Why the Wait?
by robert Krumrey
I am not a fan of waiting. I don’t think anyone really is. COVID has made this aversion to waiting even worse. I’ve become so used to going to stores and restaurants where there are very few customers which means there is very little wait. Saturday we made our yearly pilgrimage to get the Christmas tree. This always includes a stop at Starbucks for a festive beverage. I suggested that we order on the app so we don’t have to . . . wait. We get to the store to pick up our order and find that a whole bunch of people must have had the same idea. Shocking! I stood there in a line of ten people waiting for our drinks. I hear my name and it’s for ONE of the three drinks. The barista says kindly, “Sorry sir for the wait.” What’s with all this waiting!
Now we find ourselves in a season that purposely shifts our lives into wait mode. The season is known as Advent. The word literally means “arrival” or “coming”. We are waiting on the advent or arrival of something or more precisely someone. Spoiler alert, that someone is Jesus at Christmas. Advent has been observed by the church for centuries during the four weeks that lead up to Christmas. It just started last Sunday and was acknowledged with the lighting of an Advent wreath. The wreath is made up of five candles which mark the four Sundays leading up to Christmas and Christmas Eve.
So why all of this waiting? Waiting is something that God is really into. God’s perspective on time is very different than our own. Peter says it best in his second letter:
“But do not overlook this one fact, beloved, that with the Lord one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day.”
God is able to faithfully work over thousands of years to accomplish his purposes among human beings. It’s partly why we have the Bible so we can know what God’s been up to over the millennia and then figure out what he is doing now and will do in the future. Advent is a time to take a really long look back into the history of God’s activity on earth and appreciate all the waiting that has taken place and let that encourage us in our own wait. So how long of a wait are we talking here?
One way to understand the wait that took place before the coming of Jesus is from the ministry of the prophets. Prophets like Isaiah and Malachi predicted that a Messiah was coming to save his people Israel and the nations of the world. Because of this, we usually read some of the promises in these writings during Advent that were written hundreds of years before Jesus. One of the most famous is from the book of Isaiah.
“For to us a child is born, to us a son is given; and the government shall be upon his shoulder, and his name shall be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.”
This promise was written down 700 years before Jesus which is absolutely amazing . . . and a really long wait. Think of what was going on in America 700 years ago. Oh wait, you can’t. I googled it and what came up was the evacuation of the Cliff Palace by the Pueblo Indians. As far as moderns are concerned, 700 years ago in North America is prehistory. That’s a really long time to wait and that is true, but if we dig a little deeper in our Bibles, we find that the wait for Christ at Christmas goes as far back as the beginning of human existence.
When you open up to the book of Luke, you find a really interesting genealogy. It’s different from Matthew’s gospel which starts with Abraham and traces Abe’s family line all the way to Jesus. That in itself is a really long wait for the coming of Jesus - about 2000 years to be exact. As impressive as that may be, Matthew’s got nothing on Luke. Luke’s genealogy traces Jesus’ family line from Adam. Here’s how it begins:
“Jesus, when he began his ministry, was about thirty years of age, being the son (as was supposed) of Joseph, the son of Heli, ”
and here’s how it ends:
“the son of Enos, the son of Seth, the son of Adam, the son of God.”
You can check the whole thing out here. Part of the message of this genealogy is that not only has Israel been waiting for the Messiah to come, but so has the rest of humanity. Every human since Adam has been waiting for Jesus whether they knew it or not. And why have they been waiting? Because every human being has been born under sin (see Romans 5:12) and is in need of a Savior.
Part of the message of Christmas is that the wait of so many years has finally culminated in the birth (and later the death and resurrection) of the God man who is Christ the Lord. He comes in his first Advent to be born in a manger in order to rescue us from the tyranny of sin and will return at his second Advent to fully realize his victory by resurrecting the entire universe, including his church. So get in line and settle in for a nice patient Advent as we remember the wait for Jesus’ first Advent and embrace (with anticipation) the wait for the Advent that is to come.