Another Look at Hope

Confident expectation based on prior personal experience. You won’t find that definition of hope in any published dictionary, but as I read Psalm 54 recently, that’s definitely what came to mind. 

According to the biographical material prefacing David’s cry to the Lord, he was fleeing from Saul (again), and his whereabouts had just been told to Saul (again). We can surely understand why David might be crying out to the Lord for deliverance in the midst of that. He’s on the run, and strangers who don’t know him or the God he serves are trying to kill him. Although our experience with persecution here in 21^st-century America is fairly limited, perhaps we too have felt attacked at one point or another, treated unfairly for no good reason. Hopefully we too turned to the Lord with our lament and plea for help. No, that David turned to the Lord for help is not surprising. 

In verse 4, David turns his attention to who God has shown Himself to be – David’s helper and the sustainer of his life – and turns that historical experiential knowledge into a confident expectation of future deliverance. In verse 6 then, he tells the Lord how he intends to respond with gratitude to that deliverance, not as a bribe in hopes of manipulating God into doing what David wants, but as more of a promise that such deliverance calls for a response from a thankful heart. Verse 7, the final verse, is more specific about how the Lord has historically dealt with David: “For [the Lord] has delivered me from every trouble, and my eye has looked in triumph on my enemies.” 

There’s much to be learned from such a short passage. 

Let’s start with the most obvious: when life circumstances are hard (and they will be sometimes), we should look to the Lord. (Duh)

We can follow that up with a slightly less obvious point: The Lord does not change (Malachi 3:6, Hebrews 13:8), and who He was yesterday is the same as who He is today and who He will be tomorrow. If He was our helper in past times of trouble, we can depend on Him to continue that.

Finally: the end is assured, guaranteed. Perhaps not the temporal end; none of us knows how or when we’ll die, and the Lord doesn’t deliver His followers from death and danger in every circumstance. In Acts 12, James was martyred, but Peter was delivered from prison from an angel. And yet, the end for them was still guaranteed. We know – we have a confident expectation based on prior personal experience, not just a desire that it might be so, but an assurance so definite it’s knowledge – that the Lord will deliver us and we will look in triumph on our enemies. 

I walked away from my time in the Psalms encouraged by David’s hope in the Lord. In fact, I wonder if verse 7 refers only to prior experience, or if David was so confident of deliverance that he was speaking of his current circumstances as though they had already been resolved. I don’t know. (If we get the chance to ask questions like that in heaven, maybe I’ll ask him.) Regardless, my prayer is that David’s lament and confidence in the Lord impacts you as well this week.