We had hoped he was the Messiah who had come to rescue Israel. Luke 24:21
What do you do when the thing you prayed for doesn’t happen, when hope itself seems to have died?
The Bible book of Luke contains a remarkable account of Jesus’s encounter with two of His followers on the very day He rose from the dead. They were walking along a road, grieving and confused over Jesus’s death, when a stranger fell into step beside them. They poured out their grief to Him, not realizing the stranger was the risen Jesus Himself.
Speaking of Jesus, they said, “We had hoped he was the Messiah who had come to rescue [us]” (Luke 24:21). The Messiah was the rescuer their people had waited generations for, the one they expected to free them from political oppression. They believed Jesus was that person.
“We had hoped.” Those may be among the saddest words in the Bible because they’re spoken in the past tense. They weren’t saying, “We don’t understand.” They were saying, “We hoped, and now we don’t.”
But Jesus did something unexpected. He reshaped their understanding. He walked them through the writings and promises their own faith was built on, showing how the suffering they had witnessed in Jesus’s death wasn’t a failure of God’s plan (Luke 24:27). It was the plan. Jesus didn’t shame them for getting their expectations wrong. He taught them to see the same events differently, at walking pace, with endless patience. He will do the same for you.
Maybe you’ve said something like, “We had hoped the marriage would survive,” “We had hoped the treatment would work,” “We had hoped God would come through.”
If your picture of God has been cracking lately, perhaps it’s not your faith that is dying. Perhaps a distortion is falling away to make room for something truer.
