The Blessed Hope
April 15th, 1984 @ 2:01 PM
Titus 2:11-14
THE BLESSED HOPE
Dr. W. A. Criswell
Titus 2:11-14
4-15-84 10:50 a.m.
Titus, chapter 2, beginning at verse 11:
For the grace of God that bringeth salvation hath appeared to all men,
Teaching us that, denying ungodliness and worldly lusts, we should live soberly, righteously, and godly, in this present world;
Looking for that blessed hope, and the glorious appearing of the great God and our Savior Jesus Christ.
[Titus 2:11-14]
And the heart of the text: “Looking for that blessed hope, and the glorious appearing of the great God and our Savior Jesus Christ” [Titus 2:14].
As the grace of God hath brought to us salvation, and as the grace of God hath taught us how to live beautifully and worthily in this present world, so the grace of God has also brought to us that blessed hope of the appearing, the Second Coming, of our Lord Jesus Christ. I hope to animate us, to characterize us, to lift us up, to fill us with glorious, incomparably precious expectation.
And without that hope of the coming of our Lord, we have no gospel to preach. Death and the grave and Satan reign forever. Without this hope of the coming of our Lord, our footsteps hesitate. Our very walk is laggard. Our hands hang nervously by our sides. We are defeated before we even begin the fight of faith.
It is the blessed hope of Jesus’ coming again that gives us victory in this life and a promise of resurrection and immortality in the life to come [Romans 6:1-4, 1 Corinthians 15:22-23]. If all we know is what we experience in this present world, our lives are lives of ultimate misery and the world in which we dwell is a world of unspeakable loss and helplessness and hopelessness and depravity and death and defeat.
Paul said in 1 Corinthians 15:19, “If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all men most miserable.” If all that we know and experience in this life is what we see facing an ultimate death, the Christian faith is like a bridge over a vast chasm and it stops in the middle of the abyss. It doesn’t reach to the farther shore, and all who travel over that bridge fall helplessly into the abyss below if all that we see in this world is all that God hath in store for us who love Him. “If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all men most miserable,” but the Scriptures present to us an altogether different promise.
In the holy Word of God, every horizon expands into a more beautiful day. There is a blessed hope for us. There’s a blessed hope for the church. There’s a blessed hope for our beloved dead. There’s a blessed hope for each one of us.
He uses the word makários elpida, “happy hope, beautiful hope, precious hope.” And he uses the word dōxa, “the appearing in glory, the glorious appearing of our wonderful Lord.”
And I think of three reasons why the apostle Paul could call this elpida, this “hope,” makarios, “blessed,” and dōxa, “glorious.” And the first reason is this: in the coming of our Lord, in the glorious appearing of our Savior, there is the final end and the forever destruction of sin, the bondage and the slavery of sin.
In the eighth chapter of the Book of Romans, beginning at verse 19, the apostle Paul describes the delivery of the whole creation from the bondage of corruption and sin [Romans 8:19]. And he ends that marvelous passage with the word of hope:
We are saved by that hope: but hope that is seen is not hope: for what a man seeth, why doth he yet hope for it?
But if we hope for that we see not, then do we with patience wait for it.
[Romans 8:24]
The blessed hope in our Lord is the delivery of the whole creation from the bondage of sin [Romans 8:18-25]. Those burned-out stars are to be recreated. This blasted earth, with its vast deserts, is to be regenerated; and the whole animal kingdom is to be regenerated and recreated; and even the fallen dead are to be raised to life. The whole history of mankind is the story of the war and the battle and the struggle against sin, wrong, oppression, violence, murder, sorrow, age, death.
In the previous chapter in Romans, Romans 7, Paul closes the chapter with the exclamation: “O wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me from the body of this death?” [Romans 7:24]. Every one of us is that wretched man: “O wretched one that I am! who can deliver me from this body of death?” [Romans 7:24]
And in our own nation, in our beloved America, there is a philosophy that is becoming almost universal in our country. It’s seen; it is read; it is followed in every area of life and especially is it taught in the American school. It’s the doctrine and the philosophy and the teaching of humanism. That is there are no moral absolutes; there is but situation ethics. There are no problems that the human man himself cannot solve. And give us time, and we will ripen into perfection—the doctrine of inherent and inevitable progress. Just give us time, and we will evolve out of the ape and the tiger and the fang and the claw that are in us. It’s a wonderful philosophy. It’s a marvelous teaching. The only thing is it’s a lie before God, and it is denied by human history itself.
There is no doubt but that there is progress and development in the discovery of the instruments that we use in this life in communication, in travel. In most every area of human science, history, there is development. There’s development from immaturity to maturity. You see it in an automobile. You see that development in an airplane. You see the development in a radio or in a TV. There is progress. There is development, but there is also progress and development in wrong and in violence and in murder and in war and in bloodshed.
Our ancestors who lived in caves killed one another with a stone ax. Then there was progress: they killed one another with a bow and an arrow. Then there was progress: they killed one another with a bullet and a rifle. Then there was progress: they killed one another with cannon. Then there is progress: we kill one another with an atomic bomb. But there is no evidence, ever in human history, that there is progress from evil to good out of the curse of unrighteousness and violence and blood and death.
There is not an instrument more beautiful in the hands of God for the propagation of the gospel of Christ than the radio and the television. Sit there before it and listen to a man of God speak the Word of the Lord or sit there before a television set and watch a service of the Lord God in the sanctuary of the Lord’s house.
What a wonderful thing. What a marvelous instrument. What great progress. But as I look at it, I have never thought for so much blood and murder and violence and promiscuity and wrong in my life as I see every day on the television screen.
There is no such thing in human history as our evolving out of the curse of sin and depravity that afflict us from the days of our fallen ancestors to the days of our own impending judgment and death. That’s why the Bible refers to the coming of our Lord, the appearing of our Lord, as being the dōxa, the makários, the “blessed hope.”
Someday, someday Jesus is coming again. And someday we shall live in a kingdom of righteousness, and the world will be filled with the knowledge of the Lord like the waters cover the face of the sea. The blessed hope: it means the final end of all sin and wrong.
Number two: why the second coming of our Lord is called the blessed hope. It is because, when Jesus comes, He brings with Him the abolition of death. As the First Corinthian letter, the fifteenth chapter, says, “The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death” [1 Corinthians 15:26].
Three times in the Gospels—three times is it described how our Lord raised the dead. He raised from the dead a young maiden, and a young man, and a beloved brother. And in all three instances, the dead were raised when Jesus came. He came to the home of Jairus and raised his daughter [Mark 5:22-24, 35-43]. He came to the town of Nain and raised to life the son of the weeping widow [Luke 7:11-16]. And though He tarried long, yet He came to Bethany and raised from the dead Lazarus, the brother of Mary and Martha [John 11:1-46].
So it is with us. Though He tarry long, Jesus is coming. And when He comes, He will come to raise us from the dead—to speak to the grave—and they in the grave shall hear His voice and rise to the glory of His marvelous presence [1 Thessalonians 4:16-18].
If that is not so, and if that does not come to pass, then the victory of Christ over death and the grave is but partial. Satan has divided the victory of Christ in two. Christ Himself may have been raised, but these who have found refuge in Him lie corrupting in the dust of the ground. And every grave in this world cries aloud to heaven: “He is not able. He has lost the victory. The grave is triumphant. I lie in this dust of the ground. I lie corrupting in this earth because He is not able to deliver us who are held in the grasp of grief and lie under the victorious feet of sin and of death. He has failed us.” And my brother, the very resurrection of Christ Himself but emphasizes that ultimate defeat of our Lord. He is in heaven in a resurrected, glorified body, but all of His saints who surround Him are disembodied spirits.
In the second letter of Paul to the church at Corinth, in the fifth chapter, Paul describes the horror to the Christian of disembodiment. Like nature abhors a vacuum, the Christian faith abhors disembodiment. Paul calls it nakedness. Paul calls it unclothed [2 Corinthians 5:1-4]. We who lie corrupting in the dust of the ground may be spirits in heaven, but our very corrupting bodies witness against Christ. He’s not able to raise us from the dead.
He is raised. He’s an immortalized, glorified, transfigured man, but we lie [as] pawns of Satan. He, Satan, is the victor of the tomb. Every grave in this world witnesses against our Lord: “You’re not able. You have failed. You’ve passed me by. You’ve forgotten me.” The grave is triumphant. Death is victorious.
That’s why I think that when I read the Bible such as the fourth chapter of the First Thessalonian letter or the fifteenth chapter of the First Corinthian letter—that’s why I read that when He comes, when He comes, when He comes the dead in Christ are raised first [1 Thessalonians 4:4-18, 1 Corinthians 15:52]. This is the great mark of the triumphant Lord: the resurrection of the dead [Romans 1:4]. And if He’s not able to raise us from the dead, if He leaves us corrupting in the heart of the earth, His victory is nothing but a defeat for His fallen saints and those who have found refuge in Him. There has to be a resurrection from the dead if our Lord is to be victorious over sin and death and the grave.
In our beautiful passage, it speaks of “the grace of God that has brought salvation to us” [Titus 2:11]. That salvation is in three respects. The salvation is for us. He died for us on the Cross [Romans 5:8]. That salvation is in us. He regenerates our souls and our spirits [Titus 3:3-6]. But also, that salvation is upon us. We are clothed upon with our house, our home, our body, which is fashioned by His omnipotent hands in heaven [1 Corinthians 15:45-57]. That’s why it is called “the blessed hope.”
Third: last, it is called “the blessed hope” because of the glorious appearing, personal, visible, of our great God and Savior Jesus Christ. Do you notice the theology of that sentence: “looking for the blessed hope and the doxa appearing of the, t-h-e singular, the—the great God and Savior, our Jesus Christ” [Titus 2:13]. That’s what it is. As Paul wrote it, we are looking for “the appearing of the great God our Savior Jesus Christ.” When He comes—when He comes, it’ll be the coming of the Lord God Himself, and it will be the Lord God Himself that we shall see [Revelation 1:5-8].
That theology of the deity of our Lord is met again and again in the Word of the Bible. For example, Isaiah 9 and 6: “Unto us a child is born and unto us a Son is given …. and His name shall be called Wonderful, Counselor, The Mighty God, The Everlasting Father …” His deity.
In the theme of our pre-Easter services, the doubting Thomas looking upon the risen Lord cried, “My Lord and my God” [John 20:28]. It is God who is coming in all of the glory of deity, “the glorious appearing of our great God and Savior Jesus Christ” [Titus 2:14].