As we saw in our last post, hope is not to be mistaken with optimism. If this is the case, then neither is pessimism to be taken as the opposite of hope.

Both optimism and pessimism depend upon possibilities latent within us to affect the future. The optimist places more stock in human potential while the pessimist not so much.

But hope operates on a different register. It does not traffic in human possibilities, but rather in the God who is “able to accomplish far more than all we can ask or imagine” (Eph. 3:20). What this does is reconfigure our usual way of understanding how the present relates to the future.

We often envision the future as the end result of a long chain of cause and effect events. But the logic of hope does not work from past and present conditions to forecast the future. It does not build a prospectus of what will be based on what can be reasonably deduced from what is. Hope works in precisely the opposite direction. It imagines the present in light of the future. Hope trusts in a future that is received as a gift not of our own making and lives according to the expectation that that future has the power to erupt in and disrupt the present.

The Substance of Hope

Hope does not extrapolate from our current circumstances to discern a plausible future, but rather, extrapolates from what faith holds to be true to envision a future that transcends what we assume possible.

This, I think, is what is meant by the curious phrase found in the King James translation of Hebrews 11:1 — “Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.”

Faith is the substance. It holds the pieces that point us to the future. Through faith, we confess that God raised Jesus from the dead and before that, delivered Israel out of Egypt. These are not the result of human achievement. These are the works of a God who has possibilities beyond what we can empirically expect. As such, these are the “stuff”, the substance, of hope. They are glimpses of what God has in store for us that give us “reason” to hope. And so what we believe to be true through faith is, as the writer of Hebrews tells us, the evidence of a future we cannot yet see.

If we comeback to hope and its opposite, we could say that the proper antagonist of hope is not pessimism but despair. Despair is what happens when optimism must finally admit defeat and pessimism is followed to its utter and desperate conclusion. Despair is what results when we realize that if the only evidence we have of the future is the fruit of our past then we are, as they say, up Shit Creek without a paddle.

We despair, in part, because we have lost the ability to carry within us the very stuff that makes hope possible.

Scripture as a Work of Hope

More and more, as a culture, we are feeling the weight of this despair. Studies suggest there has been a substantial increase in mental health issues in the past decade. Deaths of despair (suicide, alcohol-related deaths, and drug overdoses) are on the rise. Some experts go so far as to suggest that this surge in despair ought to be considered a public health crisis.

Here is where I think Scripture, in its very form, has a word to speak to us. For what we find in its pages is that hope and despair are intricately entwined. Though they may be opposites, hope finds its birthplace in despair. One place we see this is in the very opening chapter of the Bible. Simply put, what God does in creation is bring order out of its opposite, disorder. God makes something out of nothing; brings light out of darkness.

At its core Genesis 1 is a story about a God who brings forth hope out of despair. Despair, like that dark and chaotic void “in the beginning,” serves as the womb from which hope is born. This then sets the stage for the rest of the biblical story.

The Bible is very much a work of hope. It is the concerted effort of a people experiencing overwhelming despair carefully collecting and curating all those glimpses of God’s past work to produce a record of evidence that is the soil from which hope springs forth.

Despair, Scripture teaches us, is the very place in which we find the God of hope.