Objective Hope

Truth is objective. That is to say something is real regardless of any imposition on it by a subject. The 5-year old who sees a rattlesnake in front of him will be killed by its venomous bite if he attempts to handle it, notwithstanding his ignorance of its lethal nature, because it is objectively poisonous. Knowledge of the truth is a life-saver and the converse is borne out by Scripture, "My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge..." (Hosea 4:6).

God is objectively "there" even if not a single soul acknowledges it. And God has broken through the transcendence barrier, enfleshed Himself, walked in time, and made history—objectively. The Christian faith is not a spiritualization of secret knowledge gained by esoteric means (Finney's revivalism, the prosperity movement's "principles", and basically evangelicalism's pragmatism ring a gnostic bell), but the laying hold of truth that is objective: Jesus Christ is God, and once upon a time in history He became man, lived a perfectly righteous life, and died on a Roman cross, in full obedience to the Father, to redeem for Himself a people that would be reproductions of His glorified body and character.

There is tremendous strength and comfort in this objectivism since we realize that our hope is not in our feeble attempts at righteousness and self-redemption but in something, or more accurately Someone, external to ourselves. Our state of being beloved by the Father, in His counting us as His sons and daughters, is not founded on anything qualitatively meritorious or inherent in us, but in the radical implications of what Christ has already done in history past. Eschatologically, our glory is sealed as we wait in joyous anticipation of not an ethereal disembodied existence but a physical coalition of the kingdoms of this world and the kingdom of God.

And that is the truth.