The Anchor

The writer to the Hebrews reaches for the sea to describe the soul. He sees a ship in a storm, driven and battered, and he sees what keeps it from being wrecked, the anchor, dropped into the deep, gripping ground the sailors cannot see, holding the vessel steady while the waves do their worst. And he says this is what hope is to the soul. Which hope we have as an anchor of the soul, both sure and stedfast. The soul is the ship, the storms are real, and hope is the anchor that holds it fast through weather that would otherwise drive it onto the rocks.

But then he says a thing about this anchor that no sailor ever said of his. This anchor, he writes, entereth into that within the veil. A ship’s anchor is cast down, into the dark and shifting seabed below. The soul’s anchor is cast up, into the holiest place of all, within the veil, into the very presence of God in heaven, where the high priest alone could go, and where now, the next verse says, the forerunner is for us entered, even Jesus. Our anchor does not grip the uncertain floor of this world. It grips heaven itself. It is lodged in the presence of God, fastened to Christ who has gone in before us, and it holds because of where it is fixed, not because of how tightly we hold the rope.

AN ANCHOR CAST UPWARD

This changes everything about the way we hope. A ship’s anchor may drag; the seabed shifts, the fluke slips, the ground gives way, and the vessel is carried off in the night. But the anchor cast within the veil grips ground that cannot move, the unchanging presence of an unchanging God. It cannot drag, because heaven does not shift. It cannot slip, because it is fastened to Christ, who having entered will never be cast out. The reason our hope holds is not the strength of our believing but the fixedness of what our hope is tied to. Weak hands may hold this rope, and it will still hold, because the holding is done at the other end, in the sanctuary, by a forerunner who does not let go.

We commonly get this backward. We think our hope is only as strong as we feel it to be, that in the calm it is secure and in the storm, when feeling fails, it is lost. But the anchor does not depend on the sailor’s feelings about the anchor. It grips or it does not grip, and this one grips within the veil, whether the storm- tossed soul at the other end feels the grip or not. There are nights when the believer feels nothing but the wind, and the waves hide every star, and the whole sky is black, and still the anchor holds, unseen and unfelt, fastened where no storm can reach it.

WHAT THE ANCHOR DOES

And what does the anchor do? It holds the soul steady when everything else is in motion. It keeps the vessel from being driven where the storm would drive it, onto the rocks of despair, out into the open sea of unbelief, under in the flood of affliction. The anchored soul is battered, let us not pretend otherwise; the waves break over it, the timbers groan, the wind screams in the rigging. But it is not carried away. It holds its position through the night. The storms of doubt and fear and grief and temptation beat against it, and it strains at the cable, and it stays, because it is anchored to something the storm cannot touch.

This is the great difference between the anchored soul and the drifting one. The unanchored are, in the apostle’s words, tossed to and fro, and carried about with every wind, at the mercy of each new current and squall, blown wherever the weather of the age or the mood of the hour happens to push them. But the soul whose hope is fixed within the veil has a holding point outside itself and above the storm, and so it can ride out what would scatter the unmoored. He only is my rock and my salvation, sang the psalmist, he is my defence; I shall not be moved. Not because the sea was calm, but because the anchor held.

SURE AND STEDFAST

And why is this hope sure and stedfast? Not because we are sure and stedfast, for we are neither. It is because of what stands behind it. Just before this verse the writer speaks of two immutable things, God’s promise and God’s oath, in which it is impossible for God to lie, and on those two unchangeable things the hope is built. The anchor holds because God has promised and God has sworn, and heaven and earth will pass away before his word does. This is a lively hope, the apostle Peter says, to an inheritance incorruptible and undefiled, reserved in heaven for us. Reserved in heaven, within the veil, where the anchor is lodged. The hope holds because the inheritance is kept where the storm cannot reach it and where Christ himself has gone to keep it for us.

THE CABLE OF THE PROMISES

An anchor is joined to the ship by a cable, and the cable of this anchor is the promises of God. The anchor grips within the veil, in the presence of God, but what runs from the storm-tossed soul to that unmoving grip is the word God has spoken, the promises let down like a strong rope into the deep. Just before he names the anchor, the writer speaks of two immutable things, God’s promise and God’s oath, in which it is impossible for God to lie. Two things that cannot change. On those two the whole cable is woven, and it is strong precisely because God cannot lie and God cannot change, so that the rope between the soul and its hope is as unbreakable as the faithfulness of God himself.

This is why the soul in the storm must take hold of the promises and not of its own resolve. When the waves rise, do not grip your feelings, which are spray, or your resolve, which is a rope of sand. Grip a promise. Find the plain word God has spoken, that he will never leave nor forsake, that he works all things together for good, that nothing shall separate you from his love, and hold to that, hand over hand, down into the dark where the anchor grips. The promises are the tested cable by which countless souls have ridden out storms that should have sunk them, and not one who held to a true promise of God was ever finally lost.

And the cable will bear the whole weight of the soul, so let out its full length. Do not hold back a portion of yourself from the promise, trusting God with the small storms and keeping the great fear in your own hands. Let out the whole cable. Cast the entire weight of the soul upon the word that cannot fail, and let the anchor within the veil bear it all. It will. It has borne heavier souls than yours through darker nights than this, and the grip has never once slipped.

RIDING OUT THE NIGHT

Yet we must be honest that the storm can be long, longer than we thought we could endure, and that hope held through such a night is a hard and aching thing. Hope deferred, the proverb says, maketh the heart sick. There are vigils at anchor when the morning seems never to come, when the believer feels nothing of the grip, sees nothing of the harbor, and can only hold the cable in the dark and wait. This is hope at its truest and its hardest, not the easy hope of the sunny day but the anchored hope of the long night, which clings to what it cannot see because it trusts the One who fastened the anchor.

For this is the very nature of hope, that it deals with what is not yet seen. Hope that is seen is not hope, the apostle says, for what a man seeth, why doth he yet hope for it? But if we hope for that we see not, then do we with patience wait for it. The whole point of the anchor is that it holds when nothing can be seen, through the night, through the storm, through the long deferral, until the morning breaks and the harbor comes into view and faith gives way at last to sight. Ride out the night at anchor. The grip does not depend on the darkness lifting. The darkness will lift; the grip held all along.

So when the storm comes, and it will, do not go below and stare at the heaving sea and take your bearings from the waves. That way lies terror, for the sea gives no steady ground and never did. Take your bearings from the anchor. Remember where your hope is fastened, not to your circumstances and not to your feelings, both of which are storm and spray, but within the veil, to a Christ who entered as your forerunner and will not let go. Let out the full length of the cable of hope, and trust the grip you cannot see. Hope maketh not ashamed, the apostle says, and this hope least of all, for it is an anchor of the soul, both sure and stedfast, and it grips the one ground in all the universe that no storm can ever move.