Easter Sunday - This Hope Does Not Disappoint [Ryan Ashley]

Romans 8:18-25

“Despite what we hear on the news and from many authorities, the great story of our era is that we are witnessing the greatest improvement in global living standards ever to take place. Poverty, malnutrition, illiteracy, child labor, and infant mortality are falling faster than at any other time in human history. Life expectancy at birth has increased more than twice as much in the last century as it did in any previous recorded century. The risk that any individual will be exposed to war, die in a natural disaster, or be subjected to dictatorship has become smaller than in any other epoch. War, crime, disaster and poverty are painfully real, but they are rapidly declining. What we see now are the exceptions, where once they would have been the rule.”

Johan Norberg

“As we have slowly and surely attained more progress, we have lost something that undergirds all of it: meaning, cohesion, and a different, deeper kind of happiness than the satiation of all our earthly needs. We’ve forgotten the human flourishing that comes form a common idea of virtue. For most of the Ancients, freedom from our natural desires and material needs. It rested on a mastery of these deep, natural urges in favor of self-control, restraint, and education into virtue. They’d look at our freedom and see licentiousness, chaos, and slavery to desire. They’d predict misery not happiness to be the result.”

Andrew Sullivan

“Those who have a why to live can bear with almost any how.”

Victor Frankle

Culture Moment – Two Narratives

1. It’s all going to hell in a hand basket

2. Never been better = Utopia is here (Almost)

Romans 8:18-25

Eucatastrophe: a sudden and favorable resolution of events in a story; a happy ending.

“The resurrection of Jesus declared that Jesus was not the ordinary sort of political king. A rebel leader, that some had supposed. He was the leader of a far larger, more radical revolution than anyone had ever supposed. He was inaugurating a whole new world, a new creation, a new way of being human. He was forging a way into a new cosmos, a new era, a form of existence hinted at all along but never before unveiled. Here it is, he was saying. This is the new creation you’ve been waiting for. It is open for business. Come and join in.”

N.T. Wright

“For this world in its present form is passing away.”

1 Corinthians 7:31

1. Life is full of suffering, frustration, and groaning.

“In this life, all of our symphonies remain unfinished.”

Karl Reiner

2. The main problem in the world is the human condition.

“If society is corrupt but not the individuals in it, then where did the corruption originate and how is it propagated?”

Jordan Peterson – Evolutionary Psychologist

3. The main hope for the world (and the human condition) is Resurrection.