What is the blessed hope?

Question 10153.

The blessed hope is one of those expressions that has been said so often in Christian circles that it can slide past the ear without registering. Paul used it once, with great precision, and he attached it to a very specific event rather than to a general optimism about things working out.

What he wrote was this: “waiting for our blessed hope, the appearing of the glory of our great God and Saviour Jesus Christ” (Titus 2:13). Let me unpack what that meant, and then what it is supposed to do to us.

The Text and Its Setting

Paul is writing to a young minister on Crete about ordinary church life: how older men and women should conduct themselves, how younger ones should be taught, how bondservants should work. Then he lifts his eyes. The grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation, training us to renounce ungodliness and to live self-controlled, upright and godly lives in the present age, waiting for our blessed hope.

Notice the structure. Grace has appeared, past. Grace trains, present. Glory will appear, future. The blessed hope is not tacked on as an afterthought; it is the third movement in a sentence about how Christians behave on a Tuesday.

The word translated blessed is makarios, the same word that opens the Beatitudes. It carries the sense of a settled, congratulated happiness rather than a passing cheerfulness. And hope in biblical usage, elpis, is not wishful thinking. It is confident expectation of something certain but not yet in hand.

The Blessed Hope and the Rapture

Which event is Paul waiting for? I take it to be the rapture, the coming of Jesus for His church, rather than the Second Coming in judgement, and here is why.

An event described as blessed, and offered as a present comfort to believers going about their ordinary duties, does not sit easily with a return preceded by seals, trumpets, bowls and the great tribulation. If the church had to pass through that period first, the immediate object of expectation would be tribulation, and the hope would be at the far end of it. Paul offers the hope itself as the next thing.

Elsewhere Paul makes the same move. After describing the dead in Christ rising and living believers being caught up, he says: therefore encourage one another with these words. Encouragement is a strange word to use about an event you must survive seven years of wrath to reach. See what is the rapture? and pretribulationism.

Hope With a Face

Something easy to miss: Paul does not say the blessed hope is heaven, or rest, or reunion with those we have lost, true as all of those are. He says it is the appearing of the glory of our great God and Saviour Jesus. The hope is a person.

That single detail is worth sitting with. I have known believers whose whole comfort in bereavement was the thought of seeing a husband again, and I would never belittle that. But Scripture puts something greater in front of us. The centre of the hope is not a place or even a reunion. It is His face.

Incidentally, this verse is also one of the clearest statements of the deity of Jesus in the New Testament. The Greek construction ties God and Saviour together under a single article, so that our great God and Saviour is one person, not two.

What the Blessed Hope Does to Us

Paul’s whole argument is that this expectation is morally productive. Grace trains us to say no to ungodliness precisely as we wait. Peter argues the same way, asking what sort of people we ought to be since these things are going to be dissolved. John says that everyone who hopes in Him purifies himself.

I find that reassuring, because it means the doctrine is not escapism. A man who genuinely expects his Lord this year handles his money differently, and his temper, and his diary. It is remarkably hard to nurse a grudge while listening for a trumpet.

The blessed hope also does something for grief. Paul’s aim in 1 Thessalonians 4 was to stop Christians grieving as those who have no hope. Not to stop them grieving. There is a world of pastoral wisdom in that distinction.

Waiting Without Wandering

Two failures spoil this. The first is date-setting, which turns a blessed hope into a diary appointment and always ends in embarrassment. The second is indifference, where the doctrine is technically believed and practically forgotten.

Jesus dealt with both in the same parable. The wicked servant says his master is delayed and starts beating his fellow servants. The faithful servant is simply found doing his job when the master arrives. Watchfulness in Scripture almost always looks like ordinary faithfulness rather than dramatic anticipation.

Hope in the Biblical Sense

Part of the reason this doctrine has lost its force is that the word hope has weakened in English. We use it for anything from the weather to a football result, which is to say we use it for things we would like and cannot predict.

Scripture uses it for something certain that has not yet arrived. Paul says hope that is seen is not hope, since who hopes for what he sees, and then adds that if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience. The uncertainty is in the timing, never in the outcome.

Hebrews calls this hope an anchor of the soul, sure and steadfast, and locates the anchor inside the veil where Jesus has gone as a forerunner (Hebrews 6:19-20). An anchor is not wishful thinking. It is a heavy object attached to something that does not move.

Who the Blessed Hope Is For

One caution before I finish, because this doctrine can be misused as easily as any other.

The blessed hope belongs to those who are His. Paul writes it to a church, about a Saviour who gave Himself to redeem us from all lawlessness and to purify for Himself a people for His own possession. The same event that gathers His people is the beginning of a period of judgement for a world that has refused Him, and it would be dishonest of me to describe only the comfortable half.

So the question of whether you belong to Him is not a side issue attached to this doctrine; it is the whole of it. If you have never trusted Jesus, the blessed hope is not yet your hope, and the honest thing is to say so plainly rather than to offer comfort that has not been purchased. And it can be yours today, on the same terms as everybody else: repentance and faith in the One who died and rose.

For those who do belong to Him, notice how Paul frames it in the rapture passages: not as a subject for debate but as material for mutual encouragement.

Hope and the Ordinary Week

Let me bring this down to the ground, because doctrines that stay in the air do nobody any good.

A woman in her eighties in a congregation I know once told me she had stopped buying green bananas. It was a joke about her age, but underneath it was a settled cheerfulness about the future that I have rarely seen in people fifty years younger. She was not morbid. She was ready.

That readiness is what this doctrine is meant to produce. Not a withdrawal from life, since she was busy to the end, but a loosened grip on it. The people I have known who most obviously loved His appearing were also the most useful people in the church, and I do not think that is a coincidence.

Hope of this kind changes the texture of a week rather than its timetable. The same jobs get done, the same bills get paid, and something underneath has shifted.

One More Thing About Waiting

Waiting is not a passive word in Paul’s vocabulary, and the verb he uses in Titus carries the sense of welcoming something with open arms.

You can wait for a bus with resigned indifference or wait for a son coming home from abroad. The difference is not in the duration but in the affection. Scripture assumes the second sort of waiting, which is why the crown is promised to those who have loved His appearing.

So the question is not whether you can recite the doctrine correctly. It is whether the thought of seeing Him gladdens you.

So, now what?

Ask yourself what you are actually waiting for. Not what you would write on a doctrinal questionnaire, but what your mind reaches for when things go quiet. Retirement? The children settling? A diagnosis that turns out to be nothing?

Every one of those hopes can fail, and some of them will. The blessed hope cannot fail, because it rests on the character of the One who promised and He has never yet broken His word to anybody.

So live today as someone expecting Him. Not anxiously, not with one eye on the sky and no hand on the plough, but as a servant who would be quite content to be caught mid-task. Would you be?

Waiting for our blessed hope, the appearing of the glory of our great God and Savior Jesus Christ, who gave himself for us to redeem us from all lawlessness and to purify for himself a people for his own possession who are zealous for good works.

Titus 2:13-14 (ESV)