The Necessity of Hope
Thinking through the political implications of living between the already and the not yet
It’s humbling to come to terms with your own faults, especially when you realize that some of those faults are the same things you’ve too easily noticed and criticized in others. Lately, God has graciously been pointing out some postures of my heart that haven’t been the healthiest over the past few years, and I want to use what I’ve been learning as a starting point for a broader conversation about a possible solution to some of our cultural ills.
It’s been a recurring theme on this humble blog that the past decade in American politics and culture has been less than optimal. As someone with an outsized interest in these subjects (and who, for a variety of reasons, feels increasingly alienated from both major parties/“tribes” that dominate our political discourse), it’s hard not to feel like the current state of American life is uniquely bad and crazy compared to historical norms. Some days, I half-expect to find out that we’ve actually been living in The Bad Place all along.
In one sense, this is an appropriate response to the hardships of living in a sinful, broken world. We should mourn when we see society operating in ways that aren’t in line with God’s good design, lest we become too comfortable as exiles on this side of eternity. There’s a fine line, however, between appropriate mourning and a default position of cynicism and pessimism - and I’ve realized that my attitude about the state of our world has too frequently modeled the latter option. In ways that might only be subtly visible to others, my general angst regarding our present moment has led me to internalize a variety of assumptions that I don’t think are true or particularly helpful. There are multiple situation-specific assumptions that have informed my thinking in different settings, but I think the most powerful underlying beliefs that have shaped my sense of civic hopelessness are:
Things are as bad as they’ve ever been, and are unlikely to improve.
There is nothing I can do to help make things better, so I might as well just put my head down and “ride it out” as best I can.
Even just writing out those sentences has helped me see the folly in some of my thinking (I think the inhabitants of some previous periods of American history, let alone world history, would beg to differ on the assertion that “things are (currently) as bad as they have ever been.”) But at an even higher level of criticism, I’m feeling increasingly convicted that thoughts like those are not a biproduct of putting on the mind of Christ in the civic realm.
To live as a follower of Christ is to live in the tension between the “already”, the “not yet.” Life is really hard, and the effects of sin and the fall are truly awful, but Jesus is still on is throne and is working even amid the hard and awful on behalf of those who love Him and who have been called according to his purpose (Romans 8:28). Someday, we’ll be freed from the curse entirely, but until then, we can wait with hope and assurance even as we mourn the brokenness around us. Living in this tension is hard, and (in my experience) it’s easy to oscillate between one of the two extremes - developing an excessive sense of triumphalism and desire for temporal victory beyond what is promised to us in Scripture, or to become so fixated on the “not yet” that we lose sight of our future hope and the good that God is currently working around us. My civic pessimism has been an outgrowth of an unhealthy focus on the “not yet”, and starting today, I want to do a better job of tempering my mourning about our broken world with the steadfast, eternal hope that only comes from the Gospel. As Paul says:
“We are hard pressed on every side, but not crushed; perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not abandoned; struck down, but not destroyed.” (2 Cor. 4:8-9)
Or, as Jesus says:
“In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world.” (John 16:33)
The trouble our world faces is not as new as we might believe - and though it might sometimes surprise us, it never surprises Jesus. He’s coming soon to bring about our final restoration, but until then, he gives us the strength and hope we need to face another day - and to work to make our fallen world just a little bit more like his Kingdom, one faithful, hope-filled believer at a time.
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