Welcome to the Advent Season. Culturally, we’ve equated “advent” with cardboard boxes with 25 little cubbies containing small gifts that serve as a calendar leading up to Christmas. However, the concept of Advent is much bigger than a calendar guiding us to Christmas, and it begins with what the term means:

Ah, yes, Jesus came 2,000 years ago as a baby, so we celebrate Advent, but again, this is just the tip of what it means to celebrate the Advent season.

Advent is a paradox of both celebration and waiting.

Wait. Celebrate. Repeat.

Photo by Brooke Lark on Unsplash

Over the next few weeks, we’ll look at what Advent meant before Jesus arrived, when Jesus arrived, to the Church after Jesus returned to heaven, and for the world when Jesus returned. As we study these four turnings of history (and the future), we’ll use one Old Testament passage of Scripture and other portions of the Christmas story we know and love.

Each week, we’ll use this passage from the book of Jeremiah as a springboard into the waiting and celebration of Advent:

“Although our sins testify against us,
do something, Lord, for the sake of your name.
For we have often rebelled;
we have sinned against you.
You who are the hope of Israel,
its Savior in times of distress,
why are you like a stranger in the land,
like a traveler who stays only a night?
Why are you like a man taken by surprise,
like a warrior powerless to save?
You are among us, Lord,
and we bear your name;
do not forsake us!”
-Jeremiah 14:7-9

Jeremiah put these words to pen and paper around 600 years before the birth of Jesus. God went silent two hundred years later (about 400 years before the birth of Jesus). We have no Scriptural prophecies or stories of God speaking during that period. The silence was broken with the written word in the Gospel of Mark, closely followed by Matthew.

Did God use him (and her)?

Matthew wrote for a Jewish audience, so he began his story in a very Jewish way—with a genealogy. This list of Jesus’ ancestors includes the usual suspects: Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, David, and Solomon. These are some of the greatest of the Old Testament greats. What is shocking are some of the other names listed in this lead-up to the Savior of the world.

They include Tamar, Rahab, and Ruth—all non-Jewish women. One pretended to be a prostitute to assure her place in the family (Tamar), another was a prostitute but risked her life to save a few Israeli spies (Rahab), and one was a relatively innocent outsider who displayed more faith than the average Jew (Ruth). On top of all of that, Jewish genealogies didn’t typically include women.

What is Matthew doing?

The list included a long line of Israeli kings. Some of these men followed in the footsteps of David, who was described as a man after God’s own heart. These included Jehosophat, Hezekiah, and Josiah, but the list also included a king, Manasseh, who committed the most horrible of sins—child sacrifice.

It’s as if Matthew wrote to point out what Jeremiah wrote hundreds of years earlier:

There were men and women of incredible faith in Matthew’s list, but there were also men and women of questionable character. Think about this: Jesus’ line of ancestors were not just sinners but some of the most notorious sinners the nation had known. Even the “good ones” had faults — David slept with another man’s wife and had him killed to cover up his sin, Abraham offered his wife to another man to save his own life, and Solomon introduced the worship of idols to appease his many foreign wives.

The waiting begins…

And so God was silent.

Jeremiah wrote,

“why are you like a stranger in the land,
like a traveler who stays only a night?”
-Jeremiah 14:8b

Day after day, month after month, and year after year, the men and women under God’s covenant waited for the fulfillment of the promises of a Savior. Yet God was silent.

To truly appreciate Jesus’s coming 2,000 years ago, we must recognize what the Jewish people suffered through—their sin and God’s silence. They waited hundreds of years for God to speak and to move. Hopefully, this puts what you might be dealing with this Advent season in perspective.

Waiting is a part of our Christian experience.

Jesus came to begin the process of setting things right. God redeemed a line of men and women who had questionable pasts by gracing them with the Savior as their “child.” But he isn’t done, so it may seem like God is silent.

But as we’ll see in the coming weeks, hope is coming. God spoke into the silence, and into your silence, God will speak again.

Group Questions:

Ice Breaker Questions:

1. What Christmas traditions do you and your family celebrate that you can’t imagine skipping this year?
2. What does the word “Advent” mean to you beyond the cultural celebration of Christmas?

Read Jeremiah 14:7-9:

1. The Jewish people waited for hundreds of years in silence for the Messiah. How can we relate to their experience of waiting for God’s promises in our own lives? What helps us trust God’s timing when facing long waiting periods?
2. How does the Advent season give us hope amid our struggles, doubts, or feelings of silence from God? How can we learn to find hope even when we feel God is distant or not answering our prayers?

Read Matthew 1:1-17:

1. How many names do you recognize from Matthew’s genealogy of Jesus? What do you remember about them? What does this tell us about God’s grace and His ability to redeem broken people? How does this shape our understanding of forgiveness and grace?

Read Devotion:

1. What does it mean that Jesus came to “begin the process of setting things right”? How does His coming make a difference in how we view the world and our role in it today?
2. Advent invites us to prepare for God’s arrival. How can we actively prepare our hearts during this season to receive the hope and joy of Christ’s coming, both in the past and future?