Advent: Waiting and Hoping

Hope deferred makes the heart sick, but a desire fulfilled is a tree of life.

Proverbs 13:12

Wanting. Desiring. Yearning.  We have an almost infinite capacity for hope, the feeling that things will eventually turn out for the best.  But when it becomes clear that hope will not be fulfilled, how do we react?  Do our hearts turn bitter toward God, or do we continue faithfully serving Him?

Zechariah and Elizabeth were elderly and childless, with no one to carry on after them or to care for them in their old age.  The society in which they lived valued large families, viewing childlessness as a reproach, even an evidence of ongoing sin in a couple's life.

Luke tells us that in spite of their circumstances, Zechariah and Elizabeth were "...walking blamelessly in all the commandments and statutes of the Lord."  (Luke 1:6).  No bitterness, just obedience.

Perhaps it was because of this that God chose to work in an extraordinary way in their lives.  Most of us know the rest of the story, how the angel Gabriel appeared to Zechariah to announce that the couple would have a child.  Zechariah's muteness until the child's birth, and the proclamation that his name would be John.  The child would become the one who would "...turn the hearts of the fathers to the children, and the disobedient to the wisdom of the just, to make ready for the Lord a people prepared." (Luke 1:17).

The birth of John the Baptist wasn't just a nice ending for a pleasant old couple, but an event that was designed to stir up the people, to give them hope.  For over four hundred years, God had been silent. The circumstances of John's birth were meant to get people talking, to remind them of the promises God had made of a coming Messiah, to reignite a hope that laid dormant all that time.

A voice cries: "In the wilderness prepare the way of the LORD;

  make straight in the desert a highway for our God.

Every valley shall be lifted up,

  and every mountain and hill be made low;

the uneven ground shall become level,

  and the rough places a plain.

And the glory of the LORD shall be revealed,

  and all flesh shall see it together,

for the mouth of the LORD has spoken."

Isaiah 40:3 - 5