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The Hope of the World
I trust you all had a great thanksgiving, and I hope you had time to pause, reflect and truly thank God for the countless blessings he has given to you and your families.
This time of the year is so often marked by business and the hustle and bussle of the holiday season that it often flies by in a way that the holiday season happens to us rather than it happening for us.
Thanksgiving - food prep
Black Friday shopping
Cyber Monday shopping
Christmas decorations
school breaks
traveling
busy busy busy…
One of the great blessings of celebrating the advent season is that it calls us to slow down, and put into focus the coming of Christ.
The Meaning of Advent
Advent is a season that should orient our lives for the whole year.
The season of advent is the beginning of the church calendar, today is actually the start of the new year.
Advent is a season that has been celebrated by the church for over 1500 years.
Advent comes from the Latin word adventus, meaning “coming” or “arrival”
Advent is the period of preparation for the celebration of the birth of Jesus Christ at Christmas and also of preparation for the Second Coming of Christ.
A great verse that captures the heart and spirit of Advent is Psalm 130:5
The People of God would sings songs of anticipation, of waiting for their king to come.
So when we celebrate advent, as we move closer to Christmas, we join our voices with the saints of old who longed for the coming of God’s Kingdom.
They waited for the kingdom to come, we now wait for the kingdom to be GLORIFIED.
I have titled this advent series HOPE OF THE WORLD
The Hope of the World
So over the next four weeks leading up to Christmas we are going to be exploring how Jesus is and has always been the only hope for our world.
HowJesus has come to put back together that which sin has fractured.
This morning we will be looking at Isaiah 9:6-7 and focus on the prophecy that the coming Messiah will be the Prince of Peace.
Look with me at Isaiah 9:6-7
In verse six we see The coming messiah called the Prince of Peace
What does it mean that Jesus is prophesied to be the Prince of peace?
To understand this title and the hope that it brings, we must first understand what the bible means by Peace.
And Genesis 1-2 is a great place to start!
Here we see what the peace of God is all about as we see God’s Shalom in the Garden.
Shalom in the Garden
Peace is the translation of the Hebrew word, Shalom.
Shalom has a far richer meaning than our modern definition of peace,
When we think of peace we think of situations without conflict or chaos.
Which is good, but that only one part of what the bible means when it talks about peace.
in the scriptures Shalom means, togetherness or wholeness
In the garden, everything was marked with God’s peace, all creation was whole, every experience was right, for God dwelled with man and man with God.
Every emotion, every taste, every word and action, every thought, every aspect of life was as it should be.
Shalom is God webbing together mankind and all creation in perfect harmony,
it is universal flourishing, wholeness and delight
Shalom, in other words, is the way the things ought to be.
Shalom is the way things ought to be
It is holistic well-bing
If you think about all creation as a Puzzle and your individual life is a piece of that puzzle
when we lack peace, if feels like nothing in life is as it should be.
The puzzle does not fit.
Our physical bodies, our emotional well-being, our mental and spiritual lives feel beat up trying to jam the our lives into the wrong place in the puzzle.
Shalom is when our life fits perfectly into the right place in the puzzle
It is when we are centered in all aspects of life - physical, spiritually, emotionally, relationally and socially.
In the Garden, before the fall, Every motivation and behavior in this world was aimed at the building up and flourishing of God’s creation.
Man and women were in perfect harmony with one another and in perfect harmony with God, and in perfect harmony with creation.
To experience the true peace, the true shalom of God, is to experience life where every impulse, feeling, relationship, job, hobby, or activity dances together in perfect harmony like the notes from a symphony.
And there is not a single hint of dissonance.
Shalom, again, is the way things ought to be.
This harmony of peace was experienced in the Garden of Eden.
Everything was as it ought to have been.
all was harmony, all was right.
Until, Adam and Eve disobeyed and ate from the tree God told them not to eat from.
At that moment everything changed.
Light was turned to darkness
harmony turned to dissonance
Joy turned to sorrow
Love gave way to hate
Relationships were fractured
God was distant
And Peace turned to horror
Shalom was gone, for sins corruption affected everything.
No longer was there peace and harmony as was experienced in the garden, for the horror of sin, the darkness of evil devastated everything.
All of God’s creation moved from the Shalom of the garden out into what we will call, “The Devastation”
The Devastation
The devastation is life outside the shalom of God.
After the fall, every note of creation took upon itself the horrific dissonance of sin.
Every puzzle piece of life was thrown into disorder, unable to find its rightful place
Sin vandalized the Shalom of the garden
Sin has cast humanity into a hostile world, where men and women would become horror makers, interested in their own survival over the well-being and wholeness of others.
In the Devastation, every thought of man was evil constantly
hatred and bitterness toward one another is common place
And corruption spreads like a wildfire
The darkness of the devastation is marked by death and pain and suffering.
In the world outside the garden, outside the Shalom of God, everything left to itself tends toward destruction.
Emotionally we fight anxiety, depression, sadness, manipulation and ignorance just to be at a place where we feel stable
Physically our bodies suffer the affects of sin from the moment we are conceived
Spiritually, well, the bible says we are constantly at war.
Spiritual warfare is an every moment occurrence, whether we realize it or not.
Relationally we feel the devastation of sin in every single relationship.
Gossip destroys, manipulation runs unchecked, bitterness and anger toward those who have offended us is a constant battle
As history progresses from fall in the garden we see the people of God longing, waiting, hoping for a peace that will still the chaos, they wait for a new garden where God will put everything back together as it ought to be.
And this is what advent represents, a longing for the coming king who would put this broken world back into order.
Advent is a Longing for Peace
Though the darkness of sin horrific, God did not leave his creation without hope.
With God there is always hope.
We see God’s faithfulness toward his people throughout the scriptures, he promises that he would send one who will destroy the power of darkness and bring about a kingdom of Peace.
We see in Gen 3:15 that God would send one who would crush the serpents head.
He chooses a man named Abraham and makes a covenant with him and gives humanity hope by telling him that through his seed there will come redemption for all the nations who are enslaved to the darkness of the devastation.
He called Moses to lead his people out of slavery, and through the Mosaic covenant gave his people hope for the coming Messiah
He then called David to be king of Israel, and through the Davidic covenant gave his people hope for a future king who’s kingdom would overcome the horrors of sin and establish the eternal Shalom of God.
As we move through biblical history we come to the prophets.
we see these men longing and waiting for the coming king, the one who would be a light in the darkness and bring shalom back to God’s creation.
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