Anticipation and Fulfillment
Grace to you and
peace from God our Father, and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.
What is it that drives
millions to wait for hours in the dark and the cold on the morning after
Thanksgiving Day for a department store to open? What is it that possesses young men to
wait in line for hours to purchase the new video game console? What is it that keeps deer
hunters on their stands for hours on end? It is what happens at the end of
all of that waiting. Their expectations are met; their hopes are realized. Those
who waited in department store lines get their bargains. The young men get
their cool new video game console. The hunters tag their bucks and does. The
waiting and the hoping are over, and what has happened has made the wait
worthwhile.
This is the
Christian life: a life of waiting and hoping, and then realizing that all that
waiting was so worthwhile! We see this in the lives of the Old Testament saints.
For forty centuries, they had waited. God had promised a Savior from sin
immediately after man committed the first sin. And so the people of God waited
for their hope for a Savior to be realized.
During the next
twenty centuries, God continued to give descriptions about the promised Savior.
Jeremiah, for example, proclaimed that the Savior would be born in the line of Judah. In
giving prophesies, God showed His goodness and mercy toward His people, calling
us to task for being impatient with Him and His ways and renewing our hope
through His Word. And so the people of God waited for their hope for a Savior
to be realized.
And, finally, the day
was at hand! The long-expected Savior had come into the world! Jesus revealed
Himself to be the promised King when He entered the city of Jerusalem on the donkey colt. The people of
God had waited for their hope for a Savior to be realized…and it was. The
waiting was over. What they had anticipated with hope had now happened!
And what happened
made the long wait worthwhile! For the One who was paraded into Jerusalem and lauded as the King on that Sunday was
paraded out of Jerusalem
the following Friday, condemned as a criminal. The Lamb of God was being led
out of the city to the slaughter. His day had come. His long wait was over,
too. He had waited patiently from the very beginning of eternity for this day;
He had been born in flesh for this very moment. The Father had held back His
wrath against all the sins of the world, and now He was going to unleash His
wrath against His only Son, the One carrying our sin in His Body. The wait was
over. What the Triune God had anticipated was now happening: the Father put His
Son to death for sin so that we, His adopted children, would not perish in sin.
Because of Christ’s sacrificial death, the Father forgives the sins of the
entire world: from the original sin of Adam to the final sin of the last man on
earth.
Like the Old
Testament saints, our lives also are lives of waiting. We await the Second
Coming of the same Savior. And we, too, have waited long. It has been nearly
twenty centuries since the Lord ascended with the promise that He would come
again, to usher in the new heavens and the new earth, our eternal dwelling
place with Him and with each other.
In the meantime,
we wait for His final coming. But as we wait, He comes to us in humbler
ways—but these ways are no less fulfilling for us, for He comes to us in the
mouths of pastors who speak His forgiveness to us. He comes to us in the
preaching of His Word. He comes to us in His body and blood. And all these humble
comings of Christ prepare us for that final coming in glory, when He will come
to us, when we will never again be able to be parted from Him…and it will be
worth the wait! In the name of the Father and of the Son (†) and of the Holy
Spirit. Amen.
The
peace of God which passes all understanding will keep your hearts and minds in
Christ Jesus always. Amen.
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