The Misery of Limiting Our Hope in Christ

“If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all men most miserable.”—1 Corinthians xv. 19.

The passage: If our hope in Christ reaches no further than this life, we are the most miserable of all people.

These words have distressed many humble and devout readers. Their hope in Christ has made this life joyful to them. It has made the earth look bright and put a beauty and glory on every human face. Nature and art, the commonest things and the rarest, the past and present as much as the future, have been lit up by it. They do not owe this gladness to outward circumstances or to a cheerful temperament. Many won it through sharp bodily suffering, and not a few received it as a gift although they were naturally inclined to despondency. The word hope does imply looking forward. But they do not find that their expectation points chiefly to leaving the earth, and least of all do they find that the mere thought of a change of position is their blessedness. “Lo, I am with you always” and “My peace I give unto you”: there, they say, is the secret.

They are right to claim St. Paul in general as the highest authority for this conviction. He told these same Corinthians, “All things are yours, whether life, or death, or things present, or things to come; and ye are Christ’s, and Christ is God’s.” He told the Philippians to rejoice, and to rejoice again. He spoke of himself as rejoicing in tribulation. As a prisoner he lifted his chained hands before Agrippa and wished that Festus, Bernice and all who heard him were such as he was, except for those bonds. Was that exception so terrible that he thought the worshippers of false gods, his own countrymen with their hateful strifes and hypocrisies, and Nero with a mother’s murder on his conscience, less miserable in this life than he was?

Does anyone who knows St. Paul’s life and words believe this? Those very bonds, riveted more tightly than at Caesarea, became a cause of exultation to him, because through them Christ’s name was made known in the palace and city of Rome. He counted as the highest privilege ever given to a mortal, not some promised future happiness, but his office as Apostle to the Gentiles, the office that made him the offscouring of all things. So that the other nations might know they were fellow-heirs and of one body with his countrymen, he cheerfully lost everything. To save those countrymen from the ruin hanging over them, he would have been willing to be accursed. Is this a man likely to say, “I am utterly miserable here, but I can endure it, for I shall be well paid hereafter”?

But if that is not the meaning of the words, what is? What hidden, cabalistic sense can we find to overturn the natural one? I believe, brethren, that the simplest sense is the best. I believe we have read into the words a sense drawn from our own artificial notions, one that contradicts both the immediate context and the Apostle’s general teaching.

The Corinthians had heard him say, “We are risen with Christ.” A party among them built on this, or on words like it, the conclusion that the spiritual resurrection they already possessed was all Christ had won for them. They thought they were following their teacher when they dropped the idea of a future resurrection of the body altogether. St. Paul examines this theory fully. He shows that they were turning the half-truth they had grasped against not only the other half but itself. If they were not to rise in their bodies, then Christ their Lord had not risen in His body. The very ground of the spiritual resurrection they boasted of was their union with Him; God had justified them in Him. The new doctrine disclaimed that relation. It left them poor, separated, unredeemed, unjustified creatures, or, as he put it more fully, “yet in their sins.”

I. After pressing this argument in various lights, he says, “If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all men most miserable.” It would indeed be miserable to believe such a contradiction. Christ had broken through the barriers of death, joined the visible and invisible worlds, and scattered the darkness over the grave and the world beyond. Those who said “the resurrection concerns us only here” restored the separation. They divided present from future. After speaking of a great deliverer who had conquered death and all man’s enemies, they treated Death as in effect the final ruler, and Life as shut up within threescore years and ten of conflict. No one could be so constantly tormented by the feeling of being deceived, by God Himself, with promises that had no fulfilment, as those who grafted this notion onto their Christian belief.

II. But this was not all. St. Paul had the right to tell the Corinthians that no people in any age had settled for a conclusion as miserable as the one they embraced in their pride of Christian enlightenment. They were teaching that Christ had come to confound and cancel the dim hopes of all nations. Those nations’ visions of the future were often very dark, and some would gladly have given them up, since it seemed likely that outward evils, and still more the pangs of conscience, would grow worse beyond the boundary of time. But there were glimpses of hope amid the forebodings. When present misery was acute, a prophecy arose in some minds, almost to conviction, that the other side of death might offer compensation. When the injustice of human rulers was overwhelming, the heart bore witness that there must be One higher, who might hold dominion there if not here. Those who felt this unrighteousness in themselves as well as in their rulers, yet knew they did not love it and would gladly be free of it, fixed their minds on a true and lasting, though unknown, Substance with which they might have fellowship once their ties to the evidently transitory and false were dissolved. However these anticipations were expressed, clouded, sensualized, or mixed with what contradicted them, every popular belief in the world, and most attempts to escape the perplexities of popular belief, testified to their existence. They were clearly necessary not to certain places or races but to mankind. To suppose them away is to rebuild the world on a different principle from the one history shows God used.

Had St. Paul not the right to say, then: “If we are not to look forward with hope into the future world, if we already possess all Christ came to give, He has taken from us something He has not taken from any others, even the most wretched of His creatures. What has never been wholly a blank to them, with some bright Elysian spots in it, has become wholly a blank to us. We are men, and so we must believe in immortality. But we are Christians, believers in a risen Lord, and so all that lies beyond the grave is to be a void we know nothing of, which we shall certainly fill, as all men have done, with pictures of our imagination, most of them very gloomy”?

III. I foresee an objection: “If you give the words this force, you must keep still more strictly to their letter. You say all men have had some hope of a future, mingled with fears. But the Apostle speaks of a hope in Christ. What has such a hope to do with the dreams of Greeks or Goths about an Elysium or a Walhalla? Whether they lived before our Lord’s coming or after, being heathens they certainly could not hope in Him.”

Brethren, I do not want to evade this. I allow that if we take the Apostle’s language as it stands, we must attribute the hope in Christ not only to himself and the Corinthians but to those with whom he compares them. And I think every other passage in his writings shows this was no carelessness or haste, and that he would not have explained it as a mere figure of speech. The principle underlying all his teaching, and nowhere clearer than in this epistle, is that Christ’s relation to man explains all the facts of the Gospel. When He took flesh and dwelt among men, He declared Himself the King, the Son of God, the Cornerstone of Humanity of whom all nations had dreamed, whom they had conceived under different forms, and whose manifestation in His true nature all had desired. If so, I cannot imagine how Paul could describe any hope ever held by any human being except as a hope in Christ. He must have seen it, like every good gift, as coming from Christ, and, like every right wish, as tending toward Him. The phrase “hope in Christ” is very comprehensive and clears away many difficulties. It explains how men in different latitudes, drawn different ways by outward circumstances, could cherish the same expectation. There was one common centre from which all were diverging in search of contradictory objects, yet to which they were continually recalled. It was drawing them to itself, and each was secretly confessing it when furthest from it. The gods the Greeks or Goths worshipped, so far as they were framed from fancy or from nature, could have kindled no hope, only vague, inconceivable dread. Whatever hope they had came from a hidden root. It was the acknowledgment that man in his inmost being is related to the Son of God and meant to share His life and immortality. So the Apostle could truly say that if the Corinthians, professing that Jesus was the Christ, made His appearance on earth an excuse for not looking beyond the earth, and for not regarding Him as Ruler of all worlds, the same yesterday and today and for ever, they had given up some of the hope in Christ their heathen brethren possessed.

IV. There is another and, I think, ample justification of the Apostle’s words. He felt the misery of the world far more deeply than anyone who did not believe the Gospel could. It must have looked immeasurably more distracted to him than to those who did not believe God had created all to be members of one body in His Son. The forms of devil-worship around him must have seemed far more hideous to him than to one who did not worship a God of perfect charity. The dark and malignant passions in human beings, matching those they imagined in the higher powers, revolted him as they could only revolt one who believed the Spirit of Christ had come to make men in His image. And these sights could never be mere sights to him. He could not look at the wickedness and misery from a distance. They were the sins and miseries of those whose nature his Lord had taken, and he shared in them, conscious of a more inward evil than he could attribute to anyone around him. There were signs that cheered him and drew out his deepest thanks that God was working amid the corruption. Otherwise, how had he come to know the Lord whom his Jewish pride had so long resisted? How had Churches arisen in cities once wholly idolatrous? But how few members those Churches had, how much of the world’s evil reproduced itself in them, and how great was the fear that an even subtler evil might develop among them! If the Corinthians’ theory were true, and Paul could think all Christ came to do was done when a few were awakened from their death of sensuality and unbelief to a higher life, he might well call himself the most miserable of men. For what in the sight of those few, however blessed, could console him for the myriads alive then, or who had lived before, or would live after? Feeling their misery so much more intensely than others, he would have been crushed if he had had hope in Christ in this life only, if he could have measured the future of mankind, or of the individuals of any age, by anything he saw or had yet experienced. If we count among his experiences the chief of all, Christ’s love to him a sinner, that might give him hope for every one of his fellow creatures. But then that hope could not be limited, as these Corinthian heretics would limit it, to this life or world. He must suppose that love reigning everywhere. Its infinite, incomprehensible nature had been shown here, and ages upon ages must be given for its full scope upon those it created and redeemed. If it was shrivelled into a few years and confined to the benefits conferred on a few persons in a small circle, then Calvary did not show the love, wisdom and power of the eternal God as Paul had declared. Christ had not risen as first-fruits of a redeemed creation, and the Church was not the pledge and witness that all things in heaven and earth would be gathered together in its Lord. The Corinthians might be content with such a low and selfish view of Christ’s glory; if St. Paul had been, he would have been of all men most miserable.

V. So those simple and true people who find their belief in Christ an infinite comfort in this life, who in pain and desertion feel they have something they would not trade for all the kingdoms of the earth, need not fancy that St. Paul sets this conviction at nought. He sympathized with it on earth and sympathizes with it now. He would not call them most miserable. He would bid them give thanks for a present King and Deliverer, who makes this earth, with all its confusions, a blessed place where they may be well content that their lot is cast, because it is full of tokens of His love and occasions for serving Him. And if a wild thought should come, as it does even to the honestest, “If an angel from Heaven told us there is no future state, ought we to give up our faith in Christ?”, St. Paul would answer, “No more than you should stop taking warmth from the sun today because you have reason to think it will not rise tomorrow.” But he would add, “If such an angel does come, never mind his credentials or miracles. Tell him plainly that he lies. For he contradicts the message of One greater than he, the Lord of Angels, the Son of God and Son of Man. He has made yesterdays, todays and tomorrows into one. He showed us the Eternal Life that was with the Father. He must reign till all things are put under His feet. And those who live expecting that He will are the most blessed of all.”

VI. But if we have a merely selfish satisfaction with what we think we have gained by Christ’s death and resurrection, if we are content that all things go on as they do now, with no higher condition for individuals or mankind, then the words apply to us in full force. We are of all men most miserable. We had better be among those who expected a Walhalla or a sensual Paradise, or among those whom earth’s torments drove to think there might be a Comforter though they had never heard of one. We had better be among the wildest fanatics who have tried to set up some imagined polity on the ruins of all they see. For they have a hope. They think there is a Being somewhere who does not wish evil to go on for ever and will not allow it. The Being we worship is not such a Being, if Christ is not to make His Will triumph over all that opposes it, in earth and hell. He has not revealed His Will in His conflict with Evil and victory over it otherwise. The faith we hold, instead of overcoming the world, has been overcome by it. We say we believe in the Father, the Son and the Spirit, and we really confess the Devil to be the supreme Lord.

We should often bring this thought before ourselves as we walk our streets and read of what is happening elsewhere. Are our hopes in Christ, for those we see perishing in filth, ignorance and moral debasement, hopes for this life only? Do they depend on the efficacy of our money, labours and prayers? Is it the wisdom of Rulers, the godliness of Teachers, the benevolence of Societies, the purity of Churches, that stands between them and utter ruin? Then surely we are of all men most miserable! For do we not feel daily how little separates us, respectable Christian people, from these outcasts? Do we not sometimes suspect our sins are blacker than theirs, or doubt whether, with their temptations, we should not have sunk into depths of evil they have not sounded? Do we never think that when God rises to judge the earth, the stewards of His gifts will have a heavier account than those to whom the gifts were never distributed, who fancied from our report of Him that He required much and gave little?

To think of all the wickedness crowded into the most fortunate corner of the earth, of the crimes committed in God’s name and for His honour, of how few great evils the Church speaks against and how many she instigates herself, and not to feel something like despair and its palsy of heart and limb, is very difficult. It would be impossible if we were not encouraged and commanded to place our hope not in what we or the Church are doing but in what Christ has done, not in what we are but in what He is. That hope must carry us beyond this life. When we speak of Death, Resurrection, Ascension, the Descent of the Holy Spirit, and the Revelation of Christ as Judge of quick and dead, we are carried into a region where our measures do not apply. “He has overcome death; He has taken away sin; He has led captivity captive”: what words, how far beyond our grasp! Yet the Apostle uses them without hesitation, and our consciences testify that without them he would not have preached the Gospel he professed. If we think that nothing is given yet and we are only to look for something to come, we are most miserable, for that something to come is as shadowy as what is about us. If we think that all has been given and we have nothing to long for, we are most miserable, for what is good here becomes a lie if it is not the germ of what will be perfectly good. But if we accept the signs and pledges of a perfect Sacrifice made once for all, feed on it and give thanks for it, the vision of Him who died once and reigns for evermore will grow brighter and clearer. May the ministers and stewards of Christ’s mysteries, while they mourn their own unfaithfulness, remember that these are His mysteries, not theirs! Then they may encourage you to hope, and may dare to hope themselves, in Christ, for this life and for that life which He will give more abundantly when He appears in His glory.