Hope

Some books you read in order to know something.  I recently read a book by Larry Sabato called the Kennedy Half Century.  Dr. Sabato is a political scientist (my undergraduate major) and he wrote about how the legacy of John F. Kennedy had influenced the administration of each of the Presidents who had followed him for the next 50 years.  It is a book I read in order to learn something about a subject that interested me, politics.  I read the Kennedy Half Century because I wanted to know something a period of time in which I have lived and by which I have been influenced.

The Bible is not such a book, try as we often do to make it such.  This week’s epistle (1 Thess. 4:13-15) is a good example.  It speaks about an important topic, one that has been of ultimate interest to human beings since human beings appeared on the Earth, which is what is beyond death.  First Thessalonians does not offer information or knowledge.  It does not even offer opinion.  It offers something much more important to being human.

Paul wrote, “But we do not want you to be uninformed, brothers and sisters, about those who have died, so that you may not grieve as others do who have no hope.”  What the Bible has to offer is hope.  It may be an informed hope, but it is still fundamentally hope.  And hope, I think, is, in the end, more important than knowledge. 

This is a bit hard for those of who have grown up in the modern world, which is all about what we know.  Faith, though, has a different value.  It is all about what we hope. 

Knowledge, after all, will pass away.  I don’t know, of course, but I believe hope will last.  At least I hope so.

Peace,