The season of Advent is about waiting. For children, an Advent calendar counts the days until Christmas, the anticipation of presents becoming more intense. For adults, Advent may become a way to track how many shopping days are left. This year, BG will reorient Advent around the question, “What are you waiting for?”
We all know the correct answer: We’re waiting for Jesus. But what is so important about the arrival of this particular baby? Why do so many people in the Old Testament seem to be waiting for Messiah like a child sitting in front of the Advent calendar?
Starting this morning, we will journey deep into the back-stories of four women named in Jesus’s genealogy in Matthew 1. Their names are Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, and Bathsheba. Each one is vulnerable, urgently needing God’s intervention to save them from immediate dangers. And the dangers they face are extreme, filled with the ugly reality of a fallen world.
So often Christmas is an annual escapist fantasy. For a month or so, we are allowed to retreat into a gauzy, feel-good story of hope and light, humorously reenacted by kids in bathrobes and exotic hats. We turn the neighborhood into a Disneyland of colored lights. Happy songs play on every speaker. No sad vibes allowed!
But if we only focus on hope, shutting out anything grievous, we will miss the Bible’s message. We need hope and light because the darkness is extreme—just as it was for Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, and Bathsheba. Matthew included their names in Jesus’s genealogy so that we would see our own need for God’s intervention.
Those four women were waiting for justice, redemption, and forgiveness. They were waiting for a Savior, Messiah Jesus.
I find myself thinking much the same thing every Advent: The world got worse this year in so many ways. We really do need Jesus, the eternal King, the Mighty God, the Prince of Peace. As we wrap up 2024, I pray that you will peer into the darkness portrayed in the Bible, so that we can rejoice all the more as we remember the first advent of Jesus Christ.