Advent Season Hope
Advent Season (Hope)
In the summer of 2022, my wife had what was supposed to be a routine surgery. We were told that she would be back to normal after just 3-4 days of recovery. It was anything but that.
In 20 years of marriage, I’ve never seen my wife bury her face into a pillow and cry and wail in pain, but this was her reality. She ended up back in the hospital and sat there for another 3 days while they never were able to pinpoint what was going on.
LOSING HOPE…
She was sent back home, and I watched her live in almost constant pain, suffering day after day for several weeks. It was brutal. I questioned God. “Where are you?” “Why aren’t you doing something?” I was losing hope.
This is the beginning of the Advent season when we think about the coming of Christ and His incarnation, but we must remember that at the time Jesus was born in the first century, there was very little hope among the Israelite nation.
Many of them were asking the same questions I was asking, “Where are you God?” “Why have you not done something yet?”
See, God had been relatively silent for about 400 years. The Israelites had been conquered by the Greeks and then the Romans, and now they were living under their rule, reign, and oppression. They were losing hope.
ALL HOPE LOST…
At the same time an entire nation was losing hope, Luke tells us in the Christmas account of his gospel about a married couple who had lost all hope. Zechariah and Elizabeth we are told, were “very old” and that they were childless (Luke 1:7).
Infertility struggles will strip all of your hope out of the depths of your soul. It’s hard. It’s gut-wrenching. Believe me, I know.
But as hard as it is for anyone going through it today, it was even worse in the 1st century. On a practical level, children were needed to help with all the work to be done, and parents counted on children to help care for them when they got old. But the worst part about infertility is that there was a belief that you were being punished by God.
Can you imagine the confusion, the hurt, the shame, and the guilt they must have felt? And we are told by Luke that they were “righteous and observed the Lord’s commands and decrees blamelessly.” Surely, they asked along the way, “Why God?” “What have we done?” Where are you in all of this?” “How did we end up here?”
“Here” was old age now. The childbearing years are over. There is no hope for a child now.
BUT GOD…
Yet, Luke tells us that the angel Gabriel shows up and tells Zechariah that they will have a child and that his name will be John (The Baptist). We are told that he would prepare the way for Jesus, who was coming into the world.
John was born into this world to introduce the King of Kings and the Lord of Lords, Jesus Christ. God was sending John to prepare people for the greatest work ever accomplished. Jesus would defeat the power of sin and death forever through His finished work on the cross.
When we look at the birth and life of John the Baptist, we see that God was up to something of cosmic proportions. He would bring hope to the entire world by pointing to Jesus, the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world (John 1:29).
BUT WATCH THIS, when Luke tells us that Elizabeth became pregnant, he makes sure to include what Elizabeth says in v.25 of chapter 1:
“The Lord has done this for me,” she said. “In these days he has shown his favor and taken away my disgrace among the people.”
DO YOU SEE IT? IT’S PERSONAL…
Not only was God sending John into the world as part of accomplishing the redemption of the entire world, but He was also sending John FOR Elizabeth. “The Lord has done this for me,” she said.
God was putting his rescue plan for all of humanity into motion, and at the same time, He was meeting the needs of one of His daughters.
This is how God works. While He rules and reigns on a cosmic scale, He sees you. He knows your hurts. He knows your pain. He is not absent from it. He is working for your good and His glory out of His love for you.
That doesn’t mean things will always turn out the way we want them to, but we can rest assured that God “works for the good of those who love Him” (Ro. 8:28).
Advent Season Hope
The focus of the first week of Advent is hope. Jesus brings hope. Hope for humanity. Hope for you.
And if you have received Jesus by faith, then you have “Christ in you, the hope of glory,” (Col. 1:27) and will never be apart from Him in your struggle and pain.
