The Incarnation is a fundamentally historical event. I don't mean that in the sense that it definitely happened as a real event in history, though that is true; what I mean is that it did not happen in a vacuum. The coming of Christ was wrapped up in so much history and so much covenant language that it is impossible to grasp it with significant depth if we don't understand what came before. For the record, this is one of the reasons I feel as strongly as I do about Advent, that it is a time specifically targeted toward understanding the context into which Jesus was born. How often do we go back to the Old Testament during Advent? How often do our churches focus all their sermon series on the New Testament alone? How often do we give new believers a New Testament, maybe with the Psalms and Proverbs thrown in, instead of the fullness of God's word?

Consider Zacharias' song, sometimes called the Benedictus. Empowered by the Holy Spirit, he looks forward to the coming Christ by looking backward to the promises God made to His people and the terrible circumstances where they learned the value of those promises. I fear sometimes that we are so used to the idea that God is among us that we miss how shocking it really is that God would dwell with us. How wonderful must these words have sounded to those who first heard them!

In western churches, we celebrate Christmas tomorrow. Today, let us go back to the Old Testament and consider what it must have been like to receive the promise of Christmas for the first time.

Advent is not just about waiting. I mean, that's basically what's on the label, waiting for Christ's second coming, waiting for Christmas, understanding a bit of Israel waiting for her messiah. Advent looks backward and forward, and not only acknowledges the importance of waiting, but the importance of understanding that God fulfills His promises.

God promised that He would send a redeemer through the line of Eve, that the world would be blessed through Abraham's seed, that He would make a covering for sin. Christmas is a celebration of God fulfilling His promises. During Advent, we remember that He has been faithful in all things so far, and will continue to be faithful to see all His words come to pass.

We must take seriously what it means that He will judge the world, that all we know will pass away, but those of us who trust in His salvation shall be secure. This Advent, we must look at the people around us and know that they will either be with God or they will face true, comprehensive judgement. We are so used to fighting over the commercialization of Christmas that we don't even argue in the public square anymore whether or not it should be commercialized, but that it isn't being commercialized properly. The Christmas cups are written wrong, the cashier said "happy holidays" to me instead of "merry Christmas" while I was out putting myself into debt to meet our culture's demands. Our culture is so far removed from looking at Christ during Advent that we think these little battles we've picked are more important than loving that cashier, than helping a barista bear the weight of their life, than asking how we can use this season to show the world that the empty promises of Black Friday sales and Hallmark Christmas movies pale in comparison to the God who really will do exactly what He says.

People around us are hurting this season. Some people reading this may be hurting this season. They are hurting from broken promises, from the curse of death on this world, from families who cannot or will not see the pain they've caused and seek restoration. How would the world around us change if we made this season about sitting with them in their pain, entering into their mess like Christ entered ours, and pointing them to the God who keeps His promises and conquers death and loves with an everlasting and unconditional love?

Christ came into the world to redeem us from sin and death, and will return to finish making all things new and setting the world right. Consider how glorious God is, that He should even care about saving us, that He should have any desire to connect with us and take on the effort to bring us to Himself! He who was above all things, who had never had need of anything, who sat on the throne of glory, reaches out to the hurt, the despised, the servants and the forgotten and the poor. He who fashioned the world with a word and with a breath gives life to all mankind, humbled Himself to be born among animals and was greeted by shepherds.

And why should He do all this? Let us not assume that it is because we are so great and deserving of His attention that even the least of us deserve such effort. This is all for His glory; Christ coming into the world deserves more than a manger in a flyover district of the Roman Empire. It is too small of a thing that He should be the savior of one people only, the Lord of just one nation. Yet we see how His glory is manifested, that it should be by inviting us to taste of it. His glory is not something that is revealed to break us down or shame us, but something revealed to invite us in and help us know His goodness. Let us be in awe this season, not only of His glory that is revealed, but the fact that that glory makes God humble and loving rather than aloof and distant.

Those who observe modern Jewish rites are coming to the close of Chanukah today, while Christians are continuing to look ahead to Christmas. This season, where we both celebrate miraculous light coming into the darkness, has at its heart the wondrous works of God.

It can be easy around Christmas to focus entirely on the infancy of Christ. Because He was very much a real infant, with all the limitations and needs that fact includes. But what a magnificent work He has done! We have no idea what it takes to boil the whole person of God the Son into a tiny, fragile, helpless human frame. We can't conceive of the scope of the miracle that is the Incarnation.

The people who watched Christ perform miracles often glorified God, and rightly so, because the works they saw were so far beyond what they were expecting or could understand. But they rarely saw the greatest miracle of Christ's life, that being the fact that He was there in human flesh at all. Let us, this season, consider the mighty works of God in our lives and in the Incarnation itself, and glorify God accordingly.

I commented a year or so ago, on a different platform, that I enjoyed the Advent season for a variety of reasons, but one of those was the hymns, and my favorite of those hymns was "O Come, O Come, Emmanuel." In that comment, I noted that I felt there was quite a lot of the Christian life that can be summarized simply by singing "rejoice, rejoice!" in a minor key, so often a style choice made to express despair. This has apparently resonated well with at least one friend of mine; I think of it now because she quoted me on it earlier this week on Facebook.

One of the most fascinating things that happens in scripture is the commands to rejoice in the Lord. Not that it is odd that we should be expected to worship, but that we would need to be told. Consider these blind men. Now, Jesus had His reasons for telling them not to tell people about their healing at that time, and we don't need to deal with the sequential nature of His plan at this time. But even when Christ Himself told them to keep quiet about the blessing that had come into their lives, they couldn't contain their joy. Can we? What is blindness compared to spiritual death, that we would react more stoically to His work in our lives than they did?

But rejoicing does get hard in this long, dark season, when the world seems cold and unforgiving, when the light is so slow to appear and quick to vanish. I understand that Christ was probably not born in December, but it feels hard to consider it a mistake or coincidence that we celebrate the season of Advent in this season, in this age. I have been hanging heavy here on the idea that Advent is important lately, at least partly because of how few churches I've been involved with that honor it. But remember that the point of remembering the waiting, the point of coming to a place of eager anticipation, is to restore a heart of worship in us. After all, consider in the Old Testament, how often the promises that Israel would rejoice appear alongside promises that the nation would wait, in distress or turmoil or anguish, longing for the deliverance of God. And how greatly they would rejoice when it comes!

Let is be a people of rejoicing, for the great deliverance that has come! And let us be a people, even if only for a season, who will look forward to the final day of deliverance and find in our waiting an eager joy to last us through the year.