of the Passover, is one of the most powerful sermons in all of Scripture. It is a silent testimony that still preaches today to every fundamentalist Christian who believes the Bible is the literal, inerrant, infallible Word of God from cover to cover.   Let’s open our King James Bibles to ** Genesis 50:22-26 ** and hear the Holy Ghost speak through the dying words of Joseph : > “And Joseph dwelt in Egypt, he, and his father’s house: and Joseph lived an hundred and ten years. And Joseph saw Ephraim’s children of the third generation: the children also of Machir the son of Manasseh were brought up upon Joseph’s knees. And Joseph sa...