S. OUT OF TRIBULATION, HOPE

OUT OF TRIBULATION, HOPE Dr. W. A. Criswell Rom 5:3-4 08-01-54

You are listening to the services of the First Baptist Church in downtown Dallas. And this is the Pastor, bringing the morning message-which is the evening message.

I just refuse to get in a rut. Every time they set this program, they say, at the morning hour, he’s going to preach such and such. And the evening hour, he’s going to preach such and such. And you would think by that that I prepare a sermon for the morning hour and another kind of sermon for the evening hour.

Well, I don’t do it. I prepare as earnestly and faithfully for the evening hour as I do at the morning hour. So, today, I’m going to preach the sermon for the evening hour right now. And this morning’s sermon, I’m going to preach tonight. And the invitation will be either one you entertain. This was the morning text: “Therefore being justified by faith”-In our preaching through the Bible, we’re in the fifth chapter of Romans:

Therefore being justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ; By whom also we have access by faith into this grace wherein we stand, and rejoice in hope of the glory of God. And that’s the morning sermon. This is the evening sermon: And not only so, but we glory in tribulations also; knowing that tribulation worketh patience; And patience, experience; and experience, hope. And hope maketh not ashamed; because the love of God is shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Spirit which is given unto us. And the announced sermon for tonight was: “We Glory in Tribulation.” And if I could turn it a little bit, I’d like to title it: Our of Tribulation-Out of Sorrow-Hope.

Rom 5:3-4; Rom 5:1-21 -I read the text again: And not only so; but we glory in tribulations, knowing that tribulation worketh patience; And patience, experience; and experience, hope. And hope maketh not ashamed; because of God… . In Phillips’ translation, in his unique and wonderful volume, Letters to Young Churches, he translates that passage like this:

Sorrows and troubles brings about patient endurance. This, in turn, develops a mature character. And a character of this sort produces a steady hope-a hope that will never disappoint. And Weymouth translates that same passage in Romans like this:

We exult in our affliction, knowing that affliction produces endurance; and endurance, rightness of character; and rightness of character, hope; and this hope never disappoints. And then, I wrote out here a literal translation of that Greek passage. It’s not beautiful when you write it out literally, like the published translations. But, taking those Greek words literally, one right after the other, this is it:

We rejoice, or we glory, or we exult in tribulations-you could translate it “hardships, sufferings, troubles”-knowing that trials and troubles produce constancy-or fortitude or patient endurance-and constancy produces veteran character-that is the character of a veteran, as opposed to a raw recruit; and veteran character produces hope, which never disappoints.

Isn’t that a strange thing: out of trials and tribulations, endurance; and out of endurance, maturity of experience and character; and out of maturity of experience and character, hope? But, we’re leaving out the middle of it: we exult in trials and hardships and tribulations for, out of these, come our great hope.

Now that’s the opposite-that’s contradictory to everything I ever thought for and everything that this world has ever thought for. Isn’t that the way of the world: we have hope when things are favorable, when things are propitious, when things are getting better, when things are looking up? In these favorable circumstances-in these fortunate situations, we have hope. In the thermometer of our emotional experience, we are happier; we are gladder; we are lighter, when things are going better-when everything is propitious. And out of these favorable circumstances, people have hope. Now, that’s the world.

This, in Paul, is the diametric opposite. When things are unfavorable; when they are unpropitious; when things are dark-within the days of our trials and our troubles, says Paul, that we have our great hope-just the opposite, just the opposite.

Isn’t that strange? Isn’t that different from anything you ever heard of in your whole life? And the secret of that difference is the heart and the essance and the nature of the Christian faith. And it is my proposal today that that heart and that essence and that nature is emotional.

I can remember that, for the last 30 years, for the most part-I can remember its development most distinctly. And as I review it, there has been tremendous and unbeleivable change in the outlook and the attitude of the people of the world and especially here in America.

I was eight years old in 1918 and I remember the blowing of the whistles and the ringing of the bells. I remember the rejoicing from one side of the continent to the other. The armistice had been signed and we had won the War. Not long after that, the peace pact was signed, implementing that victory. It was a war to end wars. It was a war to make the world safe for democracy. The world had a new stage and a new hour and a new hope. The future was great and glorious and beyond compare. Not only had we won the war, and not only were the opportunities that lay ahead rich and glorious indeed, but there a flood of new inventions, a flood of new discoveries, a great world of wonderful new things in our lives. The biological and medical frontiers were pushed back greatly. In physics, in mechanics, in technology, in astronomy-on the seas, in the skies, on the earth, underneath the earth-everywhere, there were new horizons. These discoveries brought optimism home to the whole world.

I can remember the great psychologist, Koch, who came over here and was lecturing. And all of us were taught to say-you remember it: “Every day, in every way, I am getting better and better.” And that outlook was typical of the bright attitude and spirit of optimism of the entire world. The future was to be better and better. And it was brighter and brighter in prospect than anything the world had ever known heretofore. That spirit of brilliant optimism entered into all of our school lives. The professors laughed at the idea that we might ever need God. That was an old medieval superstition that we had grown beyond. Humanity had gotten beyond all that theological baggage. Not only did you find that doctrine of inevitable progress, a corollary-an addendum to the accepted notion of evolution-that things were just going up and going on and going forward, we were headed fort he kind of time that we had never known before, but along with that spirit of optimism and inevitable progress, there was a university professor, was found in the teaching of philosophy. It was also found in the pulpit. All of the modernist preachers also preached of the inevitable progress of man and human ingenuity and ability. That was the period of the roaring ‘20’s, as I remember it.

Hope? Everyone had hope. It was the propitious hour, headed for a golden state.

Then, the ‘30’s came. That’s when I began my ministry. What a time that was. The “Stock Market Crash” was a phrase-and I was just a boy, in my teens-and I didn’t quite know what it meant, until I caught on to the business world, and it affects all of our lives, with its economic rise and fall.

I remember the first town in which I had my first pastorate. I remember talking to a man, walking over there and talking to him. He said, “I don’t know what’s going on. I can’t sell my goods-I can’t sell my goods.”

None of the stores or workers could sell their goods. I went out and visited with a bunch of cotton farmers. And they couldn’t sell their cotton for even five cents a pound. And that was the beginning of what you know as “the Great Depression.”

Out of that Depression arose two sinister, and terrible, forces. One of them was called Communism. The other, its opposite, was called Fascism. And with one of them on the east of us and the other on the west of us, we soon found ourselves in another world conflagration. And the ‘30’s ended.

Then, the ‘40’s came. And when the ‘40’s came, America was plunged headlong into that great holocaust. And as we entered the War, that led to the beginning of the atomic age. Hiroshima was absolutely destroyed by an atomic explosion. And a few days later, Nagasaki met the same fate. In the wake, the prince and the rulers of imperial Japan took it upon themselves to sue for peace. And in the explosion of that atomic bomb, America won the War. But, a strange thing happened. Ever since that day, there is an undercurrent in all our statecraft. There is an undercurrent in all our international relationships. There is an undercurrent in all the editorials and all the commentations and all the discussions. In all the current literature, there’s a disillusionment; there’s an echo; there’s a sounding-somehow, ever since we exploded that bomb over Hiroshima, there has been an lingering fear, an uneasiness in America. Do you remember Pliny the Elder? He ended every speech in the Roman Senate with a famous appeal: “Carthage must be destroyed.” And soon Carthage was destroyed. The Romans razed Carthage to the ground. And at the moment Carthage was destroyed, Poleubius, the Roman historian, was there with Pliny the Elder. Pliny said, “It is a glorious moment, Poleubius. But, I have a foreboding. I hear that the same flame may someday destroy my own country of Rome.”

Five years later, the hordes were storming the gates of Rome. Who could believe that Rome, built up by the conquest of the entire known world, could fall? But, it would happen very soon.

Though we have not been party to it, it has happened to England and France and Spain. On the other side of the world, there are millions and millions who have lived under tyranny. In Africa, in India, in the Orient, in China, in Indonesia, the people are terribly exploited-instruments of self-aggrandizement-and it has hardly been noticed by people in the West. We’re not interested in their souls, in their salvation. We’re not interested in their lives. And they’re being exploited. The Americans, the British are just not interested in these people-people we spit on. Our economists, our politicians, just exploit them. The Western world does not care about the poor, the uneducated, the ignorant, the untaught. And I read to you the immortal words of Edwin Markham, in his poem “The Man and the Hoe”:

Bowed by the weight of centuries he leans
Upon his hoe and gazes on the ground,
The emptiness of ages in his face,
And on his back, the burden of the world.
Who made him dead to rapture and despair,
A thing that grieves not and that never hopes,
Stolid and stunned, a brother to the ox?
Who loosened and let down this brutal jaw?
Whose was the hand that slanted back this brow?
Whose breath blew out the light within this brain? Is this the Thing the Lord God made and gave
To have dominion over sea and land;
To trace the stars and search the heavens for power;
To feel the passion of Eternity?
Is this the dream He dreamed who shaped the suns
And marked their ways upon the ancient deep?
Down all the caverns of Hell to their last gulf
There is no shape more terrible than this--
More tongued with cries against the world’s blind greed--
More filled with signs and portents for the soul--
More packed with danger to the universe.

What gulfs between him and the seraphim!
Slave of the wheel of labor, what to him
Are Plato and the swing of the Pleiades?
What the long reaches of the peaks of song,
The rift of dawn, the reddening of the rose?
Through this dread shape the suffering ages look;
Time’s tragedy is in that aching stoop;
Through this dread shape humanity betrayed,
Plundered, profaned and disinherited,
Cries protest to the Powers that made the world,
A protest that is also prophecy.

O masters, lords and rulers in all lands,
Is this the handiwork you give to God,
This monstrous thing distorted and soul-quenched?
How will you ever straighten up this shape;
Touch it again with immortality;
Give back the upward looking and the light;
Rebuild in it the music and the dream;
Make right the immemorial infamies,
Perfidious wrongs, immedicable woes?

O masters, lords and rulers in all lands,
How will the future reckon with this Man?
How answer his brute question in that hour
When whirlwinds of rebellion shake all shores?
How will it be with kingdoms and with kings--
With those who shaped him to the thing he is--
When this dumb Terror shall rise to judge the world,
After the silence of the centuries?

[Edwin Markham, “The Man with the Hoe”] And I think back to the “Roaring ‘20’s”-and I think back to the professor and the pulpiteer and the statesman and the politician and the commentator and the editorial writer and the whole world that was confident of the coming golden age and the shallowness of their optimism.

Then, there is the opposite view: we’re just cannon fodder anyway. So, “Three cheers for everything” and “three cheers for nothing.”

One of the men in our city was told, “If you don’t stop drinking, you’ll die.”

Then he was told by a friend, “I see you’ve gone back to drinking.” The man answered, “I drink because it’s not worth living.”

Underneath-underneath, there is a spirit of defeat and despair and fear of what lies ahead.

But, we still follow the emotional thermometer. When things are happy, we are happy. When things are propitious, we are propitious. We’re like a weather vane. When the winds of the circumstances of life blow in a favorable way, we go that way, too. But, when the thing goes down, we go down. When things aren’t propitious, we lose heart. When things are uncertain and full of fear, we cringe and are afraid.

Oh, oh. What a difference. What a difference. Out of tribulation, out of hardship, out of suffering, out of despair arises our hope.

That’s an autobiography there. He’s talking out of his own life experience.

Five times, he says, “I received forty stripes save one.” Many times was I beaten with rods. I was stoned and left for dead. I was in peril from my countrymen, from robbers, from the sea, perils in the wilderness. I went through suffering and hardship and trials and I developed a hope-a hope-a hope.

You know, you never can forget that Paul, in a prison epistle, in the Epistle to the Philippians, said: “Rejoice in the Lord always; again I say, always rejoice.” He said that in pain and in prison.

How can I ever forget? He was in prison and it was out of pain and despair and heartbreak. Out of these comes our hope-our hope. And not only so, but we glory in trials and troubles because they work endurance; And endurance works mature experience; and mature experience produces hope that never disappoints.

Fortunate circumstances may last for a day and then be gone. Difficult circumstances may last for a year and then are gone forever. The rise and fall, the trials and trouble produce in us a hope that will never disappoint because-because the love of God is in our hearts through the gift of the Holy Spirit. Our hope is not tied to our circumstances and our economics. It is grounded in the trials we face and grow through. That kind of hope from God will never disappoint, no matter how much suffering and tribulation you face. The prophet said, “The Lord will receive the praise of his people.” The Psalmist, in Psa 42:5, says: “Why are you cast down, my soul? And why art thou disquieted within me? Hope thou in God… .” In the Book of the Hebrews: “God, who could swear by none greater, swore by himself, for it is impossible for God to lie… which hope we have as an anchor of the soul, sure and steadfast”-never moved, never moved. In the midst of the sea, when the anchor is thrown out, it grasps the great immoveable rock. And the anchor holds-and this is an anchor for the soul, holding onto our rock, our hope-our hope in God-in God-in God.

I close. Did you ever notice-did you ever see the end of this glorious Christian’s life who wrote these words in the New Testament record? How does it end? How does it close?

Why, you would think that such a marvelous story would close in a blaze of light. You would expect that such a marvelous record would close with victory. Does it? Does it?

No. It closes with Paul’s head on a chopping block, with him appealing to Timothy to come and see him one more time before he loses his life.

How does it end for Simon Peter? He was crucified-nailed to a cross.

How does it end for so many in the early church? They were persecuted and many of their lives were exterminated for their faith. That’s how it actually ended.

But, what was Paul’s attitude in all this: “Looking for that blessed hope, and that glorious appearing of the great god and our Savior Jesus Christ.”

How did it end? On the lonely Isle of Patmos, John, left to die of exposure and privation, lifted up his eyes and saw a vision. And in those visions, he saw the triumphant Son of God. He saw Armageddon and he saw the end of the human race. He saw it all in his visions. In Rev 20:1-15, he saw an angel come down from God out of heaven and bind Satan in a bottomless pit. Then, in the twentieth chapter, and the twenty-first chapter and the twenty-second chapter…