II.  What will last?

‘So then, abideth these three, faith, hope, love.’  When Paul takes three nouns and couples them with a verb in the singular, he is not making a slip of the pen, or committing a grammatical blunder which a child could correct.  But there is a great truth in that piece of apparent grammatical irregularity; for the faith, the hope, and the love, for which he can only afford a singular verb, are thereby declared to be in their depth and essence one thing, and it, the triple star, abides, and continues to shine.  The three primitive colours are unified in the white beam of light.  Do not correct the grammar, and spoil the sense, but discern what he means when he says, ‘Now, abid_eth_ faith, hope, love.’  For this is what he means, that the two latter come out of the former, and that without it they are nought, and that it without them is dead.

Faith breeds Hope. There is the difference between earthly hopes and Christian people’s hopes.  Our hopes, apart from the revelation of God in Jesus Christ, are but the balancing of probabilities, and the scale is often dragged down by the clutch of eager desires.  But all is baseless and uncertain, unless our hopes are the outcome of our faith.  Which, being translated into other words, is just this, that the one basis on which men can rest—­ay! even for the immediate future, and the contingencies of life, as well as for the solemnities and certainties of heaven—­any legitimate and substantial hope is trust in Jesus Christ, His word, His love, His power, and for the heavenly future, in His Resurrection and present glory.  A man who believes these things, and only that man, has a rock foundation on which he can build his hope.

Faith, in like manner, is the parent of Love.  Paul and John, diverse as they are in the whole cast of their minds, the one being speculative and the other mystical, the one argumentative and the other simply gazing and telling what he sees, are precisely agreed in regard to this matter.  For, to the Apostle of Love, the foundation of all human love towards God is, ’We have known and believed the love that God hath to us,’ and ‘We love Him because He first loved us,’ and to Paul the first step is the trusting reception of the love of God, ‘commended to us’ by the fact that ’whilst we were yet sinners Christ died for us,’ and from that necessarily flows, if the faith be genuine, the love that answers the sacrifice and obeys the Beloved.  So faith, hope, love, these three are a trinity in unity, and it abideth.  That is the main point of our last text.  Let me say a word or two about it.

I have said that the words have often been misunderstood as if the ‘now’ referred only to the present order of things, in which faith and hope are supposed to find their only appropriate sphere.  But that is clearly not the Apostle’s meaning here, for many reasons with which I need not trouble you.  The abiding of all three is eternal abiding, and there is a heavenly as well as an earthly form of faith and hope as well as of love.  Just look at these points for a moment.