2. Facts for our Era of Anxiety - 1 Corinthians 15:1-11

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VIDEO

•        Introduction

I sat in a lecture given by a now departed but then very eminent Regius Professor of History in the Examination Schools building on High Street in Oxford listening to his very popular lectures on Edward Gibbon’s famous multi-volume history: ‘The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire’.

The lecturer was (I think it’s fair to say) a pretty eccentric old sort, turning up to the lecture on this occasion in a red bow tie with purple polka dots.

That was just about all that made his lectures entertaining but there was an exam on it at the end of the term, so I went.

On this occasion as the lecture rolled on in almost terminally tedious monotony, the learned Professor stopped in full flow, peered over the top of his glasses and said: ‘Gentlemen …’ (the university has been taking in ladies for decades but the old chap hadn’t kept up) ‘I wish you to know that the best attested fact in the ancient world is that Jesus Christ died and rose from the dead’.

And then he carried on immediately where he’d left off.

He was attesting the resurrection as a fact, but whilst that is crucially important, our concern in our current series on hope for our anxious age is much more to do with the relevance and significance of this fact.

But for there to be any relevance or significance there must BE that fact.

It must BE a fact.

So … IS it?

Here’s what Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 15:1-10:

“Now, brothers and sisters, I want to remind you of the gospel I preached to you, which you received and on which you have taken your stand. 2 By this gospel you are saved, if you hold firmly to the word I preached to you. Otherwise, you have believed in vain.

 

3 For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance[a]: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, 4 that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures, 5 and that he appeared to Cephas,[b] and then to the Twelve. 6 After that, he appeared to more than five hundred of the brothers and sisters at the same time, most of whom are still living, though some have fallen asleep. 7 Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles, 8 and last of all he appeared to me also, as to one abnormally born.

 

9 For I am the least of the apostles and do not even deserve to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God. 10 But by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace to me was not without effect. No, I worked harder than all of them—yet not I, but the grace of God that was with me. 11 Whether, then, it is I or they, this is what we preach, and this is what you believed.”

1 Corinthians 15:1-11

Scripture teaches us that it matters crucially for any sort of Christian hope that this should be true.

So our big question for today will be: is it?

Let’s look at that.

         •        Christianity - A Historical Faith

Now, of course, you’d expect a historian like the old Regius Professor I mentioned to get wrapped up in the historical aspect of Christianity, just as you’d expect a scientist to get wrapped up in the scientific ones and so on.

But it is of the essence of Christianity that it is a historical faith because Christianity isn’t based on an idea or an ethos (although ideas and values follow, of course) but it is based on a historical person Who lived a human life, then died a particular sort of death at a particular point and time in human history … and then rose from the dead in a way that is historically unique … in order to tackle the biggest and most fundamental issue that has characterised the whole of human history.

Death.

Christianity is a historical faith that has historical consequences in the present, and that are being laid down in human lives in a way that shapes the history of our times.

It is a historical faith not a philosophy.

        •          The three central, hopeful features of this Biblical faith are, arguably, three-fold:

           •          The empty tomb

           •          The resurrection appearances

·       The Changed lives of the followers of the resurrected Jesus

But first let’s take a moment to look at …

            •          The weight of the historical testimony

Peter J. Williams in his book ‘Can we Trust the Gospels’ lists all those occasions that the post-resurrection Jesus is recorded as appearing.

I counted at least thirty-eight attested sightings in his list.

There are named eye-witnesses there cited, who were people living at the time the written records were in circulation … and often the appearances were to crowds of people not just one person at a time.

He appeared to people 

·       in Judea,

·       in Galilee, 

·       in town and 

·       countryside,

·       indoors and 

·       outdoors, both 

·       by and without prior appointment, 

·       close-up and 

·       at a distance, 

·       sitting, 

·       standing,

·       eating, 

·       walking and 

·       ALWAYS talking.

Peter J. Williams … who I have met a few times and even had breakfast with once (it was at a conference!) … seems to have a brain the size of a bus and he arrives at this conclusion of the matter:

“It is hard to imagine the pattern of appearances … in the Gospels and early Christian letters without there having been multiple individuals who claimed to have seen Jesus risen from the dead.”

(Can we Trust the Gospels’, pp.134-135)

This all adds up to a whole lot of reasons that the historicity of the resurrection stands the test of time.

And it HAS been tested over time!

Famously a journalist called Frank Morris set out to write a book debunking it, and found himself almost compelled into faith … leaving him writing in the end a book called: ‘Who Moved the Stone?’

We’re saying Christianity is a historical faith, and it is also a reasonable faith …

         •        Christianity - A reasonable faith

What I’m trying to illustrate here is that, although by far the majority of us human beings have a tendency to be social and oral learners (rather than book-ish types committed to logic-chopping), the Christian faith is for all of us a reasonable faith, requiring us all to be willing (each in our own way) to think it through.

It’s got thinking, and it’s got sound thinking going on in it.

Now that is not to say that it has not been rationally questioned, but that it stands up well to rational questioning … and standing up well to that is what make it reasonable.

Firstly, then, it has been …

            •          A rationally questioned faith

The implication of a convincing resurrection would be that we need to change our lives around a bit in response to the One Who taught us the things it demonstrates.

Jesus actually said that about it from the outset of His ministry in Mark’s Gospel … but we’ll come back to that by the end.

The fact that it calls for action and for change means that people who don’t like the sound of that action or change will challenge it! 

So, in establishing that what Christians believe about the resurrection and the hope it brings to our Age of Anxiety, let’s just notice first that this resurrection-based Christianity has been questioned.

There have been a number of very similar strands in that questioning …

            •           ‘It is a much later legend’

There’s been this idea going around during the last part of the last century that the resurrection was a much later legend either cooked up or shipped in from some other culture or belief system.

Our text in 1 Corinthians today bears clear witness against this view.

Here’s why.

Verses 3-7 are considered by most New Testament scholars as being Paul citing an early Christian summary of the faith used all around the Mediterranean by the early church … already in widespread use when Paul wrote.

1 Corinthians was written only 15-20 years or so after Jesus’s crucifixion, which leads the New Testament scholar Jimmy Dunn to conclude we can be entirely confident this summary in 1 Corinthians 15:3-7 “was formulated … within months of Jesus’s death.”

Almost instantly thousands of people were worshipping the newly risen Jesus as Lord and God (and Acts 2:41 describes people doing just that).

It wasn’t a much later legend.

            •           Only a ‘spiritual’ resurrection

In our verses Paul also says that people saw this Jesus physically raised ‘on the Third day’ which rules out a second theory which propounds that the followers of Jesus did not see the resurrected Jesus with their eyes but only experienced His continued presence with them ‘in their hearts’.

In vv. 3-4 Jesus’s resurrection is given a point of historical reference ‘according to the Scriptures’ (which prophesied this bodily resurrection) and a time reference ‘the third day’ … an actual physical event with an actual ‘time stamp’ on it.

            •           ‘It was a hoax’

Well, this doesn’t stack up either because there are literally hundreds of witnesses referred to in vv. 5-8 … none of whom came forward as resurrection-denying whistle-blowers across the decades that followed and many of whom actually gave their lives rather than deny it.

As Josh Mc. Dowell puts it, ‘why would they die for a lie?’

Hundreds of people bearing corroborating testimony, referred to in publicly circulating documents within the life-time of people being cited as eye-witnesses of Christ’s physical resurrection (walking, talking, touching, eating fish together) then ultimately laying down their lives because they were convinced of Christ’s physical resurrection and not willing to deny it … it’s a bit of an ask to expect us to believe this was all a hoax.

This next common objection isn’t very politically correct …

            •           Ancient people were gullible

It’s the objection that says in some form or another ‘Ah yes, but ancient people were just naturally gullible’.

Credulous.

Superstitious.

Well up for myths, and stuff.

Now I have to say, that’s an odd one.

In our passage of Scripture Paul is writing to provide evidence, as if his readers would be reluctant to believe in the resurrection without good evidence.

In fact what Paul does is argue strongly that they should believe this with the evidence of many named and referred to eye-witnesses of the resurrection and then saying persuasively: “After that, he appeared to more than five hundred of the brothers and sisters at the same time, most of whom are still living”

Why did he say that?

He wouldn’t need to do THAT if his readers were so gullible!

He is inviting his readers to seek those folks out and check their eye-witness testimony, which presupposes they aren’t going to believe it just because Paul is asking them to!

Paul KNOWS that they won’t believe this easily, so he is making the case here most persuasively. 

That’s the point.

He is not calling for a leap in the dark, he is rationally supporting Christ’s hope-giving historical and physical … bodily … resurrection.

And he’s doing that because they’re persuadable, but not gullible.

We could go on like this showing that this Christian faith in Christ’s bodily resurrection has been researched and examined pretty well over the years and come out of it convincingly, but let’s finally wind this point up by looking at this last one … the contention that the disciples believed in the resurrection because they - quite simply - WANTED it to be true.

 

            •           It was wish-fulfilment

It’s been argued that believing this was simply wish-fulfilment.

The thing is, the first-hand accounts seem to be describing the first eye-witnesses of the resurrection being slow to believe the things they were seeing, and being SHOCKED to see that Jesus had been raised from the dead.

They weren’t expecting this to happen at all.

Tom Wright in his ‘The Resurrection of the Son of God’ sets out lengthily that both Graeco-Roman culture and first century Judaism had strong assumptions that would make the idea of bodily resurrection hard to accept.

The Pharisees of Jesus’ day (who believed there WOULD be a resurrection at the end of the age) believed in the principle of an end-time general resurrection, but the idea of an individual resurrection BEFORE the end of history … whilst evil, sin, suffering and death continued as before … was really not compatible with what’s called ‘Second Temple Judaism’ … the ideas of Jews in the time of the Lord Jesus.

You can read about that in N. T. Wright’s ‘The Resurrection and the Son of God’ (Fortress Press 2003) vol. 3 pp. 81-84.

So what WAS Paul’s argument supporting Christ’s resurrection?

            •          A historically reasoned faith - The Bible makes the case

You can see the resurrection has been a rationally questioned article of Christian faith.

But it has been and still is also an historically well-reasoned article of faith.

And that’s been Paul’s habit throughout his ministry … TO ‘WELL-REASON’ THE FAITH AS HE PRESENTS IT to his hearers, whether full-on pagans or Christians in local churches.

Let’s just take two examples to demonstrate …

            •           Paul amongst Kings

When his life was on the line, Paul made the proclamation of the resurrection his priority.

So, in Acts 26 Paul was under interrogation by King Agrippa and this guy Porcius Festus.

Porcius Festus was the procurator of Palestine who succeeded Felix; neither the beginning nor the end of his rule (at his death) can be determined with certainty, although he appears to have died in office after about two years. 

The Emperor Nero recalled Felix in A.D. 57 or 58, and Festus was appointed to his vacant office in A.D. 57, 58, or 59. 

According to the Romano-Jewish historian Josephus (Ant. 20.8.9-10 [20.182-188]; J. W. 2.14.1 [2.271-272]), his administration was better than that of his predecessor Felix or his successor Albinus, but Luke in Acts portrays him in a less favourable light: He was willing to sacrifice Paul to court Jewish favour by taking him to Jerusalem for trial (see 25:9), regardless of Paul’s guilt or innocence. 

The one characteristic for which Festus was noted is that he dealt harshly with those who disturbed the peace.

King Agrippa was Herod Agrippa II (A.D. 27-92/93), the son of Herod Agrippa I (see Acts 12:1). 

He ruled over parts of Palestine from A.D. 53 until his death. 

His sister Bernice was widowed when her second husband, Herod King of Chalcis, died in A.D. 48. 

From then she lived with her brother.

It was an irregular situation.

In an attempt to quiet rumours of an incestuous relationship between them, bernice resolved to marry Polemo of Cilicia, but she soon left him and returned to Herod Agrippa II. 

Their incestuous relationship became the gossip of Rome, according to Josephus (Ant. 20.7.3 [20.145-147]).

Now, the visit of Agrippa and Bernice gave Festus the opportunity to get some internal Jewish advice. 

But they were not really very upstanding people.

And it says a lot that as far as Porcius Festus was concerned, Herod Agrippa II was a trusted adviser because he was known to be very loyal to Rome.

What I am trying to show you is that Paul was in very ruthless and sin-darkened hands with this lot, but that for Paul, proclaiming the resurrection was worth risking your life for … it was more important than life to him, possibly of course because it was life to him.

So while he was there in front of these dead serious and very heavy guys Paul goes straight from his formal introduction to his address in his own defence to say:

“And now it is because of my hope in what God has promised our ancestors that I am on trial today. 7 This is the promise our twelve tribes are hoping to see fulfilled as they earnestly serve God day and night. King Agrippa, it is because of this hope that these Jews are accusing me. 8 Why should any of you consider it incredible that God raises the dead?”

(Acts 26:6-8)

It is SO outstanding Paul does this that halfway through his address Festus bursts out at him (Acts 26:24):

““You are out of your mind, Paul!” he shouted. “Your great learning is driving you insane.”

Now, Paul’s defence against that is very significant:

Firstly he defends his assertions:

““I am not insane, most excellent Festus,” Paul replied. “What I am saying is true and reasonable. 26 The king is familiar with these things, and I can speak freely to him. I am convinced that none of this has escaped his notice, because it was not done in a corner.”

 

Paul defends the truth and the reasonableness of his preaching Christ’s bodily resurrection and the idea that Jesus should then be alive to approach and commission Paul personally for his ministry (he describes what happened to him on the Damascus Road).

True.

Reasonable.

And then Paul brings in Herod Agrippa.

Herod was the ruler of Palestine and therefore knew all too well the facts surrounding the resurrection because he’d had to deal with it all, and Paul takes the message right TO the heart of the other guy listening in the room who he has reason to believe may be more open to the message … ‘King Agrippa’:

“The king is familiar with these things, and I can speak freely to him. I am convinced that none of this has escaped his notice, because it was not done in a corner. 27 King Agrippa, do you believe the prophets? I know you do.”

 

Well no, of course it wasn’t done in a corner, Agrippa well knew that Gethsemane’s tomb was open for viewing!

Paul is NOT afraid to share this gospel directly with the powerful, arrogant and deeply lost …

 

28 Then Agrippa said to Paul, “Do you think that in such a short time you can persuade me to be a Christian?”

Do you notice who it is that raised THAT possibility?

Agrippa’s comment reveals that no doubt he was feeling the heat of the implication of what Paul was saying, and that this was very much in Agrippa’s mind!

29 Paul replied, “Short time or long—I pray to God that not only you but all who are listening to me today may become what I am, except for these chains.”

Paul is asserting the truth of the resurrection and its reasonableness as an explanation from the observable phenomena.

And Paul works that through more fully - showing as it were his ‘rough work’ in 1 Corinthians 15.

            •           Paul amongst Corinthians

Now, Paul does in a logical form in our text in 1 Corinthians 15 exactly what he does in story form in his interaction with Festus and Agrippa.

He has there and here two main arguments for the resurrection:

-        Firstly that the tomb was empty and 

-        Secondly that a very great number of people testified that they had seen the risen Jesus (and like Paul, bore living witness to the impact that meeting the risen Jesus had made on them).

-        Incidentally, the third main point about the resurrection changing lives is implicit in Acts 26 with those notorious sinners but explicit towards the end of what Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 15

 The key points that Paul makes are these …

 

            •           The tomb was empty

First off the bat, in our passage and throughout his ministry, Paul insists on the historical, physical resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.

No ‘ifs’ or ‘buts’.

“For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, 4 that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures …”

Firstly, there is a statement of the PRIORITY of this truth amongst all Christian truths.

It is ‘of first importance’.

Grk “among (the) first things.”

You can’t shilly-shally about this, says Paul … primary importance attaches to this.

There’s no wriggle room.

Secondly, there is a clear statement that this is precisely as prophesied … it was according to the Scriptures.

Peter emphasises this in the first sermon in the Church on the Day of Pentecost in Acts 2:27, quoting Psalm 16:8-11, and that same quote turns up again in Acts 13:35 as a major plank in Paul’s sermon in the synagogue in Pisidian Antioch.

Christ died and was dead.

Thirdly there’s an unequivocal statement that He was buried.

In those days once people were convinced a person was dead they were interred.

Notice who was certifying death for the Lord at the Cross.

It was a centurion from a legion that had seen active service, present at the crucifixion, well-acquainted with the practice of that gruesome execution and answerable with his own life ifs he didn’t carry the sentence on the condemned man through to its intended conclusion.

The Lord’s death was confirmed by piercing his chest cavity with a spear and His sentence was not only carried out but expertly verified by people whose lives were at stake if they got it wrong.

It’s pretty safe to conclude they had done the job diligently before handing the body over to Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathea who committed the Lord’s body to the garden tomb.

And then Jesus was dead in the tomb for three days … after which it was thought that there could be absolutely no coming back from there.

Fourthly, on a stated day Paul makes plain Jesus did the unexpected and unprecedented fundamental thing nobody was expecting.

He didn’t rise in the general resurrection at the End of the Age which some Jews were anticipating, but He defeated sin and death and hell ‘on the third day’.

That is, bringing death-defeating resurrection to the here and now.

This is, therefore, understandably described as being of first importance … because the last enemy of mankind was NOW defeated.

But it didn’t stop there … this wasn’t just the theft of a body because from that point folks started to meet Jesus again.

            •           He appeared to US

“and that he appeared to Cephas, and then to the Twelve. 6 After that, he appeared to more than five hundred of the brothers and sisters at the same time, most of whom are still living, though some have fallen asleep. 7 Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles, 8 and last of all he appeared to me also, as to one abnormally born.”

Here’s the great mass of human testimony to the resurrection Paul appeals to as the rational and reasonable foundation for believing the resurrection was factual … all referred to in a public document circulating within the lifetime of eyewitnesses and not successfully refuted by the sceptics of the time.

But please notice this.

It isn’t an empty tomb that’s being witnessed, so much as serial public meetings with the Risen Lord Himself.

That was the key to it.

The resurrection was evidenced by widespread fellowship in all sorts of walks and experiences in life with the Risen Lord HIMSELF.

The resurrection is NOT about a tomb.

The Resurrection’s about the life-giving Lord.

If we had only the empty tomb, people might be able to sustain the argument that the resurrection was actually a hoax, that the body had been stolen (or whatever).

And if we had only the testimonies then we might possibly have been able to try and argue it was all a fantasy … some psychological wish-fulfilment or something.

Keller: “Together, however, they give evidence that something extraordinary happened.”

The burden of proof moves to the other side of the argument … which must now prove ITS case … given that the tomb was verifiably empty and hundreds of living souls with radically changed lives and values testified to having their lives revolutionised by meeting the living Lord Jesus.

 

Now, crucially, here’s the third thing that gets emphasised about the resurrection - this central feature of the Christian hope in Paul and across the face of Scripture …

            •           He CHANGED us

He, says Paul, radically changed me:

“I am the least of the apostles and do not even deserve to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God. 10 But by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace to me was not without effect. No, I worked harder than all of them—yet not I, but the grace of God that was with me. 11 Whether, then, it is I or they, this is what we preach, and this is what you believed.”

Three times in Acts, when on trial for his life, Paul testifies to his meeting with the risen Jesus and the changes it made in him - in Acts 9, Acts 22 and Acts 26 - and so also here:

“… I persecuted the church of God. 10 But by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace to me was not without effect. No, I worked harder than all of them—yet not I, but the grace of God that was with me.”

(1 Corinthians 15:9-10)

So (in conclusion, then) here’s the thing …

         •        Christianity: A faith that works - A perennially life-changing fact

The resurrection changes people.

Inwardly.

And then outwardly.

From the inside out.

Now, to meet somebody famous can be a life-changing event.

A really special occasion.

But to meet the risen Lord initiates an everyday fellowship and close walk with the living God and that experience is totally life changing day by day.

And the key to it is the shift from being your natural, default-setting Pharisee (a rules-based order and attitude to life) to living daily in the love and grace of your God.

And as Paul says - here’s the norm: 

“… his grace to me was not without effect. No, I worked harder than all of them—yet not I, but the grace of God that was with me …”

It is receiving His love and mercy – His grace – not learning His Laws and trying harder that makes the change in us.

But more than that.

It’s knowing and walking with the Risen Lord Who is all grace to us, and who draws us after Him on into eternal Glory.

That is the life of the Christian, and it brings to us the hope of the Christian … the hope and assurance of eternal life in our paradise restored.

But please notice these initiate in Paul and everyone else a truly changed life.

Meeting that risen Lord brings the dawn of grace in the soul and that dawn brings about a life of loving service in the Kingdom of God … the intuitive response of saved souls to such love from their God.

The consequence of the resurrection is that Christ’s ministry is supremely attested so Mark 1:15 must now apply … the Kingdom of God which restores all things ruined in Eden has been inaugurated on earth, the King is here and we fall in behind to follow Him forward towards where He has gone ahead, and the outcome is a life of fellowship with the Risen Jesus on the Way that leads onwards into Glory.

BECAUSE … please note because … He was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures.

And there’s the historical, reasonable questioned but substantiated hope held out in the Christian faith to our Age of Anxiety.

It is absolutely crucial if we want to bring Christian hope to our world to insist on the historical, reasonable, substantiated physical resurrection of Christ from the dead.

It’s not only the absolute truth.

It is a thoroughly life-changing truth.

So let’s be sure not only to hold it, but also to walk in it.

Hope for our Era of Anxiety - 1 Peter 1:3-5

AUDIO

STUDIOCAM 

         •        Introduction

Have you noticed how really anxious our culture has become?

Now let’s be clear that there is clinical, psychological depression and anxiety … the sort of anxiety that is very hard to address for yourself and that needs medical and professional help.

But we’re talking about the other sort today that is far, far more common and that you can have a word with yourself about … even though it can sometimes feel quite overpowering.

There is a lot of what we’re talking about going around at the moment.

Certainly, in the last couple of pandemic years there’s been the bit of a dawn of a famine of hope!

And I suspect that has been taking root from uncomfortable uncertainty.

According to Dan W. Grupe and Jack B. Nitschke in Nature Reviews Neuroscience 2013 July; 14(7): 488–501:

“Uncertainty diminishes how efficiently and effectively we can prepare for the future, and thus contributes to anxiety … 

Comprehensive information about the probability, timing, and nature of a future negative event promotes more efficient allocation of these resources, but such information is rarely available owing to the inherent uncertainty of the future.”

The thing is, people can’t survive long without hope.

It is after all hope that keeps us going through both our present painful experiences AND our anticipatory fear of what the future may hold for us.

The sort of anxiety caused by uncertainty about the future in our culture is not just about the pandemic of course … it seems fairly general.

Now, these things do seem to go in cycles, but it seemed a good time for us to spend a bit of time looking over the weeks running up to Easter … no, Easter, daffodils, lambs and bunnies ISN’T that far away now … at this whole issue of the Christian hope.

We are not isolated from society around us and that famine of hope therefore brushes up against us … but this issue is also pretty relevant to all the people WE brush up against in the course of our daily lives as well.

So, we’ll spend a number of weeks now looking at this whole issue of what Christianity has got on hope … it’s explanation, implications and application to us and our times.

To me, the obvious first question is this one …

         •        Quite where has all the Hope gone?

When you look into it a bit, it seems that the Western world in general was heading into a bit of a crisis of hope even before COVID 19 came along.

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, there seems to have been a positive attitude in the West attached to the idea that humanity was making progress and that, basically, the next generation would enjoy a better world than the current one.

There was this idea that reason and science and stuff like that was going to make life better and things would get to be just fine.

Two world wars and a number of other factors seem to have put paid to that … so much so that W. H Auden in his long poem ‘The Age of Anxiety’ seemed to very much capture the mood of the times … it won the Pulitzer Prize but didn’t get read very much. 

Too depressing a title, I suppose!

Two World Wars, the Great Depression of the 1930s and the looming threat of nuclear Armageddon in the Cold War knocked around people’s hope for the future quite a lot.

Now, I remember seeing live footage on the TV as the Berlin Wall came down, and what with that and the crumbling of Communist dictatorships in Poland, Romania, Czechoslovakia and across the peripheral states of the old Soviet Union, the optimism of the pre-war period started to wake up a bit.

In 2006 Pew Research produced a paper called ‘Once again, the Future Ain’t What it Used to Be’ which showed that around that time the number of people who said that children in America would grow up to be better off than their parents had risen to over 50% of the populace.

But by around 2005, the numbers believing their children would have a better life had declined again.

A Pew Centre Research poll published in 2019 shows that the decline in our Western culture’s hope levels has only continued.

            •          Where has it gone?

Well, for sure, there’s been a polarisation and fragmentation of society that looks pretty much as if it is heading towards no good.

There’s no great shared idea of any common public good.

The last U.S. Presidential election, of course, just a year ago now saw a serious polarisation of opinion and led to the storming of one of their legislative bodies by a violent mob unprepared to see a President from the other party in power.

The same degree of difference … a going to opposite extremes … is getting reflected in UK politics too, or so it appears.

And with it comes a deep sense of distrust which is undermining the institutions that have previously held our society together.

Social media has undoubtedly fuelled all of this … becoming a forum for the expression of personal opinions that is peppered with abuse and antagonism.

We have seen a real rise in the threat of both ideologically inspired and non-ideological terrorism across the last decade … such that the list of destinations we are safe to visit on holiday has declined noticeably, and our news reports periodically carry accounts of violent outrages.

We can’t imagine where this is heading, and that breeds a loss of hope for our children’s futures.

Then there’s the growing anxiety about climate change:

According to the Lancet, respondents across all countries were worried about climate change (59% were very or extremely worried and 84% were at least moderately worried). 

More than 50% reported each of the following emotions: sad, anxious, angry, powerless, helpless, and guilty.

(https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanplh/article/PIIS2542-5196(21)00278-3/fulltext)

Andrew Sullivan (reviewing Stephen Pinker’s ‘Enlightenment Now’) points to a wider issue than these immediate things though:

“As we have slowly and surely attained more progress, we have lost something that undergirds all of it: meaning, cohesion, and a different, deeper kind of happiness than the satiation of all our earthly needs.”

Tim Keller’s ‘Hope in Times of Fear: The Resurrection and the Meaning of Easter’ … not available in the UK until April this year but a great book to order for someone for Easter (not me, I’ve got a copy!) … has quite a lot about the current literature on the loss of hope and is well worth a look if you would like to understand better our times and how they can influence us too.

Keller says: “We hunger for meaning and purpose. We find that things we thought would bring us satisfaction do not. We are shocked at the evil things other human beings - and we ourselves are capable of doing.”

And then that, of course raises the question for Keller about what on earth we can also do about US.

“The greatest threat to our hope for a better world is not the natural environment but the various evils that continually spring from the human heart. Science cannot eradicate human evil - in fact it can give it more tools to use for its own ends.”

            •          What are they doing about it?

In October 2021, just ahead of the COP26 UN Climate conference in Glasgow, three-quarters (75%) of adults in Great Britain said they were worried about the impact of climate change, according to the Office for National Statistics’ (ONS’) Opinions and Lifestyle Survey (OPN).

(https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/wellbeing/articles/threequartersofadultsingreatbritainworryaboutclimatechange/2021-11-05)

Just over two-fifths (43%) reported feeling anxious about the future of the environment more widely in the past month.

That’s really a pretty widespread problem.

And it’s just ONE issue.

So what are people doing, then, about this loss of positivity, this dread of where it is all heading, this pessimism for the future and famine of hope?

Well, if there is a particular issue to which concern for the future attaches, people tackle the problem they’re worried about.

Or rather … they tend to tackle it by proxy.

Activism is an action, but it doesn’t necessarily act on the actual problem.

So, for example, four people were recently acquitted on charges of throwing a statue of Sir Edward Coulson’s statue into Bristol Docks.

Now … has that done anything that actually helps anyone?

There is still such a lot of racism about in our society that could be directly acted on … but throwing a statue into a dock doesn’t actually help someone suffering racist bullying in their school or workplace.

Arguably it may well kick off a negative response towards them from racists around them … making things worse!

Now reforming activism in our country has a glorious history, but so much of this ‘activism’ seems to make the activist feel better.

Judging by the people I heard speaking on the radio after they were acquitted, those people were definitely feeling better … but I’m not convinced the underlying problem has gone away.

I think my point is that what we are all doing about future anxiety is to try to feel better about it … and probably to some extent to feel better by virtue signalling about it too.

This famine of hope really is a problem we’ve got in our culture, and the ways we are tackling it seem to be to feel better rather than change much in our experience of external realities.

What I want to do today ids to expose the problem and begin to show that there is a better hope-restoring narrative in Scripture that actually has its roots NOT in our changeable feelings, but deep in human experience of reality.

         •        The Hope of the Resurrection

The remarkable rise of the Christian faith in its earliest stages was due in no small part to the hope at its heart … Peter stood up famously on the Day of Pentecost at what we might call the birth of the church to preach and his founding premise in that first sermon in the new life of the church was this:

““Fellow Israelites, listen to this: Jesus of Nazareth was a man accredited by God to you by miracles, wonders and signs, which God did among you through him, as you yourselves know. 

This man was handed over to you by God’s deliberate plan and foreknowledge; and you, with the help of wicked men, put him to death by nailing him to the cross. 

But God raised him from the dead, freeing him from the agony of death, because it was impossible for death to keep its hold on him.”

There’s the solid objective historical reality that colours the Christian’s future hope which tackles the anxiety and … in fact … most of the other challenges the Christian faces in living through this present evil age while travelling to the eternal home held out before us in the Gospel.

And this brings us today to a foundational Biblical text that the same apostle Peter wrote a number of years later from the heart of the Roman Empire in the city of Rome itself … where persecution had arisen … to a bunch of scattered believers across (probably) Asia Minor who were starting to worry that the state’s persecution was going to be shortly arriving on. THEIR doorstep too.

These verses open up the issues of anticipatory anxiety of the future and the Christian response to that, and it’s found in 1 Peter 1:3-5

“ Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! In his great mercy he has given us new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, 

and into an inheritance that can never perish, spoil or fade.”

            •          New birth

“Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! 

In his great mercy 

he has given us 

new birth 

into a living hope 

through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead …”

 

The foundation of the Christian hope lies clearly, Peter says from the outset, not in anything WE may have done to improve ourselves, but in the sheer gift of God in Christ.

He has GIVEN us … these things.

This is the key to the Gospel’s success at dealing with human beings because it doesn’t rely on broken people attempting to do what it turns out we cannot satisfactorily achieve in our brokenness, but on what God has done for us … in His perfection.

So what is this gift on which the resolution of this our human difficulty hangs?

It starts with the gateway event to Christian life - the new birth.

You see, the Old Testament prophets expended a lot of energy over a long period trying to get people to bring themselves back to God, but they failed at the hurdle of humanity’s broken ability to walk with God … at the problem of the fallen and therefore sinful human heart which habitually turns away from the Living God.

So Jeremiah spends thirty long chapters exposing and addressing the situation God’s people had got into due to the sinfulness of their hearts and then receives this word from the Lord in Jeremiah 31:33-34

““This is the covenant I will make with the people of Israel

    after that time,” declares the Lord.

“I will put my law in their minds

    and write it on their hearts.

I will be their God,

    and they will be my people.

34 No longer will they teach their neighbour,

    or say to one another, ‘Know the Lord,’

because they will all know me,

    from the least of them to the greatest,”

declares the Lord.

“For I will forgive their wickedness

    and will remember their sins no more.”

And Ezekiel after much description of the sad human state of heart carries this prophecy in Ezekiel 11:19

“I will give them an undivided heart and put a new spirit in them; I will remove from them their heart of stone and give them a heart of flesh.”

It is spelled out again in Ezekiel 36:26

“I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you; I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh.”

And so the Lord Jesus speaks to Nicodemus in John 3 about the need to be born again or ‘born from above’ in this way in order to be able to even SEE the Kingdom of God.

It is the gateway to Christian life, and it is the gateway to the new humanity that was the hope of Israel through all its years in the spiritual wilderness.

You HAVE been born again though, writes Peter, to these believers who were fearing for their future.

Now here’s the key thing … what they (and all true believers) have been born into is a hope.

That’s what colours our response to the fear of the future … the hope we’ve been born again into (if indeed we have been born from above) and the INHERITANCE we are thus born into … which colours our transforms our experience of our present realities well as our future’s.

It is a LIVING hope, writes Peter.

We mentioned earlier the sort of dying hopes that people pursue in our culture for a bit of a feel-better (if not quite feel good) feeling in response to anxiety and the fear of the future.

These are not, of course, necessarily bad things in themselves … not at all … but they are dying hopes.

You, says Peter, have your current experience and response to it shaped by the fact that you have been born again into a LIVING hope.

The new life in Christ that will be enjoyed supremely in Glory has taken root in your hearts and lives even now and will endure to the end of all time!

It is alive.

It is life-giving.

It is ENERGISING, in the life of the believer.

Our current experience is often trying, but I am anchored in the sure and certain resurrection hope … initiated and bolstered by the reality of Christ’s resurrection … anchored and bolted on to the eternal life of the Heavenly Kingdom … we have this hope as the ANCHOR for our souls … as Hebrews 6:19 puts it.

As we’ve ben seeing, it’s just that anchor of hope that our hearts need in the current uncertain earthly life and pilgrimage that we’re embarked upon.

You see (1 Peter 1:4) that new birth brings us into a new inheritance … ours now, but that we receive in full when the terms of the will are enacted.

            •          New inheritance

“and into an inheritance 

that can never 

perish, 

spoil or 

fade. 

This inheritance is kept in heaven for you …”

It’s not only a living hope … a lively, life-giving and on-going eternal hope that lives on … it’s a glorious inheritance too that the new birth brings with it.

Now, please bear in mind, these believers Peter writes to from the hot-spot of the persecution at that time in the city of Rome itself were looking at the loss of all things that had been afflicting so many of their brethren in that big city, but they were at least anticipating facing a similar experience on their own part.

Peter is reminding them - in order to stimulate a proper, invigorating, reality-based, real-world hope in them in place of their fear and anxiety for the future - that they have been born again into a sure and certain future hope (based in their born again experience of God) but also CRUCIALLY into the inheritance pledged to the new-born children of God.

Imperishable … which addresses fear for the future.

Undefiled … which addresses the fear that everything in our world is getting mucked up.

Unfading … which addresses the fear of things turning sour on us.

And this is KEPT in Heaven for us … there is no scope left for the fear of loss and that it will all be taken from us.

This is the reality towards which the born again believer now lives, and the promise in which we anchor our souls.

It is fail-proof, because God guards it and preserves it eternally in Heaven for us by His Almighty power.

Yes, powerful people may take against us.

But our hope and our inheritance are KEPT … and kept by the power of the Almighty.

No.

People cannot survive long without hope.

But people can LIVE on for ever with this one! 

And that brings us to the root that underlies and tethers tight this living hope in a world painted in despair …

 

         •        The POWER of the Resurrection

Peter doesn’t hesitate to hammer home his point, but goes on to spell out for the persecuted Christians he was writing to just exactly what the future prospects of their inheritance (and ours on the same terms) really were … and who those prospects actually depended on.

“This inheritance is kept in heaven for you, 

who 

through faith are 

shielded by God’s power 

until the coming of the salvation 

that is ready to be revealed 

in the last time.”

We’ve touched on this already so there’s not much left to say here, but there you have it, you see?

There lies the strength and the power that secures the Christian’s future and our destiny.

Now, Peter knew the objective reality of the resurrection.

He had been there on the day, in fact when the women broke the news Peter and John went running to the tomb, but Peter was the first to dive in and look around in there.

Grave clothes lying where they’d been left when the Lord was raised from the dead … and then meetings that took place with the risen Jesus that entirely blew their human minds.

These guys like Peter saw He’d died and been literally raised from the dead.

That is the hugely life-changing reality.

Through faith in the future hope held out by God in the Gospel and the experience of the first instalment of that resurrection of Jesus as we undergo our own personal experience of new birth from above, we as believers are from that point on shielded by GOD’s power through the vagaries of this life and brought securely to the destiny that will only be revealed for all to see in the last time.

         •        Conclusion

Now, I wonder whether you’ve noticed the words I’ve not mentioned in our text?

In fact I’ve left them deliberately until now.

I’ve done this because they are the key to living in the living hope and living on the future inheritance that we’ve been highlighting in addressing the Age of Anxiety that we are living through, the spirit of our age that can so easily affect us.

I’ve left the part of what Peter says here that helps us live in the light of the truth about us and to Iive in that truth day by day.

You see, some will emphasise to you that in the face of anxiety we should take courage.

Well, mebbe there is some truth in that if what we are talking about is the courage that is born of faith, but when you are fearful and anxious that often seems like telling a person that is ill to not be ill.

It doesn’t work too well!

No, the cure for the anxious soul is something Peter models here for these anxious believers, and that he models from the very start of the things he has to say to them to help them in countering their problems along the way.

Look how Peter starts all these powerful things he wants to say to them.

V. 3 “Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! In his great mercy he has given us new birth into a living hope …” and so on.

Praise be.

Look who we’re being addressed by here.

The apostle Peter wrote this letter (1:1). 

He was once a fisherman but now was a disciple, a “witness of the sufferings of Christ” (5:1). 

That is really a very significant thing.

He has seen his beloved friend His Lord and God, the Messiah, suffering and crucified before his very eyes (he says).

And He was following in the very dangerous and self-sacrificial way of His crucified Messiah.

He probably wrote this letter from Rome (in 5:13; “Babylon” almost certainly refers to Rome).

He seems to have been writing this around A.D. 62–63 during Nero’s reign. 

The letter is addressed to Christians scattered in “Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia, and Bithynia” (1:1). This is an area north of the Taurus Mountains in Asia Minor (modern-day Turkey). The area had been through rapid social and cultural change as it was subjugated by people propagating a new Graeco-Roman culture and politically the people there had been under uninvited Roman control from the mid-first century B.C.

Life for Peter particularly as a bold Christian leader living in Nero’s Rome but for these scattered Christians too was full of things that could cause a person some anxiety.

Peter is going to talk reasons about that in a moment as these verses progress, he is going to talk about the new birth they knew and about where that leads in terms of living hope and inheritance … but Peter starts off immediately with what is going to cure their anxious souls and that I setting a conscious and deliberate practice of praise to God.

There was a LOT in Peter’s current experience to be anxious about.

There was a lot that his readers seem to have struggling to not be anxious about in the future prospect of the persecution that had started in Rome spreading out in their direction.

But Peter sets, first of all, an example of praise to the God Who is Sovereign and gracious and kind and Who has not only given them a future that is glorious and wonderful, but Who holds them in the inheritance they are living towards … and in doing so he calls them to that same soul-curing praise.

Of COURSE, there is little in their current circumstances (and possibly we think ours) to rejoice about.

This life can be very much like that.

But lift up your eyes to your eternal future and what lies in it, says Peter, and praise the good God who secures our eternal future.

Peter starts with worship for fundamental realities, the truths because of which the Christian lives … the LIVING hope which isn’t going to fade.

And THAT is his pastoral theology for when the prospect of following a suffering Messiah becomes very real … he KNOWS from his personal experience that anxiety fades in the presence of theological and faithful praise to the God Who saves.