The Absurdity of Hope – in Man

At the 2004 Democratic Party convention, a little know candidate for the Senate named Barak Obama delivered the keynote address which he titled The Audacity of Hope, a speech which later became a book titled The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream, which in 2006 became a New York Times best seller.  It was the concepts and ideology put forth in his speech and book, as well as his ability to articulate them in a compelling manner, that propelled Mr. Obama to election as junior Senator from Illinois and subsequently to the President of the United States.

Mr. Obama acknowledged that the concepts and ideology presented in the speech and book came from a sermon preached by His pastor, Jeremiah Wright, on hope – hope in the face of great difficulty and uncertainty.  Hope of this type is defined as a confident expectation/anticipation of future good or a desirable outcome.

This resulted in Mr. Obama espousing a politics of hope, set against what he saw then as a politics of cynicism, the latter of which promoted distrust and divisiveness. However, the hope he espoused was not ultimately hope in God, and in the goodness and wisdom and power of God to change men’s hearts, but in his esteem for man’s wisdom and ingenuity, man’s inherent goodness and indomitable spirit as the means to achieving his vision for a just, fair, free and prosperous nation that upholds the dignity of all men and women.  As history has played out, this audacity of hope ideology did not produce the flourishing society Mr. Obama envisioned, nor will it ever.

The adjective form, audacious, essentially means bold and daring.  Someone who is audacious is someone who will put their reputation, their future, their well-being on the line for a principle or cause they strongly believe in, despite great opposition.

I would suggest that there is very little that is audacious about putting your hope in mankind considering that this has been the prevailing ideology of humanity since Adam’s capitulation  to Satan’s lie that we would do just fine without God telling us what to do; that we have within ourselves the means, ability and ingenuity to find our happiness and well-being, our significance and security independent of and thus without accountability to God.

The history of mankind’s embrace of this ideology in all of its forms and iterations is fraught with failure, such that wars and crime, mental illness and drug addiction, civil unrest and terrorism are becoming more the norm than the exception in our nation and in this world.  A tiny virus, so small that it can only be seen with a powerful microscope, is wreaking havoc worldwide on our bodies and psyches, on our economies, our political structures and medical systems.

Close on its heals in putting a damper on human flourishing and individual happiness in this present world is the political unrest and violence that has divided communities, paralyzed cities and exposed many of those we have trusted to lead and protect as the self-serving and impotent charlatans they are as fallen human beings.

Despite all of our technological advances and the present explosion of knowledge and information available to anyone who can hold a cell phone; pain and suffering, sorrow and despair still invade every life. We as a nation have lost wars on poverty and drugs, failed to eliminate sickness and disease or to significantly decrease crime or the abuse of young children.  Mankind has no defense against natural catastrophes (hurricanes/earthquakes) when they rage against us as they indiscriminately kill hundreds, even thousands of people, causing untold property damage to a nation or community. And in case you haven’t kept up with the number of wins we have over our greatest foe, death, it remains 0.

The Bible speaks clearly to the absurdity to putting our hope in the wisdom, power and ingenuity of man, and calls us to put our ultimate hope in the living God who made the heavens and earth (Psalm 146:1-6) (Jeremiah 17:5-7).

But what man or women in our nation do you believe could get elected to any significant position in human government if they spoke of or wrote books on the audacity of hope in the one true God of the Bible as the only means of establishing and maintaining a just, fair, free and prosperous nation?

Yet God calls those who would be His people to be audacious, to go against the norms of this world and resist the seductions of the god of this world; to risk its ridicule, hostility and scorn, even our own lives as we entrust them fully to Jesus Christ as our hope of glory (Colossians 1:27), as our only hope of being restored to the glorious image of God in which we were created, our only hope of being reconciled to the glorious life with God for which we were created, our only hope of one day living in a world where every hope we ever had regarding our life in this world will be gloriously fulfilled in ways we can neither conceive of nor imagine  while in this world (1 Corinthians 2:9).

Grace and Truth ×