 |  |
"person". Charakter comes from a word which means "to engrave'. Wycliffe uses it in
his translation of Rev. 13: 16. The word character also means "a letter" and in natural
science, the essential marks which distinguish a mineral, plant or animal, and so the
ordinary use of the term to indicate personal qualities. God is Spirit. God is invisible,
and Christ is "God manifest in the flesh". He is the "character" of God made evident.
The invisible hupostasis, that which "stands under" the substance, being in Him made
visible and expressed. Faith therefore is the underlying reality, the substance, of things
hoped for. In a legal document, the "Petition of Dionysia", the word is used as a
technical term for the "title-deeds" of a property which was the subject of litigation. We
can therefore translate somewhat freely, Heb. 11: 1, "faith is the title deeds of things
hoped for".
This brings us back to Eph. 1: 18. "The hope of His calling" cannot be severed from
the faith, from things believed. Things believed must refer to the revelation made in
Eph. 1: 3-14, which received the seal and the earnest of the Spirit; we are therefore
contemplating something new. A new calling, a new sphere, calls for a corresponding
hope, and instead of actually teaching what that hope will be, the Apostle rather prays,
knowing that an understanding of its distinctive features will grow out of the believer's
acknowledgment of the truth already believed. In some things we ourselves answer our
own prayers. The hope of His calling therefore must be closely related to the quality of
our blessings "all spiritual"; the sphere of our future inheritance "in the heavenly
places", and the period of our election "before the foundation (or overthrow) of the
world".
Our hope therefore will be far above "the earth" which in the millennium and in the
New Earth will blossom as the rose and be "Paradise restored". Our hope will be realized
"in heavenly places", anything lower than this highest of all spheres, would introduce a
discrepancy between what we now entertain by faith, and what we should actually enter
by hope, which cannot be. The fact that our election antedates Gen. 1: 2 removes this
calling from any covenants subsequently entered into either with Adam, Noah or
Abraham. What is true regarding the hope, will be found to be true when considering the
two remaining petitions of this prayer. These however are too important to be surveyed
in the limited space now available, we accordingly propose to give them a consideration
in the next article of this series.