A Pastor's Commentary
Pastor Tom Hasbrouck
The Birth of Hope
Very early Monday morning, after a nearly sleepless night, my wife and I welcomed our youngest son into the world. This young life, nine months in growing, had finally come to the light of day. Well, it would soon be light. And we gave thanks to God, the Creator and Sustainer of his life and ours.
We gave to him the boy's name we had chosen weeks prior, and affirmed during the weekend. We had not known until he arrived if we would use the boy's name or the girl's. It is an ancient name in a modern time; this is a pattern seen in the names of his siblings.
On Tuesday morning, the very next day, we listened with surprised and heavy hearts to the reports of terrorist-driven destruction. Even while our arms held our bundle of joy, our hearts embraced sorrow for others, for many people were left bereft of their joys that day. Parents lost children, and children lost parents. Husbands and wives were suddenly separated by the weapon of death. Families were torn apart, as also were neighborhoods and businesses.
Life came one day, and death the next. With this new life came anticipation and hope for the future; with death the anticipation, hopes, and dreams of many were cruelly snuffed out. Thousands of individuals are dead, and thousands of families are wounded. Most still stand, like the Pentagon, with their wounds gaping, but some are nearly destroyed.
Though this hurt is felt nationally, as a people, it parallels the pain and anguish of individuals and families who experience more private sorrows of death. Accidental deaths of all kinds, wanton killings on streets or in schools, swift-moving and ravaging disease, the stillbirth of a much anticipated child, these untimely horrors are experienced each day of the week by people we know. Their pain also is real.
My son is oblivious to all of this. He does not know of the trials and traumas in the world outside our home. Is there hope for that world, a world he will (presumably) grow up to?
I told you this boy has a name—it is Josiah John. He had a great-grandfather on each side of the family named John, but meaning is more significant than family history. The name John is testimony to this fact: Jehovah has been gracious. God put this life into our hands, to nurture for His glory. Thus we hold him to be a grace-gift of God alone, and nothing we deserve.
Josiah also has a meaning. We have seen it interpreted as Jehovah is a buttress, and also Jehovah will heal, or restore. Restoration is a subject found throughout Scripture. This includes the expectation that all creation will be freed from the curse under which it now groans, a curse of death and destruction. The name Josiah is a profound promise belonging to an ordinary baby boy; it reminds us of our extra-ordinary God. He understands our sorrows and pain, and He has promised that one day, when the new heaven and the new earth are established, all these sorrows will be wiped away. This life, groaning and marred by sin, the only life we now know, will be done and gone. Death will be swallowed up in victory!
Until that day, live in hope, for we serve a gracious and powerful God. He has promised to be a certain help in time of need. He is an unfailing refuge for the sorrowing heart. He has promised to heal, and to restore. He is still the Author of life. A baby boy shows me.