Twenty-Sixth Sunday after Pentecost: Old Testament, Daniel 12:1-3                        

Daniel 12:1-3 

Hope. It is a teaching of the Holy Scriptures relating to the forward look of God’s people in all ages. If anything brings assault to the teaching, it’s death. Men fear death as nothing else. And with good reason. And perhaps for reasons that are not so evident. We all fear death in the sense that it is a cessation, at least for a time. But along with the end of the beating heart and expanding lungs is the penalty for the sinner. And the sinner is aware. Not of the immensity of what is coming, but that something is coming. It’s placed in the heart from conception that justice will be served. On everyone.

For the believer in Jesus, His work on the cross presented the justice of God to the world in regard to sin. Not a casual glance or wink. But a full-on gaze. Father to Son. Ineffable Holiness toward the sin of the world. It is holy wrath and it was felt. Thanks be to God, for the one who loves the Savior, that justice will never be served to him or her. And while the penalty of death is experienced by the believer it is, in the words of Ambrose, “like sleep (is) undergone for a time.” But just as you and I arise from the evening’s slumber, so too the believer in Christ will be raised in his or her body to an eternal existence is that is life indeed. The unbeliever not so. Raised, yes. But not to life.

“Shine like brightness of the sky above,” is how Daniel describes our future state. Not because we have earned it or because we have that light in ourselves but because our hope (remember that word) has been fixed by God on the One He has provided as our rescue. There is a day, a grand day, for the day after the last. The hope is sure.