Just reading through the scriptures, and I’ve come across I Peter 1:3; I thought it was a very fitting verse given the season we are in and entering, it says:

“Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who according to His great mercy has caused us to be born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, . . .”

What a hope-filled passage! What stands out, amongst many, is who is the One who initiates being born again; it is a unilateral move that flows from God’s free mercy towards us in Christ. We don’t cause salvation, that would be like saying that we are the ’cause’ of God’s life; that God’s life is predicated by ours, that we come first. But what this passage clearly illustrates and assumes is that Pelagianism has no play in reality, that it’s God who initiates and is salvation; or, that there really is no salvation at all!

Beyond this, the greatest source of our hope, given our human condition, is resurrection; and our union with Christ in His ‘resurrection life’. Like Paul, Peter has a ‘union-with-Christ’ theology, and we see that evinced in this passage; apart from our identification with Christ (or rather His with us) we are of all men most pitiable. It is ‘through’ His resurrection, through His life that we have a living hope; for Peter this hope is eschatological in shape, it is what we look forward to that should shape our lives right now — in other words, resurrection life is eschatological life; it is the in-breaking of the ‘life-ahead’ realized in a shadow-land form now, and we should take full advantage of living out of that resurrection life and power now!

Resurrection is our hope!