May the God of hope fill you
with all joy and peace.
—Romans 15:13
When Roman historian Publius Cornelius Tacitus started recording the history of the first century AD, he wrote, “I am entering upon the history of a period rich in disaster, gloomy with wars, rent with seditions.” He went on to write about the devastation of the era: war, murder, adultery, hate, terror, betrayal.
Those words have been descriptive of every generation. As Ecclesiastes informs us: “There is nothing new under the sun” (Eccl 1:9).
But societal corruption is impotent to destroy hope, the vaccine that inoculates us against the virus of despair. At the exact time about which Tacitus wrote, the apostle Paul was reaching out to Christians, saying, “May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace as you trust in him, so that you may overflow with hope” (Rom 15:13).
Hope illuminates the darkness.