When Humanity Loses Its Pulse
Some deaths are loud. Others are quiet.
The death of hope is the latter, not an explosion, but an exhalation that goes unnoticed in the noise of productivity. It does not arrive with the fanfare of tragedy, but through the subtle flattening of expectation. Hope dies when humanity forgets that the world can still change.
When cynicism becomes wisdom.
When laughter becomes performance.
When our prayers become paperwork.
The modern world does not crucify hope; it slowly professionalises it, folds it into “five-year plans” and corporate mission statements, until it no longer offends despair. What once was a fire burning toward transcendence has become a scented candle flickering in a self-care routine. Cornel West once said, “We cannot be optimists, but we can be prisoners of hope.”
That distinction is crucial. Optimism is a posture toward circumstance; hope is a defiance against circumstance. Optimism works when things make sense; hope works when nothing does. Optimism looks for silver linings; hope believes in resurrection.
Yet in the secular imagination, hope has been demoted, from a theological virtue to a psychological coping mechanism. We speak of “staying positive” the way prophets once spoke of divine promise. But as Charles Taylor observes in A Secular Age, we now live within an “immanent frame,” a world closed off to transcendence, where the supernatural has been domesticated into sentiment.
The devil’s brilliance lies in this: he doesn’t need to destroy faith when he can distract it into irrelevance. This is the first quiet victory of hell, not disbelief, but detachment. A world that prays for success but never for resurrection. A humanity that remembers the cross as metaphor but forgets the tomb as fact. We still say, “things will work out,” but we no longer mean “because God reigns.”
In this anaemic theology of progress, humanity becomes a machine that manages rather than a soul that hopes. And when the pulse of hope fades, the body politic, the Church, and the individual all begin to die in slow synchrony. The tragedy is not that people stop believing in God, it’s that they stop expecting Him.
And that, perhaps, is how the devil wins without firing a shot.
Hope as Ontological Resistance
Hope is not an emotion; it is an act of being.
It is the soul’s rebellion against entropy, the refusal of non-being to have the last word. When Paul writes, “In hope we were saved” (Romans 8:24), he is not appealing to sentiment, but to ontology. Hope is not wishful thinking; it is the structure of salvation itself, the metaphysical pulse that keeps faith alive in time. The devil does not primarily attack faith through doubt.
He attacks being through despair.
Because despair, in the Christian imagination, is the most sophisticated form of unbelief. It is the soul’s declaration that God will not come through. It is what happens when our anthropology forgets its eschatology. To hope, therefore, is to engage in metaphysical defiance. It is to live as if resurrection has already rewritten the laws of decay. Paul Tillich calls faith “the state of being ultimately concerned.”
By that logic, hope is the continuation of that concern when evidence collapses. It is the stubborn conviction that meaning cannot die because Meaning Himself once did and rose again. Gabriel Marcel described the human as homo viator, the traveller of hope.
Hope, for Marcel, was not projection but participation: to hope is to consent to being led by what we do not yet see. It is the paradox of a creature living from a future that has already begun. Reinhold Niebuhr, ever the realist, insisted that hope is not naive optimism but realism baptized by grace. Hope knows the world’s brutality and still believes in its redemption. That’s why hope is both terrifying and sacred, it is faith with its eyes open.
And so, the devil’s real victory isn’t the rise of atheism, but the domestication of despair, teaching humanity to live as though God is irrelevant. He wins when despair feels sophisticated and hope feels childish.
He wins when theology is replaced by therapy and resurrection by resilience. But Vaclav Havel reminds us: “Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense regardless of how it turns out.” That “something” is Someone, Christ, the Logos who makes meaning possible at all.
To hope, then, is to breathe with God’s lungs while standing in a graveyard. It is not passive endurance, but holy resistance, the protest of heaven against the tyranny of the seen. Hope is the most revolutionary act a human can commit in a dying world.
Because it refuses to let death be normal.
The Devil’s Subtle Strategy: Starving Hope
The devil no longer needs to roar.
He whispers in the algorithms, curates your feed, optimises your exhaustion, and sells despair as sophistication. In a disenchanted world, the most effective way to kill hope is not through catastrophe but through comfort without meaning.
It is the slow suffocation of the soul through endless distraction, a thousand micro-diversions that make reflection intolerable and transcendence unnecessary. C.S. Lewis, in The Screwtape Letters, warned that hell’s most effective tool was not sin in its vulgarity, but “the gentle slope, soft underfoot,” that lulls humanity into spiritual sleep. The modern version of that slope glows in 4K.
Hope starves not because it is forbidden, but because we are too busy scrolling to feed it. The devil has modernised his liturgy. His new temples are the marketplaces of distraction. His sacraments are notification pings. His hymns are self-help slogans wrapped in dopamine. He doesn’t tempt us to evil; he tempts us to triviality.
To believe that our exhaustion is noble, our cynicism intelligent, our boredom harmless. He convinces us that “progress” means doing more while becoming less. The great irony is that the devil no longer fears the Church’s persecution, he prefers its professionalism.
He does not tremble at our sermons; he applauds our branding. Because he knows that when faith becomes performance, hope becomes PR. Neil Postman foresaw this in Amusing Ourselves to Death: humanity would not be oppressed by what it hates, but consumed by what it loves, entertainment as anaesthetic.
When laughter replaces lament, and irony replaces intercession, the soul loses the ability to hunger for heaven. And so the devil starves hope not by removing it, but by replacing it, with cheaper imitations:
• Motivation instead of mission.
• Affirmation instead of repentance.
• Productivity instead of purpose.
• Therapy instead of transcendence.
Each substitute is good, but none are God.
Hope, in biblical imagination, is sustained by waiting. But in an age that worships immediacy, waiting feels like failure. So the devil feeds us noise to fill the silence where God would have spoken.
The result?
We have a world full of educated despair, emotionally literate but spiritually anorexic. We know how to “self-regulate,” but not how to resurrect. This is how the devil wins without firing a shot, he makes hope look unnecessary.
And he does it politely.
The Anthropology of Hope: Why We Were Built to Need It
Hope is not an accessory to the human condition, it is the architecture of it. To remove hope from anthropology is to remove breath from biology. Every act of endurance, every prayer, every birth, every invention assumes the same thing: the future can be different from the past. That assumption is not evolutionary; it is theological.
Charles Taylor argues in A Secular Age that modernity replaced transcendence with “exclusive humanism,” a framework where meaning must be made, not received. But in doing so, humanity placed itself in the impossible position of sustaining its own hope while denying the Source of it. We became, as Taylor writes, “cross-pressured souls,” haunted by transcendence even as we pretend to outgrow it.
The human heart, however, refuses to stay secular. Even in its rebellion, it still aches for eternity. Our capacity to imagine better, to long for justice, redemption, beauty, reveals an ontological longing embedded in our design. We are not just capable of hope; we are constituted by it.
The Imago Dei is, in essence, the divine blueprint of hope. God breathed His Spirit, His ruach, His living breath, into dust, and dust began to expect. This is what makes humans different from all other creatures, we do not simply adapt to the world; we ache to redeem it.
When Genesis tells us that we are made in God’s image, it implies that our being carries the signature of a God who creates futures from chaos. To bear His image, then, is to bear the burden and the brilliance of that same longing. This is why despair feels unnatural, because it is. Despair is not realism; it is rebellion against our design.
Jürgen Moltmann, in Theology of Hope, writes:
“Faith, wherever it develops into hope, causes not rest but unrest, not patience but impatience.”
Hope is holy unrest, the soul’s refusal to settle for a world unhealed. Without it, humanity sinks into nihilism, moral apathy, and spiritual entropy. The devil understands this anthropology better than we do. That’s why his attacks aim not merely at belief, but at expectation. He knows that once you stop expecting God to act, you will eventually stop noticing when He does.
Even secular psychology has begun to rediscover what theology has always known. C.R. Snyder’s Hope Theory describes hope as a triadic structure: goals, agency, and pathways, the ability to desire, to believe one can act, and to imagine a way forward. Every one of those corresponds to something divine:
• Goals — teleology, the sense that life has purpose.
• Agency — imago, the capacity to co-create.
• Pathways — providence, the invisible thread guiding our steps.
In short, science confirms what Scripture revealed, hope is the breath of being. To live without hope is not neutrality; it is non-being in slow motion.
To hope is to participate in the eternal.
The Resurrection of Hope: How Heaven Interrupts History
History is a graveyard littered with the bones of human optimism. Empires rise, revolutions burn, ideologies promise, and all eventually collapse under the gravity of human limitation. But somewhere outside the city gates of Jerusalem, history’s script was interrupted.
The resurrection of Jesus Christ was not simply a miracle. It was an ontological coup d’état.
The Author stepped into the story, rewrote entropy, and turned the grave, the most reliable thing in the world, into an unreliable narrator. Every religion before had whispered, “Try harder, climb higher, become worthy.” The resurrection shouted, “It is finished.”
That moment became the hinge of existence, the point where hope became history. N.T. Wright calls the resurrection “the beginning of God’s new creation.” It is the divine protest against despair, the place where time itself is reoriented.
It is not escapism; it is realism in its highest register, a realism that includes redemption. For the early Christians, hope was not optimism but eschatology. They did not simply believe in life after death; they believed in life before death because of the One who conquered it.
Their hope was not a crutch for the weak; it was a compass for the resurrected. In the resurrection, the human story is invaded by an impossible grammar, where crucifixion leads to coronation, and endings become openings.
This is why Moltmann insists that all Christian theology must be “eschatological from the beginning.” Because every prayer, every act of forgiveness, every resistance to despair participates in resurrection. Hope, then, is not an emotion we feel toward the future, it is the future breaking into the present.
Even in the darkest systems, the most oppressive structures, the resurrection refuses to let evil be inevitable. It is God’s declaration that history is editable. That is why the devil fears hope more than holiness, because hope reminds hell that its clock is ticking.
Christ’s resurrection does not simply promise our escape from death. It redefines life itself as communion with the eternal. And so, to hope is to live resurrectionally, to stand in the graveyards of our own impossibility and say, “Nevertheless.”
That word, “nevertheless,” is the heartbeat of heaven in human form. It is the whispered echo of Easter in every act of faithfulness when nothing seems to move. The resurrection tells us that despair is not realism; it is amnesia.
And that hope, however trembling, is the only sane response to an empty tomb.
The Recovery of Hope: Rebuilding the Human Spirit in a Hopeless Age
If the devil wins by starving hope, then Christ conquers by feeding it back into the world through those who dare to remember the empty tomb. We live in an age that calls itself “post-hope,” where irony is safer than faith and outrage feels more authentic than optimism. To hope now is almost scandalous, a quiet act of rebellion against despair’s empire.
But maybe rebellion is exactly what resurrection demands. The recovery of hope is not sentimental positivity. It is moral realism anchored in eternity. It begins when we stop treating despair as insight and start treating it as illness, a sign that something divine in us has been malnourished.
In his Prison Letters, Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote that “the ultimate test of a moral society is the kind of future it leaves for its children.” Hope, then, is not wishful thinking; it’s ethical architecture. It is the decision to build a world we may not live to see, because we trust the God who already lives in it. Cornel West calls hope “the refusal to succumb to despair.” But in Christian imagination, hope goes further, it doesn’t just refuse despair; it redeems it.
It transforms wounds into warnings, and then into witness.
The resurrection doesn’t erase the scars; it glorifies them. That is the pattern of hope’s recovery: wounds → wisdom → worship.
In psychological terms, Viktor Frankl taught that meaning sustains life even when happiness fails. He called it “tragic optimism,” the courage to find purpose even in suffering.
The Christian calls it discipleship.
Because when we bear the weight of suffering with Christ, hope ceases to be abstract; it becomes incarnate. To recover hope in a hopeless age requires a new anthropology, or rather, a rediscovered one. We must learn again that the human person is not a random spark in a cold universe but a co-creator with a God whose breath still animates clay.
That we were made not merely to survive history but to steward it. That means:
• To write art that points beyond itself.
• To lead ethically when corruption feels easier.
• To forgive when vengeance seems logical.
• To pray when silence seems infinite.
These are not small gestures, they are eschatological defiance. Every act of faithfulness in the mundane is a resurrection reenacted. Hope recovers not through spectacle but through sacrament. In the daily bread shared, the kind word given, the prayer whispered, heaven continues to interrupt history.
And this is how the devil truly loses, not when we win arguments, but when we keep loving. Because love is the operational form of hope. And where love persists, hell cannot hold ground. The recovery of hope, then, is not a global movement but a daily miracle, one person at a time choosing to believe that despair is not destiny.
Each act of hope, no matter how small, becomes a foothold for eternity.
Hope Is How Heaven Remembers Us
In the end, all theology bends toward doxology. Hope is not the product of good argument; it is the residue of being remembered by God. When we hope, we echo eternity’s memory of us, the way heaven still calls us by name even when the world has forgotten it.
The enemy wants amnesia.
He wants a humanity too distracted to remember who it is, too exhausted to imagine what it could be, too cynical to believe it was ever loved. And yet, hope endures.
Hope is how heaven remembers.
It is how the eternal whispers into time, “You are not finished yet.” It begins quietly, in the trembling prayer, in the apology we didn’t think we could make, in the hand extended toward an enemy, in the ordinary morning where we rise again, not because we are strong, but because resurrection still works. Hope doesn’t deny the wound. It insists the wound is not the whole story. It is the audacity of joy standing ankle-deep in grief, singing. It is the light that refuses to explain itself to the dark.
Julian of Norwich once wrote,
“All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.”She wasn’t naïve, she was resurrected. Because those who have seen the end in Christ can walk through the middle without fear.
This is what it means to live as people of hope in a hopeless world, to remember that the cross was not tragedy but strategy; that love is not weak, but weaponised grace, and that our future is not fragile, because it is already finished. And so as we stand at the threshold of every new year, every new fear, every new unknown, may we remember this simple, defiant truth: The devil doesn’t win when the world grows darker.
He only wins when the Church forgets to shine.
So, shine.
Not with performance, but with presence.
Not with certainty, but with surrender.
Not with perfection, but with the quiet, impossible hope that death was never the end.
Prayer
Father of Light,
You who made galaxies from silence and turned graves into gardens, teach us to hope like You create, without apology, without exhaustion, without limit.
When despair masquerades as realism, remind us that faith is sight in a different language. When the world grows cold with cynicism, let Your Spirit set us on fire again, not with noise, but with knowing.
Let our work become worship, our words become witness, our waiting become warfare. And when our hope flickers low, breathe on us again, until even our ashes glow with resurrection.
In the Name of the One who is our Beginning, our Middle, and our End, Jesus Christ, our Living Hope.
Amen.
#Hayibo 