Hope: Waiting, Stretching, and Trusting

Hey, Tim. Hello, John.
Today we're going to do something new.

We're going to spend four weeks in

the words related to the Advent season. Exactly.
The four words are hope, peace, joy, and love.

Advent, it's typically four weeks leading up till Christmas, marked by four Sunday worship gatherings. And those are the four Sundays of Advent.

And the whole theme is about waiting, developing the virtue of patience and waiting for the fulfillment of God's promise in sending the Messiah.

And for us, it's just a chance to dive into four really profound, meaningful, biblical,

I guess I won't say words because many of these words actually have multiple Hebrew or Greek words underneath them. So they're kind of like idea topic studies.
Okay.

Hope, peace, joy, and love. And we're going to first look at hope.
Cool. Okay.
It's been a while since I've begun with a Bible trivia question, John.

If I were to ask you, who's the first person in the story of the Bible who has to wait? Like they're waiting for something and that's like a focus of stories. They're waiting.

First character

waiting. Waiting for something.

For God to do something or just waiting.

Okay, well, let's start with Adam then. Okay, right.
Is he waiting for anything? I mean, God wants to give him a helper. He's got to go into a little sleep.
He needs that delivering ally.

Yeah, but he's not sitting around waiting. No, well, he's anethicized.
Yeah. So that time went fast.
Yeah. Can Abel, there's no waiting.

All right. So when we get to Noah,

he's got to build the ark. He's got to wait for the rain.

That's right. So there is some like the rain's not here.

We've got the boat. So it's Noah.
That's right. It is Noah.
Okay. Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding.

And you're right in that God says in 40 days, I'm going to bring rain on the land.

But that 40 days isn't really drawn out in the narrative. It's just sort of like then he builds a boat and then

the rain starts. Okay.

But the opposite moment where the period of waiting for the waters to recede,

to go away. That's also a 40, right? Mm-hmm.
Yes. And it's marked by a series of moments in the story where Noah sent out a dove to see whether the waters had subsided from the face of the ground.

The dove couldn't find a resting place for her foot. So she returned to him in the ark, for the waters were still all over.

He stretched out his hand, brought her back into the ark, and he waited for seven days.

And then he sent out the dove again, and it came back with the little olive leaf, tree leaf in the mouth. And then he waited for seven more days.
He sent out the dove, and it just never came back.

Then he gets off the boat. Noah is the first person to wait.

So the word here is yachal. You got to clear your throat in the middle.

Yachal.

This is one of the main Hebrew words that gets translated as hope.

But the first time it appears, it very clearly.

Just means wait. Yes, yeah.

It would be weird to say, and he hoped for another seven days and then sent out the dove. That does sound weird.
Yeah. He hoped for seven days.
Yeah. So I'm just going to say yachal.

So let's look at some more examples here.

So there's a story in 1 Samuel where King Saul is supposed to yachl for the prophet Samuel for seven days, and then Samuel's going to show up and offer sacrifice and a whole bunch of stuff supposed to happen.

And then during those seven days, the Philistines surround him and he's freaking out. And he doesn't yacht.
He likes moves too quickly before Samuel shows up. So it's another example just of yachal.

Yeah, and it's also seven days, which is interesting. Okay.

But then here are other examples of yachal

or the nouns that come from it. So tochelet is a noun that derives from yachal.

I don't see that at all, how they are similar. Oh,

tochelet? Yeah. Well, the y

of yachal gets morphed into o

when you put that t on the front. Okay.
And then you can see the

of yachal and tochelet. You see the ch.
And then the t on the end is a little suffix on the end. Okay, so it's in there.
Yachal is in tochelet. Okay, it's just a little historical linguistics.

Anyway, so there's a noun, and the verb and the noun are used in ways where waiting would be a weird translation, maybe.

So here's a rad little riddle of a proverb: Proverbs chapter 13:

Tochelet that is deferred makes the heart sick,

But a desire that is fulfilled, mmm, that's a tree of life.

This is such a cool little riddle hyperlink back to the Garden of Eden story. With the tree of life.
Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Desire fulfilled is a tree of life. The point of the tree of life

is, as you've said many times, to participate in God's life. God's own life.
The never ends. Yeah.

So the tree of life is like the representation of God meeting us with his own personal life, presence, power. It's like the ultimate fulfillment of every human aspiration and desire.
Okay.

That's the second half. That's the second half.
So the first half is the opposite of that. The opposite.
So you get tochelet matches desire.

You get deferred, meaning constantly delayed,

is the opposite of fulfilled.

And then a sick heart is the opposite of the tree of life. Isn't that an interesting contrast? Yeah.

In biblical thought, heart is the center of thinking and desiring and purpose. Yeah.

So you constantly want something or planning to get it, strategizing, desiring it.

And when the thing that is your tochelet is constantly delayed,

it just makes

humans fall apart, man.

Yeah.

Makes you feel sick.

chelat is like a driver it's a motivator hmm i see so here it's not strictly the act of waiting no it's it's more isn't it

it's the thing that you're waiting for it's what you're waiting for when you're waiting for a thing and that is constantly forever put off it just okay makes the heart sick so it seems like this word yachal is like a type of waiting attached to a hope.

Attached to a particular object. Yes.
Yes, exactly. Isn't that interesting?

So it can refer to enduring the passage of time, but also included in the meaning of the word is the thing that you are waiting for, and we would call that like your hope, your object of hope. I see.

Okay, okay, let's go to Psalm 33. All right, there's three appearances of this idea here, starting in verse 16.
A king is not saved by the greatness of an army,

a warrior is not delivered by the greatness of strength, a horse is a false hope for victory, nor can it save by the greatness of its power.

Typically, we think the bigger army and the bigger tank, that is the war horse, gives you victory. And that might be true in a relative sense, but it's not always true.

And you can't count on it all of the time. Okay.
So, verse 18.

Look, the eye of Yahweh is on those who fear him, on those who yacht for his loyal love to deliver their soul from death, to keep them alive in a famine.

Okay, so what really does save? Ultimately, what has the power to save and deliver and bring hope? It's Yahweh, his loyal love,

and his ability to deliver from death. From death and famine, which is interesting examples.

Both really important in Genesis as images of the fragile nature of life that we didn't create for ourselves and we don't really sustain for ourselves.

Lack of life breath and lack of food, like we could be there in a heartbeat.

So truly what's most powerful is waiting for Yahweh to fulfill his promises out of loyal love.

Verse 20, our soul waits for Yahweh. And this is a different Hebrew word.
It's the Hebrew word chikah, which does seem to refer particularly to the passage of time, sitting through a passage of time.

It's a more neutral word for wait.

So our soul waits for Yahweh. He is our, ooh, our Azer.
This is what God provides for Adam in the woman. The delivering ally.
Yahweh is for us as we wait for him. He is our help and our shield.

In him our heart rejoices. In his holy name we trust.
Let your loyal love, notice the repetition, be on us, O Yahweh, even as we yachal

in you.

So we have our soul waits for Yahweh, but these two uses of yachal,

I mean, we are waiting because you're waiting for Yahweh to do something, rescue you.

But there's more here. We're waiting for Yahweh's loyal love.
We're waiting on you, Yahweh.

You could also translate it on those who hope for his loyal love.

and it's hard to tell the difference.

So, maybe it's just the invitation for us is to see that in certain acts of waiting where I am really emotionally invested in the outcome, yeah, we use the word hope, yachal.

Yeah, so this is one major word for hope, but it's not the only one. Okay, so this was that was part one, part one.
Yeah, this next one's super interesting.

The next word that's used a lot in Biblical Hebrew is kava, kava. So here's a poem that uses it multiple times.
It'll tell the story.

So he says, let me, that is Isaiah the prophet, sing a song for my beloved, that's God,

about his vineyard. And as we're going to find out, the vineyard is the people.
So my beloved had a vineyard on a nice fertile hill. He dug it.

cleared it of all the stones, planted it with choice vines, even built a watchtower right in the middle. He like got a pickaxe and hewed out like a wine vat in it, you know, to stomp on the grape.

And then he kavad

for the garden to yield grapes. But it yielded stinky wild grapes.
Stinky wild grapes? Yeah, b'ushim.

So rad.

So he put in all this effort. Yeah.
And then he kavas. Yeah.
And what he kavas is for the harvest.

Yeah. Like what he expects is going to happen.
And then it, you know, it yields unusable grapes. Okay.

Prophet steps in. Okay, inhabitants of Jerusalem and Judah, why don't you judge between me and my vineyard? So now the beloved is talking.
The beloved just start talking.

What more could I have done for my vineyard that I didn't do? Why, when I kavad for it to produce good grapes, did it produce worthless ones?

So God basically says, I'm going to destroy the vineyard, like just full on, gonna remove the hedge, break down its wall, animals are gonna trample it, and thorns and briars are gonna come up and no more rain on that vineyard.

The vineyard of the Lord of hosts is the house of Israel. The men of Judah are the plant that he's supposed to delight in.
So he kavad for mishpat,

but what he got was mishpach. Oh.

Bloodshed. It's a little wordplay in Hebrew.
He kavad for tzedekah,

but what really comes up out of Jerusalem is tzedaka. Oh, wow.
The innocent crying in distress because of their oppression.

Okay, so here's what's so interesting. This is one of those moments where you just look things up in the Hebrew lexicon.
You're just like, whoa, serious? That's like so cool.

I'm looking at the Kohlerbaumgartner Hebrew Aramaic Lexicon of the Old Testament. And here we are, this is kava.

And it's a denominative verb. What this means is it's a verb that's derived from a noun.
So a noun is like the base meaning, and then a verb developed out of it. But the noun's the primary meaning.

All right. So here's what a kav is.

This is now looking at the noun. In Isaiah 44, this is describing a guy making an idol statue.
And it says, let's say you have a woodworker.

How's he going to start the process of making an idol statue? Making an idol? Well, the first thing he's going to do is stretch out a kav

and then make an outline of it with a marker.

Then he gets a knife and he'll make an outline. of it with another tool and make into the image of a human.
So a kav is something you stretch out

and then you use it as this kind of measure to cut or shape something. Okay.
So it's like a ruler?

Ezekiel 47, 3.

There was this man who went out to the east with a kav in his hand and he measured a thousand cubits. Yeah.
It's an ancient ruler. This ancient ruler, but it was the cord.

Like, have you ever gone seen those super long distance measuring like on a soccer field? Yeah. And it's like hundred yards or

and it's all in a roll. That's a kav.
Okay. So it's like a cord, a measuring cord.
That's what a kav is. Got it.

So in the Hebrew lexicon, it says denominative, that is a verb derived from a noun from kav, with the basic meaning of to be taught. Oh, okay.
It's fully extended. Yeah.

So the case that they're making is that kava refers to the moment when a cord is being pulled tight.

And then there's some...

Tension. Yeah, the tension is our English word.
And tension refers to when all of the energy of motion,

it can't move,

but there's energy. And so all that energy gets focused in on like one spot on the cord.
And then usually at the weakest spot, it breaks. Yeah.

But it's referring to the energy focused on that spot. in the moment of the tension.
That's what the verb refers to? That's what they're saying, the verb. So wait, the noun is the cord itself.

The noun's the cord itself. But then the verb is when it's completely lost.
You're pulling the cord tight. Yeah.
It's a figure of speech. It doesn't make literal sense.

Okay, the point of the cord is to pull it tight. Yeah, because if it's all loose, then you don't have a correct measure.
I see. If you want to measure it correctly, you got to pull it tight.

That's the purpose of the calv is to be coughed. That's right.
I see. Yep.
And so then what does it mean for myself to be calved? To kava. To kava.
Kava. So I'm stretched tight.
Yeah. Yeah.

I pull tight the cord.

And that's this word. That's the idea of anticipating.
Yeah.

Yeah. So you kava, you cord.

Yahweh.

Corded for good grapes. I mean, when I learned that, I thought, that's a coolest way to imagine expectation or hope.
Yeah, it is. It's a state of tension.

To anticipate is to be a cord pulled tight. Mm-hmm.
Yeah.

Okay. Isn't that rad? It is rad.
Okay. So here, let's just look at examples now.
So, Psalm 25. To you, Yahweh, I lift up my soul.
My God, I trust you. Don't let me be put to shame.

Don't let my enemies exalt over me. Indeed, none who kava for you should be put to shame.

Those who betray without cause, they should be put to shame. Make me know your ways, Yahweh.
Teach me your paths. Cause me to walk in your truth.
Teach me, you are the God of my salvation.

I kava you or for you.

I'm stretched tight for you. Yeah.

I mean, so what's interesting is when I hear the word tension, we have this English word to describe that tightness of all the energy focused in, but not yet to the breaking point. Right.

That's not a

sustainable or desirable place

to find yourself in.

It's not pleasant, but it's generative. It's creative.

It's not pleasant, but it does have energy. Yeah, yes.
And you could use that energy for a good purpose.

Yeah. Yeah.

So these are the two primary words that get translated as hope in the Hebrew Bible.

Waiting and

being stretched. Tense, stretching.
Yeah. Like a cord.

It's interesting. The cord has a purpose, and the purpose cannot be achieved until it's stretched.

So embedded in this metaphor is the idea of in order to live into your purpose, you need to be stretched. Yeah.
There was

an early church bishop and a scholar in the fourth century. He lived in the region of Cappadocia.
His name was Gregory of Nyssa. I just discovered his writings a couple of years ago.

I can't get enough of this guy.

He talks about the experience of new creation as being this paradox where it's both the fulfillment of every hope that I've ever had of being in a resurrection body, in the direct presence of God, or with all like the redeemed creation.

And you're like, wow, that's a pretty sweet setup. Surely that would fulfill all of my hopes.
But for God to be God, God is always above and beyond what any creature could ever fully comprehend.

Like the very essence of who God is as someone to know, like we'll never know the full depth and beauty and complexity of God's being.

Yet every step forward that we take to grow in our knowledge and union with God will simultaneously satisfy us,

but then make us realize there's another horizon in knowing God beyond it. And he thinks of the new creation as just an infinity.
In

infinity. This is a brand new thought for me.
Yeah, he calls it the epictosis, the internal stretching out of the human soul. So this idea of actually being fulfilled, it's like a past tense.

I've been fulfilled.

You're saying like every moment where you're like, I've been that, you just realize, oh, there's, there's more, there's more. There's more.

So he's not saying it's a paradox because it's both being every desire fulfilled in the new creation, but simultaneously realizing my appetite for desire fulfilled is infinite and can only be matched by an infinite God, which means it's just an eternity of growing into our desires and meeting them only to see that there's like the next horizon.

Huh. So it's like an infinite stretching.
Yeah, he calls it the epictosis. Anyway, this was his kind of unique take.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But I think it's a really beautiful way to think about that our capacity for union with God is infinite in a way that corresponds to the infinite fountain of God's life to meet our needs and desires and keep drawing us into Himself.

And that's one way to think about hope. It's a generative, creative tension that keeps us exploring and desiring.

And finding the thing that we want, and then realizing it goes much deeper than we thought. Yeah.
And there's more. Yeah.
To be a creature is to kava, to exist in a state of tension, of desiring.

Because I've thought about this a lot. Like when you get to eternal life, are we going to be bored? Right.
Yeah, yeah. Because we've attained it all.
This is Gregory of Nises' way.

He was bothered by that question too.

And so the more he thought about the biblical imagery of God's infinity, God's eternity, God is the source of infinite goodness and beauty, that... To be a creature will always be to desire more.

So this virtue of hope is not just something that we have to put up with until one day things are all fulfilled. Yeah, it's like it's, what do you say? A feature, not a bug.

Because that tension that desire creates in us, that hope

drives us onward looking for more. And then when you find the one who is infinite more-ness,

then dude, you've got a sweet existence because God's just like, hey, come over here. I got more.
I got this thing for you. C.S.

Lewis ends the final book of the Narnia series, the last battle with that image of the new creation as them running with Aslan over the next hill

and then over the next hill and just further up and further in. And then he says, you know, really the story just finally reached its beginning.

The whole story, you might think it's ending, but actually it's just an infinitely new story. And he says in which each chapter is better than the last.

I wonder if there's something about kava, especially kavah, the state of tension that's just built into our nature as creatures. It's a beautiful idea.

It is. Yeah.

I think this plays into a conversation you and I've had many times over the years about

this difference that I like to make between optimism and hope. Oh, yeah.
And I think we're kind of in the same ballpark here, where

you can have a hope built up because you look at a set of circumstances and you're like, yeah, I think we're trending in a certain direction here and it's the one that I like.

So I'm hoping for that outcome. Okay.
You would call that optimism? Yeah. Okay.
In my mind, optimism is about looking at the current trajectory

of events and seeing like, I think all the data is pointing. It's pointing that way.
Yeah.

Versus hope, which I think is something the biblical authors want us to sustain. regardless of the circumstances or actually in the face of like

the opposite

Yeah, with Goliath standing in front of you.

And in that case, you're not hoping in the circumstances to go a certain direction. What you're actually hoping for is God.

This is why these words, yechal and kavah,

especially when you go to the Psalms, they most consistently just have God

as their object, as the thing for which you were longing or waiting, that you kavah, and that you yachal for.

And

back to Psalm 33, you have a big army and you have like the biggest ancient horse tanks of anybody. Don't hope in that.
It's a false, ooh, false hope for victory. I forgot to look up 17.

Oh,

sheker. Oh, it's a sheker.
It's a false. Sheker means

a false representation of something. It's not really what it is.

It's a trick. So then that then raises the question: if there's something good about anticipating a thing you desire,

then is the wisdom in

let's learn to anticipate the right thing and to actually enjoy that. Yeah.

It's teaching us to separate our real hopes from any of the objects or experiences that we tend to put our hope in to fulfill our desires.

And like this proverb 13:12, it's telling us that the only thing that can really fulfill our ultimate desires is this gift of participating in the very life presence of God, which whatever that means, that's the goal of getting back into Eden is just unity, union with God.

I mean, we just have all these biblical images to talk about it. Yeah.

So Advent's about being in that season of feeling stretched.

But let's find

meaning in that and let's enjoy sitting in the middle of the day. There's a purpose for that.
Yeah, there's a purpose in that waiting, in that anticipation.

So the first week of Advent is about anticipating, waiting. Being stretched.
Yeah, being stretched as we wait for the arrival of God with us, God and human united as one.

in the true human, the true king and messiah. And he's the one in whom we can place our hope.
Yeah.

Very cool. Hope.

Hope deferred makes the heart sick, but a desire fulfilled is the tree of life. There's much to meditate on there.

Hey, this is Tyler, and I edit the podcast. We're going to do something special for the end of these Advent series episodes.

We're going to have some of our own staff members tell us their thoughts on each of these words, hope, peace, joy and love and so today we have someone with us very special coming in from Ohio would you like to introduce yourself hi I'm Dylan I'm from Columbus Ohio and I'm a designer for Bible Project Dylan thanks so much for joining today and I'm excited to talk to you yeah likewise so hope isn't just optimism To be hopeful is actually to choose to live in the tension of this reality that we live in and the reality that we ultimately hope in, which is the restoration of all things.

Do you have any reflections on that idea? I think the hope for something that's tough, you long for it, you hope for it, but you know it's just going to be a struggle.

I think about the Israelites wandering in the desert for 40 years.

There was a percentage of those people who started their life in that place and they ended their life in that 40-year span.

And to try to imagine how easy it would be to be hopeless for that person and being given provision, but also grumbling and the whole dynamic of that.

And so it helps me take a breath and calm my head sometimes and go, you're going to be okay. Yeah.

I think that's a great example of people living in the tension of hope, waiting for their hopes to be realized, but that there are these little things that remind us of God's goodness along the way.

What are some things, Dylan, that give you hope along the way?

One of the things that is really helpful for me, especially when I have tension or anxiety, is reminding myself what is true and God's past faithfulness motivates us for the future.

I have all these distractions, all these reasons why I have anxiety and I want to move faster and take on more stuff. And somehow that will be the magic answer.

And I realize the opposite is actually true.

And I slow down long enough to go, okay, why am I putting energy into all that stuff versus just resting in a God who wants the best for me and has a much longer term plan than I can't even begin to fathom.

But I think about when I'm walking, the immensity of birds that are just in the central Ohio area.

If we're willing to slow down and just pay attention to those little things, we get these little glimpses of a maker that delights in what he makes. That's great, Dylan.

And I can't help but think of Jesus teaching on the Sermon on the Mount about the birds and that they have what they need.

And it also reminds me of God providing for the Israelites' needs in the desert and that they had to share with each other and constantly remind each other of God's promise to them.

And so for one final thought, how significant is it that we should share hope with one another? Yeah, sharing hope is critical to hope continuing. And that word about tension.
Yeah, kavah.

Yeah, there's an energy in that. If we attribute that energy to a maker who loves us, then sharing hope propagates hope.

because it's fueled by an energy of the one who gave us hope in the first place.

Dylan, thank you so much for talking with us today at such a good time. And that's it for today's episode.

There is a whole team of us here at the Bible Project that help make the podcast happen every week.

For a full list of everyone involved, check out the show credits at the end of the episode wherever you stream your podcast and on our app. See you later, Dylan.
Bye, Tyler.

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