Certainty of Our Hope

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Jul 31, 1913

Certainty of Our Hope

THE Scriptures of Truth sound no note of uncertainty. Their teaching is not yea and nay, but yea and amen. This spirit of certainty and assurance has characterized the special messengers of heaven in the different ages of the church. It was with no spirit of faltering that Moses entered the presence of the proud Pharaoh and gave to him the message, “Thus saith Jehovah, the God of Israel, Let my people go that they may hold a feast unto me in the wilderness.” It was the same spirit of abiding confidence that enabled Elijah to stand alone upon Mt. Carmel, opposed to the myriad hosts of Baal, and proclaim the supremacy of the worship of the one true God above the false system of worship with which he was surrounded. This certainty of hope sustained Jeremiah, the prophet of sorrow, and gave to him a face of flint as day after day and year after year he bore to backsliding Israel a message of warning and reproof. It led the apostle Paul to declare, “I know whom I have believed, and am persuaded that he is able to keep that which I have committed unto him against that day.” And with the same confidence in God, without self-sufficiency, the apostle John states, “We know that we are of God, and the whole world lieth in wickedness.”

This was the certainty of hope felt by the leaders of Christian thought in the ages of the past. God wants that same certainty to possess the hearts of his people today. He has committed to us a definite message. In accepting it “we have not followed cunningly devised fables.” It is founded upon the sure word of the Scriptures of Truth. It was true when the fathers of this movement discovered it in the Sacred Word. Time has not effaced one iota of its beauty and clearness, nor extracted one atom of its strength and power. Multiplying signs and the fulfilment of prophecy have demonstrated every year the correctness of our position. There is no call today to abandon a single fundamental principle of our faith.

This only is necessary: as the men and women God called to lead out in this movement sought and found in God an experience for themselves, so do we need to seek and find an experience for ourselves, today. As they were men and women of earnest Bible study, so we need to study earnestly at the present time. Possibly we may find new settings for the truths they espoused. We may discover new relations between their several facts. We may clothe the message in new phrases of expression, but the great fundamental principles of the truth are the same today as they were half a century ago. No superficial criticism, no flippant, slighting remarks, can change the facts with which we have to deal. Let us not think for one moment, as do many of the great Christian churches, that the changed times demand a new gospel. By this deception of the great enemy thousands of professed Christians are becoming ensnared. We need a new vision of the old truth. We need a new and mightier power from above in its presentation. We need ourselves to be changed by its holy, sanctifying influence, and it will become then the power of God unto salvation in our lives, and we shall be able to give it to others with that certainty of hope, that assurance of faith, and with that power and demonstration in the Holy Spirit that will make it indeed a savor of life to our fellows.