Scripture tells us at many places that we must endure until the end. God wouldn’t go on telling us this if there was no temptation to give up. If you’re going to endure then you must endure in hope. And not many words have suffered as much violence as the word hope.

Our Christian hope is not some vague generalization that all will be well in the end. Our hope is not simply that our souls will meet again, fellowshipping together in a heavenly land. Our hope is that the firmament which God created on the second day of creation will be opened on a future day as it was two thousand years ago. On that future day, our resurrected Lord, who ascended into heaven will descend from heaven. The Apostle Paul tells us of our day of hope in 1 Thessalonians 4:16, “the LORD himself shall descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel, and with the trump of God: and the dead in Christ shall rise.”

We live in a world that is being pressed from the top and the bottom. A resurrected man is just above us. His name is Jesus. With him are the spirits of just men made perfect. And His descent is coming. When he descends, His body will be seen just as much as the archangel’s voice will be heard. The bodies of the dead in Christ are below us. To dust they have returned. The ascent of those bodies is coming. On the day of our hope, those bodies will spring up from the ground like the tulips which are soon to break through the soil beneath our feet.

So do not be ignorant of this day, living as others who have no hope.