Inherited Hope

“But thou [art] he that took me out of the womb: thou didst make me hope [when I was] upon my mother’s breasts. I was cast upon thee from the womb: thou [art] my God from my mother’s belly.” (Ps 22:9-10 AV)

How interesting.  David says that the day he was born and took nourishment from his mother, God gave him the ability to hope.  This makes sense.  The moment a baby is born and suffers hunger pain, he instinctively knows that sucking upon the breast is the way the pain diminishes.  One does not have to teach a baby to suck.  He knows this as part of his being.  All one has to do is stick a fingertip into the mouth of a baby, and he instinctively sucks, looking for food and comfort.  This natural and intuitive act is referred to as hope.  If there were no hope, the baby would not seek it, cry for it, and attain it.  The baby may not understand the spiritual principles involved.  All he knows is that his belly aches.  All he knows is the only way to make that go away is the seek the breast.  This is an important truth here.  God made mankind to hope.  Not only to hope but to seek out that which one hopes for.  The ability to hope is in our nature.  If we lose hope, that is not of the LORD.  He created us with the natural ability and desire to hope.  The devil and the world want you to lose it.  But they have no power to take it.  If we lose hope, we do so because we choose to do so.

Our world is not a great source of hope.  All one has to do is watch the news, the weather, or any drug commercial that might be running.  If you listen to it all, the apocalypse is right on our heels.  If we listen to them, the best we can do is to barely survive.  Every event, forecast, or disease is the end of mankind.  There was an interesting study done decades ago.  This study compared the music teens decided to listen to and their reaction to it.  They found that those who listened to dark music or music with hopeless lyrics were far more apt to make very bad decisions.  Including suicide.  Even today, one of the warnings of AI is the grooming aspect of it.  AI is being used by nefarious sources to poison the minds of teens to the point of giving up hope.  The world hates God.  It always will.  The Devil hates God.  He always will.  The Devil is known as the destroyer.  What he cannot have, he will destroy.  He knows he cannot win.  So, like a bully at the beach, he wants to kick over our sandcastle.  The way the world and the Devil do this is to remove hope.  If there is no hope, then there is no purpose.  If there is no purpose, nothing matters and existence is futile.  Therefore, the despondent take drastic measures to cure the hopelessness.

We were not created with a natural tendency to hopelessness.  Just the opposite.  The desire and pursuit of life prove this.  That is why David uses the example for his first day of breath.  He was created to hope.  God made him that way.  God made you that way.  Losing hope is contrary to the very definition of what it means to be human.  Hope requires the ability to see a future not realized yet.  Hope requires seeing a God in control of it all.  Hope requires that we understand God as our benevolent and all-powerful God.  Hope is in our DNA.  Losing it is our fault.  Losing hope is not what God designed us to do.  Like a child reaching forth and making sucking motions with his lips testifies that we were created to hope.  When we cease to hope, we cease to be human.  That is what the Devil wants.  Don’t let him have it!