Words of Hope

A Word Study on the Biblical Word "Hope"

Study #42 - New Testament Hope

We have now come to the word "hope" as it is used in the New Testament Scriptures.  In contrast to the Hebrew Old Testament where the word "hope" may be translated from any of twelve different Hebrew words, the Greek New Testament employs basically only one Greek word in four forms:  The noun elpis, the verb elpizo, and the compound verbs apelpizo and proelpizo.  The English word "hope" is found in the King James Version of the New Testament around 66 times.  This is slightly fewer than the 75 or so times it is found in the Old Testament but when you consider that the Old Testament is more than three times longer than the New Testament the frequency of occurrences is actually greater per page in the New.  We should also note that the Greek verb elpizo is translated by the word "trust" almost 20 times in the KJV and the Greek noun elpis by "faith" once, bringing the total number of references to "hope" up to 87 which averages out to over three times per page of the New Testament!  In other words, the New Testament is full of the message of hope!  As we seek to define what is meant by the word "hope" in the New Testament we may safely say that all that was included in the various concepts of hope expressed in the twelve Hebrew synonyms of the Old Testament Scriptures is compacted into this one word of the Greek New Testament.  Joseph Thayer, in his Greek - English Lexicon of the New Testament, notes that in the Greek Septuagint Version of the Old Testament the verb elpizo is used to translate the Hebrew words batah ("to trust"), hasa ("to flee for refuge"), and yahal ("to wait, to hope"). Thus he defines the Greek word elpizo as meaning "to hope"; "to wait for salvation with joy and full of confidence"; and "hopefully to trust in" (emphasis mine).  Likewise, he notes that the Septuagint uses the noun elpis to translate the Hebrew words betah and mibtah ("trust"), mahseh ("that in which one confides or to which he flees for refuge"), and tiqwa ("expectation, hope").  Thayer notes that the basic meaning of elpis is "expectation".  In the Greek classics (classical Greek) the word was a "vox media" meaning that it could be used in a good or bad sense:  "exectation whether of good or of ill".  But in the New Testament it is used consistently in the good sense:  "expectation of good, hope; and in the Christian sense, joyful and confident expectation of eternal salvation" (emphasis mine).  Likewise, W.E. Vine in his Expository Dictionary of New Testament Words defines elpis in its New Testament usage as meaning "favorable and confident expectation" and states that it describes "the happy anticipation of good" (emphasis mine).  And so we see that "hope" in the New Testament sense of the word is very much the same as we have observed from our Old Testament studies.  It is not a "wishful thinking" at all, but a confidence, an expectation, and even a joyful anticipation of God's blessings as promised to the believer.  And yet because the New Testament reveals to us the fulfillment of the very basis of the Old Testament hope - the coming of the Christ, and records for us the very substance of all that was foreshadowed in the Old Covenant and Law of Moses concerning Him - His substitutionary and sacrificial death upon the cross, His full and free atonement for the sins of mankind through the shedding of His blood, and His conquering of death and hell by the power of His Resurrection, and His never-ending exaltation to the right hand of  the Father as our Great High Priest - the New Testament refers to the believer's hope in Christ as an even better hope:  "For the law made nothing perfect, but the bringing in of a better hope did; by the which we draw nigh unto God" (Hebrews 7:19).  As great as the hope of the Old Covenant was, the hope provided for in the New Covenant is greater!  It is this "better hope" that we will be studying as we examine our New Testament Hope.