Today marks the first of four Sundays traditionally celebrated by the church as the season of Advent. And with live nativity displays, Christmas plays, and Advent calendars you’d be forgiven if you thought that Advent was only about the birth of Jesus.

But there’s more to Advent than the Bethlehem stable. Historically, the church has focused as much on anticipating the return of our glorious King as celebrating his birth. By examining the history of Advent, we recover this season’s neglected meaning.

Easter First

The earliest church centered its liturgical calendar around Easter. In fact, little evidence exists for the celebration of Jesus’s nativity during the first two centuries of church history. The New Testament, after all, discloses little detail concerning the time of Jesus’s birth. Of the Gospels, only Luke’s narrative hints at a time of year: lambing season in early winter when shepherds would have needed to keep watch over their flocks (Luke 2:8).

Where the Scriptures were silent, early Christian authors were too. There is no mention of birth celebrations in Christian writings from the first and second centuries.1 The earliest church, instead, focused on what the New Testament described with great detail — the final days of Jesus the Messiah. 2 For this reason, the celebration of Easter at the time of the Jewish Passover was the primary focus of Christian practice from the earliest days of the church — a celebration Paul implies in 1 Corinthians 5:7–8.

Despite the absence of Christmas celebration, by the end of the second century there was significant interest in determining a date for Jesus’s birth. This interest probably reflects the church’s apologetic emphasis on Jesus’s physical birth in the face of those who were skeptical of his full humanity. While there was vigorous debate around possible dates, by the early fourth century consensus emerged around two likely candidates: December 25 and January 6.3 Over time, the former became the traditional celebration of Christmas and the latter the celebration of Epiphany.4

From Easter to Christmas

But why December 25? Based on their understanding of Daniel’s prophecy, some early Christian writers reasoned that Jesus was conceived on the same day that he was later crucified. Tertullian (ca. 155–220) calculated that Jesus was crucified on the 14th of Nisan, the equivalent of March 25 on the Roman (solar) calendar — exactly nine months before December 25.5 Christians, therefore, reckoned the date of Christmas from their observance of Easter. Augustine of Hippo (354–430) relayed this understanding in On the Trinity: “He is believed to have been conceived on the 25th of March, upon which day also He suffered . . . but He was born, according to tradition, upon December the 25th.”6

That Jesus was conceived on the same day he would eventually give up his life may at first seem unlikely. But consider, as the early church did, the equal unlikelihood that the Messiah’s propitiatory death would exactly coincide with the celebration of Passover.7 As Peter confessed, all events, whether seemingly inconsiderable or inestimably significant, are guided by God’s “definite plan and foreknowledge” (Acts 2:23). His works in creation and his ways in history are beautiful and symmetrical (Psalm 18:30; Isaiah 46:10).

From Christmas to Advent

The precise origins of Advent celebrations are more difficult to determine. By the middle of the fourth century, celebrations of Jesus’s birth on December 25 in the West were increasingly common. A longer period of celebration like that of Lent (the period of fasting and reflection preceding Easter) soon developed around it. In 380, the church council in Saragossa set apart three weeks in December, culminating in the celebration of Epiphany.

So also, the church in Rome began formalizing Advent observances. The Gelasian Sacramentary of the late fourth century includes liturgies for five Sundays leading up to Christmas. By the mid-sixth century, bishops in France had proclaimed a fast on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday from November 11 until Christmas Day.8 Pope Gregory I (540–604; also known as Gregory the Great) further developed the Advent liturgies by composing prayers, songs, readings, and responses for congregational worship. Over the next century, these practices spread to England. Finally, around the turn of the millennium, Gregory VII (1015–1085) standardized the four Sundays leading up to December 25 as the period of Advent.

Advent’s Neglected Meaning

Despite the challenge of tracing Advent’s origin, two things are historically clear about the celebration itself. First, in contrast to Lent (a somber season of fasting, reflection, and meditation on the suffering of Christ), the weeks leading up to Christmas were full of jubilance and festivity. In Advent, the church looked back to celebrate the incarnation as the fulfillment of God’s promise to deliver his people from sin, Satan, and death (Genesis 3:15). The church rejoiced with the apostle John, “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth” (John 1:14). Advent celebrations often concluded with baptisms and highlighted new life and union with the incarnate Christ.

What is often neglected, however, is that Advent celebrations also looked to the future. The term “advent” (Latin, adventus) translates the Greek parousia, a word that in the New Testament always speaks of the Messiah’s second coming. Advent looks forward to the final realization of all that Jesus’s incarnation at Christmas put into motion. For this reason, instead of the Gospels’ birth narratives, Advent sermons often centered on eschatological passages (like Luke 21:25–36 and Matthew 24:37–44) or on the Triumphal Entry (Matthew 21:1–9) as a joyful anticipation of Jesus’s victorious second coming. Leo I (400–461) reminded his congregation that Christmas looked both backward and forward:

Hence because we are born for the present and reborn for the future, let us not give ourselves up to temporal goods, but to eternal: and in order that we may behold our hope nearer, let us think on what the Divine Grace has bestowed on our nature on the very occasion when we celebrate the mystery of the Lord’s birthday. Let us hear the Apostle, saying: “for ye are dead, and your life is hid with Christ in God. But when Christ, who is your life, shall appear, then shall ye also appear with Him in glory” who lives and reigns with the Father and the Holy Ghost for ever and ever. Amen.9

Songs of the Second Coming

This future orientation was reflected not only in sermons, but also in song. In the sixth century, a series of seven Advent songs emerged, one for each day of the week leading up to Christmas. Called the Great Antiphons (or the “O” Antiphons), each expresses longing for the Messiah’s return:

O Key of David and scepter of the House of Israel;you open and no one can shut;you shut and no one can open:Come and lead the prisoners from the prison house,those who dwell in darkness and the shadow of death.

This rich tradition of looking back and looking forward has been passed on to Reformed Protestant denominations. In the Book of Common Prayer (1549), Thomas Cranmer (1489–1555) used material from the Gelasian Sacramentary and the writings of Gregory the Great to develop Advent liturgies reflecting on both Christ’s nativity and his second coming. While many contemporary services focus on themes of hope, joy, peace, and love, Cranmer’s Advent liturgies are primarily focused on Christ’s future appearing.10

We may neglect Advent’s future-orientation in our contemporary celebration, but, intriguingly, the theme of Jesus’s second coming runs deep in our favorite Christmas carols. Isaac Watts’s (1674–1748) “Joy to the World” celebrates Jesus’s glorious return and his future kingdom where sin and sorrow are no more (Revelation 21:4):

Joy to the world! the Savior reigns;Let men their songs employ;While fields and floods, rocks, hills, and plainsRepeat the sounding joy,Repeat the sounding joy,Repeat, repeat the sounding joy.

No more let sins and sorrows grow,Nor thorns infest the ground;He comes to make his blessings flowFar as the curse is found,Far as the curse is found,Far as, far as the curse is found.

Finally, consider John Mason Neale and Henry Coffin’s “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel,” a translation of the ancient Great Antiphons:

O come, Thou Key of David, comeAnd open wide our heavenly home;Make safe the way that leads on high,And close the path to misery.Rejoice! Rejoice! EmmanuelShall come to thee, O Israel.

O come, Desire of nations, bindAll peoples in one heart and mind;Bid envy, strife, and quarrels cease;Fill the whole world with heaven’s peace.Rejoice! Rejoice! EmmanuelShall come to thee, O Israel.

History illuminates the richness of Advent’s celebration and anticipation. And one practical way of recovering the deep joy of this future-oriented season might just be to believe what we sing.

http://rss.desiringgod.org/link/10732/15686324/was-pauls-letter-needed-or-not

God reveals himself to his people in the Bible. The opening chapters of Genesis show us that God is relational. Indeed, all true theology is relational theology since God, in his triunity, is a relational God. God relates to his creatures, especially those made in his image, in a manner suitable to their creatureliness. Because God is wise and good, he does not relate to Adam in the garden in a manner that utterly confuses him. Rather, there’s a beautiful simplicity concerning how Adam must live in relation to God, which was friendship with God based upon his gracious condescension.

Now, that does not mean we are not frequently confronted in God’s word, as Job was, with the supreme, infinite majesty of our God. God is infinite in his perfections; he possesses unchangeable omniscience; he enjoys eternal omnipotence. To him alone, we can say with David, “Yours, O Lord, is the greatness and the power and the glory and the victory and the majesty. . . . You are exalted as head above all” (1 Chronicles 29:11). Our God “is clothed with awesome majesty” (Job 37:22).

However, we also find that much of what pertains to us as humans is also attributed to God. We read of God’s “face” (Exodus 33:20), “eyes” (and “eyelids,” Psalm 11:4), “ear” (Isaiah 59:1), “nostrils” (Isaiah 65:5), “mouth” (Deuteronomy 8:3), “lips” (Isaiah 30:27), “tongue” (Isaiah 30:27), “finger” (Exodus 8:19), and many other body parts. What’s more, sometimes we read of God possessing human emotions. He is sometimes jealous or grieved (Deuteronomy 4:24; 32:21; Psalm 78:40; Isaiah 63:10). After Adam sins, God, who has just made the world by acts of divine power, wisdom, and goodness, asks Adam, “Where are you?” (Genesis 3:9).

God Without Passions

What are Christians to make of these declarations of God? Is God eternally unchangeable in his being, or does he, like humans, have the capacity to change? Can God really experience distress or learn something new? What does it mean for God, who is Spirit, to “get angry”? Does God really need to ask Adam where he is, as if he can’t find him?

If we are committed to the biblical and theological view that God is unchangeable (see Psalm 102:26–28), we are affirming that in God there is no change in time (he is eternal) or location (he is omnipresent) or essence (he is pure being). God does not change, nor can he change (Malachi 3:6; Isaiah 14:27; 41:4). Thus, there are no “passions” in God, as if in his essence he can be more or less happy or more or less angry. God is what he always was and will be (James 1:17) in the infinite happiness and bliss we call divine “blessedness.”

An immutable God does not have passions; or, as John Owen famously said, “a mutable god is of the dunghill.” We do not deny that God has affections (for example, wrath or hatred), but affections like wrath in God are either acts of his outward will or they are applied to God figuratively.

Passions refer to an internal emotional change, which are suitable to humans. Think of our blood pressure rising with anger. God’s jealousy — a metaphorical way to speak of him — helps us to understand outward acts of his will. When God wills for the wicked to be punished, sometimes in the most severe way (like the flood in Noah’s time), we can speak of the “anger of the Lord.” Because God is holy and righteous, he must punish sin. When he outwardly executes his punishment, the Scriptures often speak of his fury or wrath. But to suggest that Achan, for example, could upset God so that God is less happy is to make Achan into God and God into Achan (see Joshua 7).

God’s Amazing Stooping

God relates to his image-bearers in a way that does justice to the history of redemption. He condescends and, for our sake, sometimes appropriates to himself “passions” that, while not properly true of his being, are ways of speaking that help us to understand how he will relate to us in terms of his purposes and will.

“God relates to his creatures, especially those made in his image, in a manner suitable to their creatureliness.”

Herman Bavinck (1854–1921) explains the importance of God’s dealings with us in this way: “If God were to speak to us in a divine language, not a creature would understand him. But what spells out his grace is the fact that from the moment of creation God stoops down to his creatures, speaking and appearing to them in human fashion” (Reformed Dogmatics, 1:100). If he did not, we would be left in a cloud of unsearchable darkness concerning who God is and what he is doing in the world.

Now God’s “stooping” and “appearing” are not mere anthropomorphisms in the sense that he is accommodating to us in terms of the language he uses. Rather, the humanlike language used of God in the Old Testament is fulfilled wondrously in the person of Christ in his incarnation.

Anthropomorphic Christ

The Son related to God’s people in the Old Testament by dwelling in their midst (1 Corinthians 10:4). According to Owen, in dwelling with his people, the Son

constantly assumes unto himself human affections, to intimate that a season would come when he would immediately act in that nature. And, indeed, after the fall there is nothing spoken of God in the Old Testament, nothing of his institutions, nothing of the way and manner of dealing with the church, but what has respect unto the future incarnation of Christ. (Works, 1:350)

This is a beautiful way to understand the Old Testament. These anthropomorphisms attributed to God are not only a form of accommodation on his part in terms of his covenantal relationship with his people, but they set the stage for the incarnation of the Son of God. Yet, since the Son is the reason for all things (Colossians 1:16), it goes without saying that anthropomorphic language concerning God is not merely prospective of Jesus but derives from him from the beginning.

Owen adds that it would have been absurd to speak of God continually by way of anthropomorphisms (such as grief, anger, repentance, and so on) unless it was intended that the Son would take to himself “the nature wherein such affections do dwell” (350).

“What is impossible for God, who cannot change, is possible in Christ because of the glory of the incarnation.”

Everything anthropomorphically yet not properly attributed to God is actually properly attributed to Christ as God-man. Jesus, who has arms and eyes, a heart and soul, also grieves (Mark 3:5) and expresses indignation (Mark 10:14). What is impossible for God, who cannot change, is possible in Christ because of the glory of the incarnation. In him we can affirm both God’s unchangeability and his ability to express human passions. The Son of God, as one person with two natures, is both unchangeable and changeable; he experienced an infinite joy in the deity but also, while on earth, an inexpressible sorrow in his humanity.

Always Set to Be Man

Our Lord Jesus is not only the fulfillment of all promises, which are yes and amen in him (2 Corinthians 1:20), but the fulfillment of all truth concerning who God is toward his creatures. The Lord’s hand (arm) is not too short to save because his “hand” is his Messiah who is able to save to the uttermost (Hebrews 7:25). Hands are what we use to work, and God works with his hand (Jesus) our salvation.

God often spoke of himself in human terms because the Son was always set to become the true human, the one truly in the image of God (Colossians 1:15), who allows the faithful to see God by faith in this life and by sight in the life to come. As important for us as his divinity is his humanity — a humanity that such stooping language in the Old Testament always anticipated.