Promises of an ‘Easy Way Out’….Promises of Salvation or Redemption…Promises of Respite or Reprieve……..any promise can sound very hollow when the odds are stacked against you. The history of human life is sated with illustrations of situations without any likely ‘get-out’, ‘respite’, ‘reprieve’ or ‘redemption.’
Like the story of the condemned Earl Johnstone in America a few years ago; he had been on Death Row for seven years, clinging on to the mere possibility of a reprieve. I recall standing in the middle of my sitting room late one night, marvelling at the cheerfulness of Earl Johnstone as he clung on to that promise of an unlikely reprieve. I marvelled even more when, at the end of this true and tragic human story coming out of America…..it emerged that after all the fruitless effort, the man went to the gas chamber. Alas! Too late! Some months after his death, the woman with whom he had been on the night he was alleged to have killed a cop…when she was traced.
It is in the nature of ‘faith’, the sort of faith by which we are deemed to live….it is in the nature of this ‘faith’ that we accept such promise in assured hope; that the persistent hope must ever be fanned by the breeze of human experience. Hope of ‘reprieve‘, ‘respite‘, ‘relief’ or salvation of whatever kind is always nurtured by reflecting on what God has done in the past. Religious People claim to step into the Unknown in faith…with an assured hope of ‘salvation’ based on, and re-enforced by their or other people’s experience of Life; what they would call, God’s dealings with His People.
It is strange how we can get ourselves so wrapped-up within our own little world, within ourselves, that we fail to perceive in our past experiences what has been wrought by our own ’faith’ or enduring hopefulness..even by the faith and hopefulness of others in their lives. Accepting the promises of God have the guarantee of past experience….both of our own and that of others.
Even when the realization of the promises appear to be impossible in the light of present realities, even then - perhaps especially then, the woman or man of faith and hope will look back over life and see ’The Hand of God’ at work….and thus feed the wavering assurance with what has gone before.
When stepping into the Unknown, we do so in Faith! We all do!
In the immortal words of Alexander Pope:
Hope springs eternal in the human breast,
Man never Is, but always To be blest.
