Revival and Renewal

The word “Advent” comes from the Latin adventus, meaning “arrival,” and it is a time when the Church has prepared its heart for the arrival of the King. It is a time of waiting, of reminding ourselves where our hope lies, and re-focusing on our anticipation for the second coming of Christ. Tradition tells us that Advent started to be celebrated in the fifth century. But our waiting actually has a much more ancient origin. 

In the third chapter of Genesis, Adam and Eve are impatient. They’d been told that they could eat of any tree (including, mind you, the Tree of Life!) in the garden except one: the tree of the knowledge of good and evil (Genesis 2:17). Many have suggested, and I am inclined to agree, that this prohibition was temporary—that just as we withhold knowledge from our children, so too God withheld this knowledge from his children until they “grew up” into it.  

But by the time we get to chapter 3, the children have gotten restless. God-like knowledge seemed like their right, and they took it at the slightest prompting of the serpent (3:1-7). Instead of the life God freely offered (that came with it obedience to his commands), our first parents chose to literally take good and evil into their own hands and become their own little gods. Sound like children yet? 

Ever since this moment, we’ve lived in an age of uneasy waiting. We know something is wrong, but we can’t place either the cause of our wrongness nor the solution to our waiting and weeping. What’s actually wrong is the curse that Adam and Eve (and us in them) brought upon the cosmos, a moment in time we call the Fall. Because of their rebellion, God curses the serpent, humanity’s ability to “be fruitful and multiply,” relationships between man and woman, and the ground itself. In other words, all of life is now under the curse of sin. 

Yet there is something in these curses that causes us to pause. In verse 15 God is cursing the serpent, and he says to it, “I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and her offspring; he shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel.”  In this little verse we get the first glimpse that the curse is not the last word in God’s creation. We see that our waiting is not in vain, but that we await one called the Seed of the Woman who would crush the serpent’s head and so undo the curse of sin. So now, Adam and Eve must wait. They waited to see if Cain, Abel, or finally Seth was that Seed. They died waiting, as did Noah, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, David, and every Old Testament saint. But then in the darkness of the night, in Bethlehem of all places, a virgin gives birth to a son—and they called his name Yeshua, “Yahweh-Saves.” The waiting is over.