Waiting for God

The Sunday morning message in the United Methodist churches of the Wheatland Parish on November 26, 2024.  The Bible verses used are John 1:1-18.

            This is kind of an unusual year.  Most of the time, the Sunday after Thanksgiving is also the first Sunday of Advent.  But this year, just because of the way the calendar falls, we have a Sunday in between Thanksgiving and Advent.  It’s kind of strange.  Thanksgiving is over, but Advent is not here yet.  So, while we might like to start celebrating the coming of the Savior, we have to wait.

            As I thought about that, I thought about how long the people of Israel waited for the Savior to come.  Old Testament prophecies about the coming of the Messiah go back at least to seven hundred B. C., maybe earlier.  That means the people of Israel had been waiting for the Savior to come for at least seven hundred years.

            And we’ve talked about this before, but sometimes, when we look back this far into history, we lose sight of how long a time seven hundred years is.  In our minds, it all kinds of falls into the category of “a long time ago”.  We don’t think about how long it was between seven hundred B. C. and the coming of Christ.

            Think of it this way.  Seven hundred years ago was 1323.  Seven hundred years ago most people thought the world was flat.  Seven hundred years ago there were no gasoline-powered engines, no steam engines, no power of any kind, really, other than human power and horse power.  And I mean actual power from horses, or donkeys, or oxen, or whatever animal you might have.  Seven hundred years ago there was no such thing as the printing press.  Anything that was written was written by hand.  Seven hundred years ago Europeans had no idea that there was such a thing as the Americas.  That’s how long seven hundred years is.

            And that’s how long the people of Israel had been waiting for the Savior to come.  And of course, during that time, there were lots of false Saviors.  There were lots of people who claimed to be the Savior who were not.  There were lots of people in whom the people of Israel invested their hope, only to be disappointed.

            I’m sure some people probably gave up.  I mean, seven hundred years is a very long time to wait for something.  We think seven years is a long time to wait.  In fact, sometimes we think seven months or seven weeks or even seven days is a long time to wait.  Waiting for seven hundred years--I don’t think you and I can even imagine what that’s like, to wait that long for the promise of God to be fulfilled.

            And even after Jesus came, a lot of people had a hard time believing it.  And if we think about it, we can understand why.  I mean, have you ever really, really wanted something to happen, and you kept waiting and hoping for it to happen, and then it finally did, and you had trouble believing it?  You had to pinch yourself.  You had to keep reminding yourself.  You just could not believe that this thing you had wanted for so long was actually real.

            That’s the position some of the people of Israel were in.  They wanted to believe Jesus was the Savior, but--could it really be true?  After all this time--seven hundred years--could he really be the one we’ve been waiting for?  After all the disappointments, all the false Saviors we put our hope in only to find out it was not true--could Jesus really be the one we’ve been waiting for at last?

            That’s the context the apostle John was dealing with when he wrote his gospel.  Yes, there were some who already believed, but there were a lot who did not.  They could not believe that, after seven hundred years, the one they had waited for had finally come.

            And so, John starts his gospel by trying to explain to people who Jesus was.  And what does he say?  Well, we’ll get to it in a minute, but first, we need to deal with how John refers to Jesus.  He calls Jesus “the Word” and later calls him “the Word made flesh”.  In other words, Jesus was sent to earth as God’s message, God’s truth, God’s word to us.  So in that Bible reading, when you hear the phrase “the Word”, know that he’s referring to Jesus.

So what does John say?  “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.  He was with God in the beginning.  Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made.  In him was life, and that life was the light of all people.  The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.”

Jesus existed from the beginning.  In other words, when Genesis says “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth”, Jesus was there.  And it’s not that Jesus was there with God, it’s that Jesus is God, God the Son.  Jesus is not some guy who was born two thousand years ago.  Jesus is eternal, because God is eternal.  Jesus existed before this world was ever created.  Jesus will exist after this world is gone.  Jesus always was, always is, and always will be.  That’s who Jesus is.

And the reason that’s important, or at least one of the reasons why it’s important, is to explain why they had to wait seven hundred years for the Savior to come.  As we said, seven hundred years is an incredibly long time for us.  When your life span is, at best, a hundred years or so, seven hundred years seems like a really long time.  But when you’re eternal, seven hundred years is nothing.  It’s the blink of an eye.  Psalm Ninety tells us that a thousand years are like a day that has just gone by to God.  So seven hundred years, to God, is really no big deal.

There are a lot of other things John said in our Bible reading today.  Jesus is the true light.  As John puts it, “the true light that gives light to everything was coming into the world.”  “To all who did receive him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God--children...born of God.”  There are a lot of good sermons in that passage we read this morning.

But I want to keep the focus on that time of waiting.  Seven hundred years, at least, from the time of the first prophecy of the Savior to the time Jesus came.  And let me tell you why.

The Bible tells us some things about the second coming of Jesus.  Not as much as we’d like to know, but some things.  And one of the things it tells us is that, in its own words, Jesus second coming will be “soon”.

Now, it does not define “soon”.  But most of us would have thought that it meant sometime before two thousand years had gone by.  And so, people wonder about that statement.  If Jesus was supposed to come again “soon”, where is he?  Why has he not come yet?

And when we look around at the world right now, we see a lot of things that make us think maybe it’s about time.  Look at all the things going on in the world right now.  Look at all the wars and threats of war.  Look at all the hate aimed at specific groups of people.  And not even because of anything they’ve done, just because of who they are.  Look at all the crime in our major cities, and sometimes outside of our major cities as well.  Look at all the natural disasters and diseases and everything we deal with.  Look at all the accusations of corruption and immorality about our elected leaders.  We see all that, and sometimes we think “If Jesus is going to come again and set things right, maybe it’s about time he did it.”  We wonder why God has, for so long, allowed so many things to happen that just do not seem right.  We wonder why God does not step in and do something about it.  We wonder what God could be waiting for.

But the thing to remember is that we have no idea what “soon” may mean to God.  Two thousand years?  Two thousand years is nothing to God.  Two thousand years is the day before yesterday, or the day after tomorrow.  Two thousand years is an incredibly long time on a human scale, but it’s nothing on God’s eternal scale.

We don’t know how much longer it will be.  It could be another two thousand years.  It could be another two hundred thousand years.  Or it could be two hours.  We don’t know.

And so, we wait.  We don’t know how long we’ll be waiting, just like the people waiting for the first coming did not know how long they’d be waiting.  We wonder if it’ll come in our lifetime, just like the people waiting for the first coming wondered if it would happen in their lifetime.  And sometimes we’re tempted to give up, just like people waiting for the first coming were tempted to give up.

But don’t give up.  Because Jesus is coming again.  And we need to be ready.  Even if Jesus does not come in our lifetimes, we still need to be ready.  Because if Jesus does not come to earth in our lifetimes, we will go to meet him.  And we need to be ready for that, too.  Because we don’t know when that day is going to come, either.  But we know it is going to come.

            In human terms, it took a long time for the Savior to come.  Seven hundred years or more after the first prophecy.  People did not understand why it took so long.  Some of them gave up.  But the Savior did come, and the world changed forever because of it.

            In human terms, it’s taking a long time for Jesus to come again.  Two thousand years since the first mention of it.  Some people don’t understand why it’s taking so long.  Some people are tempted to give up.  But the Savior will come again, and again the world will change forever.

            May we all be ready for that day when it comes.