Return to the M.B.Herald Vol. 38, No. 9 Home Page
Why is it, in celebrating the coming of Jesus Christ, we so often find ourselves looking backwards? We have it all figured out. In Old Testament times, people looked forward. In New Testament times, people looked around. And now we look back. That is how we keep Jesus in the centre, right? Wrong!
To be sure, the Old Testament saints looked forward. They held on to a promise. It gave them hope and sustained them in difficult times. God had promised to send a "greater than Moses" and a "greater than David". He had promised a New Day!
New Testament saints looked around and saw God fulfilling His promises, but they never stopped looking forward. They anticipated with eagerness what God would do now that the New Day had dawned. All we have to do is read the accounts of Zechariah and Elizabeth, Mary and Joseph, the shepherds and the wise men, Simeon and Anna, to see that their real joy lay in the rekindling of their hopes for the future. The coming of Jesus was a beginning…but the golden age lay up ahead.
To celebrate the coming of Jesus as a remembrance only is to miss one of the main points. Our celebration should be a glorious anticipation of what God will yet do now that Jesus has come. It should be a time of refocusing our vision for what God will still do, and of recommitting ourselves to join His work.
So often we try to recapture the magic of an age gone by. We want to experience again the wonder of the first Christmas—so we forget the smells in the stable. We want to be inspired again by the dynamism of the early church—so we forget their quarrels. We want to feel again the enthusiasm of our earlier walk with God—so we forget those early defeats. We imagine the golden age is in the past. It's not. It's up ahead.
The Messiah came as a humble, rejected human being, but He has now gone ahead, and we await His future coming in glory. The church had a remarkable beginning, but it is in the future that it will be fully prepared as a bride for her husband. Our own pilgrimages began with a very special encounter with God, but He desires to lead us on from glory to glory. The golden age is never in the past. It is ahead. We anticipate it and walk toward it. Jesus calls us to "lift up our heads, for our redemption is drawing near" (Luke 21:28).
Tim Geddert is associate professor of New Testament at MB Biblical Seminary in Fresno, Calif.
Return to the M.B.Herald Vol. 38, No. 9 Home Page