Hope is one of the significant aspects of our relationship to God. Paul regards the pagans as being without hope because they are without God (Eph 2:12). Hope is the function of faith looking to what God promises on the basis of what God has done (Heb 6:19); it is universally contingent on God’s demonstration of his capability within history, both explicitly, and implicitly in the teaching of Jesus, and it is all referred back to God’s prime capability demonstrated in his creating this world that we experience and in which our relationship with God has its setting and is exhibited.
Hope comes to us, however, not only by action, but by God’s word encapsulating and communicating his actions. Without his word, if we were not historically located at the point of his action, we would not strictly be aware of it; although the flow of biblical history (to adopt a title of one of Schaeffer’s books) would give us some confidence in God’s actions by virtue of the logic of the historical flow.
Hope arises from the link between action and word, filling actions with content and reflexively pointing us back to God’s word as the originator of his actions.
This is demonstrated nowhere better than in the creation. The creation is brought by God’s word: he speaks, it happens. He is immediately (that is, with no mediation apart from Christ, q.v. John 1:3) the author of the place that we live in and we ourselves. His authorship and revelation give us sufficient information to understand God, ourselves, the world we are given into and the noetic engagement with that world provided (Adam's naming the animals is an indicator along this line). No agent stands between us and God, and no process separates us from God.
Our confidence in the word of God and our hope is built on the continuity of God’s demonstrated connection with us and the world he created for us as the place where relationship and covenant is brought into being and played out. The three critical points in this are creation, incarnation (death pointing back to sin, and the contrast thrown starkly against the ‘very good’ preceding it, resurrection pointing forward to the new creation which envelops, reflects and extends the 'very good' now marred) and in the future, the new creation itself.
To remove God from his creation, which occurs when there is any interjection in the creation account and its significance as an anchor point for the historical 'flow', that dilutes the presence of God or the effect of his word also historically detaches him from the horizon of our existential placement. It brings uncertainty rather than certainty, because God’s relation to this world becomes uncommunicated and unknown, perhaps unknowable; this pushes God away from what he says and demonstrates (if words have meaning) is his closeness to us.
In some views this goes hand in hand with God’s actions being regarded as not only not being by God, but coming about by some mediating process not mentioned by God (and the mystery thus thickened by the uncertainty and speculation required by this argument from silence), but far removed from us in time, as though time might introduce the very process that is unstated by God (!). The function of time in this scheme is not only to provide the ‘time’ for the unstated to mediate between God’s word and its result in our time-space experience, but to push the question beyond any hope we would have of coming to knowledge of the creation as God's work: the intellectual process at work seems to be, ‘first deny the event, then insert a speculative component to assert sense in the event, then remove the event from our historical horizon with the effect that God is no longer the God of the Bible (where chronological information is almost pedantically set out) but a deist God who is uninvolved, or a Gnostic God who cannot be involved. Either way, not the God who is in intimate covenantal relationship with us; denoted with consistent historical reference to the world we are in and endorsing that world as the world that is from God to and for us; the one that we experience by the same mental organs and system of representation and logic by which we can come to have experience of God.
The upshot of pushing God out of the stream of being that puts us in the creation that he created and he has recorded requires some other creation to have occurred, which makes it call some other ‘god’ and invoke some other intervention than the incarnation of the creator amongst his creation.
