The Only Hope One Needs

“The wicked is driven away in his wickedness: but the righteous hath hope in his death.” (Pr 14:32 AV)

This is the point!  The ‘…driven away…’ means eternally driven from the presence of God.  He is driven away in such a way as to result in eternal misery.  This is not just separation.  This is eternal torment as a result of a life of unrepentant wickedness.  Because he is driven away, he has no hope in his death.  Death is seen as something unpleasant and to be avoided at all costs.  Life is the best he will ever have it because death is eternally horrific.  Conversely, those who have had their accounts settled by the blood of Christ see hope in death.  Death is a welcomed thing.  Not that the righteous purposely hasten to it.  But, he sees death as freedom.  Freedom from the wickedness of his own sin.  Paid for by Christ and liberated from by death!

God is good.  All the time.  He has blessed us in this life with blessings which abound.  Family, church, purpose, etc.  They are all given as gifts from God.  Even though life is often good with a few trials sprinkled here and there, it still cannot be compared with eternity.  The righteous have hope in death.  That is because the warfare we are asked to battle is more overwhelming than we like to admit.  The spiritual warfare to overcome or three adversaries is more than can humanly be undertaken.  The flesh, world, and devil are adversaries beyond compare.  They sap the life out of any saint who wishes to live for the LORD.  We don’t have a bad life.  We have a really blessed life.  The warfare is from what we need hope.  The battle to overcome that which drags us back down is what we need hope from.

Last fall, I blew out a calf muscle climbing out of a ravine.  About twenty feet from the top, I was down on all fours and couldn’t for the life of me understand how I would get out.  It felt like someone has shot me in the back of the leg.  I could put no wait on it.  A formidable task to say the least.  That hill was my enemy!  It was sure a pretty spot though.  Nature to me has always been amazingly wondrous. That didn’t change my predicament.  As I studied several possibilities, the LORD gave me insight that I hadn’t had before.  A way out became increasingly clear.  One foot at a time, He provided a tree here, a sapling there, a grapevine dangling from a tree, and so on until we finally crested the rim.  Seeing that rim was the hope of salvation.  Seeing the end was the hope I had in the present.  I don’t know how anyone can live their life without the hope of eternity is the near distant future!  If you don’t know Christ as your Savior, please, for your own sake, repent of your sin and trust Christ!  Grab the hope that many today share!