JOY to the WORLD
I don’t remember exactly when it happened, but at some point in my childhood, I was introduced to Advent calendars and I became hooked. Even as an adult, I bought those delightful cardboard creations filled with chocolate. Each day in December would see me happily nibbling away at a small piece of dreamy chocolate, anticipating December 24 when I could gobble down the largest piece in the calendar.
As with the Advent wreath, Advent calendars came from German Lutherans and date back to the early 19th century. The first calendars were handmade, eventually coming out in printed form with pictures behind little windows. Some companies began to release calendars that included Bible verses instead of pictures, until a brilliant manufacturer figured out that the calendars would be ever so much more popular if instead of a picture or a Bible verse, people could find chocolate awaiting them behind the little windows.
Those of you who have grown up in the Roman Catholic tradition, or one of the major Protestant denominations (e.g., Presbyterian, Lutheran, Episcopal), might remember the lighting of candles for each Sunday of Advent. The tradition I grew up in didn’t celebrate Advent in any way, so I had no idea that the word was associated with anything other than yummy calendars.
Advent holds a special dual meaning which some denominations, including the Eastern Orthodox and Oriental Orthodox churches, still celebrate. While looking back to the birth of Jesus, Advent also looks forward to His return. Traditions like the one I grew up in, however, focused the majority of the year’s effort and energy on bringing attention to a baby in a manger almost to the exclusion of anything else. They perpetuated the idea that all things in Christianity are segregated rather than being a beautiful, unified whole. The truth is, the baby who was born in Bethlehem had been greatly anticipated throughout the centuries. He was the apex of history, and He drew together all that had happened before His physical birth and all that would happen after He returned to His Father.
While He walked this earth, Jesus studied and extensively quoted from scripture, and as you probably know, His scripture was what we call the Old Testament. We often talk about the Gospel, and when we do, we usually mean the Good News of Jesus being born and living as a truly human being, dying in one of the most horrific ways imaginable, and being resurrected on the third day after His death. The Gospel that Jesus knew, however, is found in Exodus 6:6-8. This great deliverance would come as the fulfillment of a prophecy the LORD had made to Abram (Genesis 15:13-14). For four hundred years, the LORD celebrated and suffered with the family of Abraham, and He also exercised patience with the nations of Canaan to a degree I don’t think I will ever comprehend. Finally, at exactly the right time, the LORD took action. He set His hand upon a man born into the tribe of Levi but raised in the courts of Egypt, and He made a magnificent promise. Rescue was coming.
The six main verbs used in Exodus 6:6-8 are powerfully descriptive.
yatzah – to go out, come out, go forth
natzal – to snatch away, draw or pull out
ga’al – to redeem, ransom
lakach – to take, lay hold of, seize
boh – to go in, enter
natan – to give, set
In the JPS, those verbs are translated as free, deliver, redeem, take, bring, and give. Other translations render them in various ways, but the idea is all the same—the LORD was going to do a mighty work and snatch His people out of their bondage in Egypt. And that was the Good News of the Old Testament.
Deliverance and freedom are themes that would continue to run throughout the Old Testament even after the great deliverance from Egypt because Israel would continue to need delivering. Once they took the land of promise, the generation of those who had seen the works of the LORD in the wilderness died out, and Israel wasted no time in turning their backs on their Deliverer. Over and over again, they prostituted themselves to the gods of other nations, and over and over again, the LORD delivered them from the hands of their enemies (see the book of Judges). Their seemingly endless capacity for rebellion persisted even after they demanded and received a human king, and their rebellion ultimately lead to the destruction of both kingdoms.
Both themes continued after the exile but with a slightly new variation. God would, indeed, deliver His people with His mighty hand, only this time it would be permanent. A new age would be ushered in through the one who came to be known as the Anointed or the Messiah. Israel’s enemies would be defeated once and for all, and the old exodus from Egypt would become a new and final exodus (Jeremiah 23:7-8).
By the time Jesus was born, centuries had passed since Jeremiah had prophesied the hope of another great deliverance from the LORD. Israel was anticipating, praying for, and desperately longing for the new exodus. Three of the four Gospel writers made it abundantly clear that Jesus was the fulfillment of that longing. Matthew paralleled the birth of Jesus with the birth of Moses (the slaughter of baby boys in Egypt and the slaughter of baby boys in Bethlehem), and he included a reference to the exodus, directly linking Jesus with that formative event in Israel’s history (Matthew 2:14-15). Matthew, Mark, and Luke recorded that Jesus was baptized which, among other things, symbolized Israel passing through the waters of the Red Sea on their way out of bondage. He was then led into the wilderness for forty days, another clear picture of the exodus of Israel as they wandered in the wilderness for forty years following their refusal to believe that the LORD would go before them and give them the land of promise (Numbers 14:26-35). Luke 9:30-31 is the most direct statement in all the Gospels as to the nature of what Jesus was doing in going to Jerusalem. The word which is commonly translated “departure” would be literally rendered “exodus.” Jesus was going to fulfill the exodus God had called Him to endure and by doing so, He would provide the means by which Israel and the rest of the world would be snatched away from the bondage of sin and death (see Hebrews 2:14-15).
The birth of Jesus in Bethlehem heralded all that was to come and what God intended to do through Him. Just as the birth of Moses was the beginning of the great deliverance from Egypt, the birth of Jesus was the beginning of the great deliverance from sin and death, but it wasn’t until after Jesus ascended that the men He had called as disciples understood the connection. They consistently misunderstood the truth behind what Jesus said and did because they weren’t expecting God to take on human flesh and die on their behalf. They were expecting a magnificent warrior to lead them to military victory over their enemies. Even after Jesus had been resurrected, they remained a little muddled. Their question in Acts 1:6 indicates that they were still expecting Israel to be victorious and dominant over all other nations (Peter’s visit to Cornelius and the questioning it produced as recorded in Acts 10 and 11 is another indication of how the followers of Jesus were thinking at the time). They were shocked to discover that God was granting His Spirit and repentance to Gentiles, and they were anticipating that this new age would be ushered in at any moment. Once again, Jesus had to redirect their thinking (Acts 1:7-8).
A foundational belief of Christianity is often referred to as the Second Coming of Jesus. The verses we just read in Acts are a subtle hint at the idea of His return, but Jesus plainly stated in John 14:1-3 that He would come back for His disciples. We have millennia of tradition and various teachings that sometimes cloud our vision as to what Jesus meant when He said He would come back. People often cover wood with varnish in an effort to make the wood last longer and look better, but after years of wear and tear, the varnish begins to look bad and must be stripped in order to see the true beauty of the wood. In the same way, I think it’s often necessary to strip away certain traditions to reveal the truth of what is being communicated by the Word of God, especially concerning the return of Jesus.
We make the mistake, at times, of thinking that Israel always had a fully developed idea of what happens after the physical body dies. Sheol, mentioned 65 times in the Old Testament, was considered a place where all the dead went regardless of whether they were righteous or unrighteous. It was a place of darkness cut off from the LORD. Not until after the exile did ideas about the possibility of different areas of Sheol exist (see Luke 16:19-31). Teaching and belief in the idea of resurrection also began to surface during and after the exile, based largely on passages like Daniel 12:1-3. Sadducees, one prominent branch of Jewish leadership active at the time of Jesus, refused to believe that the dead would be resurrected. They didn’t consider much of the exilic and post-exilic literature, including Daniel, to be authoritative scripture, and partially as a result of that, they believed that once the physical body died, that was it. Their reasoning was a result of the fact that no mention of life after physical death was put forth in the Torah, therefore it must not be true. Jesus had a well-known interaction with them and stated unequivocally that those who had physically died were still very much alive and He used the Torah to prove His point (Matthew 22:31-32; Mark 12:26-27; Luke 20:37-38).
I think it’s also extremely important that we keep in mind the fact that Jews did not think of heaven in the same way that some people do in the modern age. Heaven was not the place where we go when we die, nor was it the place where all would be reunited once God set everything right. Heaven was always the realm where the LORD dwelled and ruled. This realm was normally unseen to human beings, but there existed places where heaven and earth met, such as the Tabernacle and the Temple. When John was given his vision of heaven (Revelation 4 & 5), he wasn’t seeing things that would happen in some distant future. He was glimpsing a reality that was happening all around him at that very moment.
Sadly, many translations of the Bible add to the confusion about heaven by translating certain words less than accurately. Matthew 24:3 in the KJV reads: And as he sat upon the mount of Olives, the disciples came unto him privately, saying, Tell us, when shall these things be? and what shall be the sign of thy coming, and of the end of the world? A much, much better translation for the last phrase is “end of the age” rather than “end of the world”. In the Jewish mind, the LORD was not going to destroy everything and then take everyone to heaven. That thought would have been puzzling if not downright blasphemous to them. They believed that scripture spoke of the end of one age and the beginning of a new age, an age where the LORD would reign as King through His Messiah. And please don’t miss the fact that this Messiah was always meant to be human. Adam and Eve were created as the image-bearers of God, and they were told to rule and have dominion over all God’s creation. They were to rule as His representatives but they blew it. The Messiah would bring God’s original intention to its perfect and ultimate fulfillment, not in heaven, but on a fully restored Earth in the new age that would dawn with His appearing.
And that is the hope that beat strongly and fiercely in every righteous heart among the children of Israel during the time of Jesus. He would take that hope and show them that the LORD was at last turning their hope into reality. It was not a reality that any of them expected, nor, I’m fairly certain, was it one that they would have asked for, but it was the awesome, majestic, beautiful reality of God.
Isaiah is one of the most breathtaking books of the Bible, stunning in its scope and depth of emotion. Prophecies concerning the birth of Jesus and the circumstances surrounding His birth are woven together with prophecies concerning the LORD ushering in the final restoration of all things, which makes it the perfect book for Advent. Tucked away amidst the grand and glorious prophecies found in Isaiah 9, Isaiah 11, Isaiah 53, Isaiah 60, and Isaiah 65 is a relatively short chapter that beautifully brings together the first exodus and the final exodus. Not only that, but Isaiah 52 speaks of the vindication of the Servant who will suffer so much. The people of the LORD will not depart in hasty flight as they did when they left Egypt (Exodus 12:11; Deuteronomy 16:1-3), but just as He was when they fled from Egypt, the LORD would be going before them and behind them (Exodus 13:21-22; Exodus 14:19-20; Exodus 23:20-22). Their God and their King would lead them and every eye would behold His return.
Jesus was born a King, although the world and even His own people didn’t recognize Him as such. Too many in Israel had settled for something way less than having God as their King. Some might even have abandoned the hope that someday the LORD would fulfill His promise and return to them. Today, we live in the truth that Jesus will once again appear and come to His people. Will He find that we have also settled for something way less than having Him as our King? Will He find that we have abandoned our hope that He really is going to fulfill His promise and come for us?
Advent is a time of remembering and a time of anticipating. When we celebrate Advent, we remember the desire and the longing of those who awaited the coming of the LORD to dwell among them. When we celebrate Advent, we also join with those who continue to anticipate His final appearance. The herald shall announce wholeness, good news, and deliverance, and then every eye shall behold the return of the LORD to Zion!
Joy to the world, the Lord is come!
Let earth receive her King; let every heart prepare him room,
And heaven and nature sing, and heaven and nature sing, and heaven and nature sing.
Joy to the world, the Savior reigns!
Let men their songs employ; while fields and floods, rocks, hills, and plains
Repeat the sounding joy, repeat the sounding joy, repeat the sounding joy.
No more let sins and sorrows grow, nor thorns infest the ground;
He comes to make his blessings flow far as the curse is found,
Far as the curse is found, far as the curse is found.
He rules the world with truth and grace,
And makes the nations prove the glories of his righteousness,
And wonders of his love, and wonders of his love, and wonders of his love.
Lyrics by Isaac Watts
NOTE: The lyrics to this popular Christmas hymn were not written to celebrate the birth of Jesus but rather to proclaim His return. In spite of that, it seems a perfect song for Advent because it has a celebratory nature and can be applied both to the joy at Jesus’ birth and the exultation we will feel when He appears at last!