Promise of Presence
What’s the greatest present you have ever received at Christmas?
This is going to sound cliché, but it’s a truth we need to realize…One of the greatest presents we receive from Christmas is God’s presence.
This Advent season, we are going to be looking at some of the promises that Jesus fulfills in His first coming. Advent literally means “arrival,” or “coming.” When He came, His advent had purpose behind it. Thousands of years of purpose and promises were fulfilled when Jesus was born in Bethlehem on that holy night.
There were many prophecies fulfilled, and we will be looking at some of those in these next few weeks, but we are going to be looking at something a little different than prophecies. We’re going to be looking at promises that God has made.
Have you ever broken a promise? What happens when you break a promise? You break trust. Christmas reminds us that God is trustworthy. He always fulfills His promises.
The first promise, the promise of presence is actually going to start with the first Christmas passage we have in our Bible. It’s not found in the prophecies of Isaiah or in Matthew, although those are great Christmas passages, too. It’s found all the way back at the beginning of the world, directly in the middle of the dark hopelessness of the very first sin. Turn to Genesis 3.
What we see in Genesis 1 and 2 is that God, in his sovereignty, created everything good. We were created for beauty and enjoyment of life and freedom and intimacy with God.
Sin separates us from God. (Genesis 3:1-8)
Adam and Eve had everything they could ever need in the Garden of Eden, but they believed the lie that it wasn’t enough. That God was holding out on them. That they knew better than God what was good for them. When Adam and Eve disobeyed God’s orders to not eat from one particular tree, even though they were completely free to eat from every other tree, their intimacy with God was broken. Immediately after falling into sin, Adam and Eve hid from the God they once walked with.
I’m not a huge fan of walking, but my wife is, and usually when we have that time together, we talk as we walk. It was the same with Adam, Eve, and God. Daily they had intimate fellowship with one another in the garden. But when Adam and Eve sinned, there were no more walks with God or talking to him face to face, because a perfect, holy God cannot be in fellowship with an imperfect, sinful man. Sin always separates us from God’s presence.
It wasn’t God who ran away from the relationship with his creation when sin entered the world. It was Adam and Eve who ran and hid from their Creator. God never pushes us away, even in our sin and brokenness. It is you and I who go and hide. As the great hymn Come, Thou Fount of Every Blessing says, “Prone to wander, Lord I feel it, prone to leave the God I love.” We are all prone to wander because it is in our flesh. We are born into this sin that Adam and Eve initiated. And sin would continue creating a divide between God and man throughout history.
Where there is distance, relationships suffer. Nearness is required for relationships that last. Who has ever been in a long-distance relationship? Many people have. Who is still in that same long-distance relationship…not the same person, but the same person with the same distance? Likely not many, if any, are. That’s how it is with us and God. When you don’t know that He is near, your relationship suffers.
But what we see from the beginning, from the very first sin, is that God never intended for us to stay separated. He longed to be near Adam and Eve again. He longed for intimacy with them, walking and talking with his creation again. God could have wiped out Adam and Eve and started all over. But instead of crushing Adam and Eve or wiping out their existence, God made a promise to one day rescue them. He was going to make a way. He was going to be the way.
Amidst our brokenness, God promises to be broken for us. (Genesis 3:9-15)
It is in this promise that we see the first prophecy of Jesus. This is called the protoevangelium. The first gospel. The first good news. You might be wondering how there could be good news in the middle of a curse. But amidst the brokenness of sin, the glory and hope of God’s great love lit up the darkness. The curse wasn’t simply a curse but also a promise. A promise that the serpent would one day be bruised, or crushed, by man. I kind of see this as pay back to Satan for tricking Eve into sin (plus, I am terrified of snakes and wouldn’t be upset if they were all crushed). But in that promise God says the woman’s offspring would be crushed as well. Where’s the hope in that?
Let’s think about this for a second. The offspring of a woman is a baby. And what do we celebrate at Christmas? God coming into the world as a baby! Who was this baby’s mother? Mary. Surely God had Mary in mind at this moment in Genesis knowing she would carry his offspring. So the seed of the woman the curse was talking about would miraculously be God himself. God loved Adam and Eve so much that he wrote himself into the very curse he was placing on them. He would go to such unimaginable lengths of love to be crushed on a cross in order to crush our brokenness and heal our intimacy with him. Though that day in the Garden of Eden everything changed, God promised that he himself would draw near to restore what sin had broken. This is why he prophecies that he would be called Immanuel (God with us),[1] and the virgin would conceive him.[2]
God’s promise fulfilled didn’t fit man’s expectation. (John 1:9-11)
Every book of the Bible points to this grand redemptive narrative. And every battle in the Old Testament points to a greater battle that is to be won through Jesus. I love how Sally Llyod-Jones poignantly writes it in The Jesus Storybook Bible, “Every story whispers his name.” That is, the name of Jesus. The name that means “the Lord saves,” because that is indeed what he was coming to do.
Jesus is a form of the Hebrew name Joshua, which means “God is salvation.” Therefore, the name Jesus carries with it all the reminders of God’s past faithfulness through every battle Joshua fought in the Promised Land. Jesus is also a name that comes from the lineage of David, a man after God’s own heart, who trusted God amidst much adversity. Jesus is the name for God in the flesh. Amidst his people. For his people. Bringing them to himself. Every battle, from the first mention of conflict in Genesis 3 to the prophecies in Isaiah 53 to thousands of years later in Matthew 1, was working its way to this moment when God would put on flesh.
However, when Jesus came, many people didn’t believe his story. They didn’t trust him to be the long-expected Messiah they had been waiting for. He didn’t meet their standards of what they thought king should be. He didn’t look like royalty. He didn’t act like a warrior ready to fight. His speech and habits and eating with sinners and calling out the Pharisees and talking of a kingdom that wasn’t just in Jerusalem made them turn away and ignore the door to freedom that was right in front of them. In their minds, Jesus wasn’t enough. They wanted more. And many would die holding onto their expectations and waiting for another king to fit their criteria than accept the one true King who had come to rescue them.
Don’t we do the same thing? We often look at our life and think, “God, this isn’t what I was expecting.” The hardship, the suffering, the pain we have to deal with on a daily basis, whether it’s from our own flesh or other people around us or circumstances beyond our control. Often we lose sight of how God could be working those things for our good. So we count him out. We ignore him. We assume he isn’t working our situation for good or is far off and unaware of what we are even going through. Maybe we question if he even exists at all. Or if we do believe he exists, we question if he’s really good. So we turn to other things besides God to satisfy us. To fill that empty void. But no amount of love, drugs, alcohol, sexual fulfillment, material gain, work achievement, familial bond, fame, or anything else we are longing for in this life can satisfy us like God alone can. Sometimes the whole point of suffering is to strip us away from all the things we hold dear until all that’s left is Jesus. That’s when we realize he is enough. And when we look to him for who he is and not who we expect him to be, that’s when we will find he is greater than anything we could ask for or imagine.
The presence of Jesus is all we need. Though we’ve looked at the first prophecy and have seen how God draws us near by coming near himself, we can also trace that promise all throughout scripture. One of the greatest promises of God that is repeated over and over, both in the Old Testament and in the New Testament is this: “I will not leave you nor forsake you” (Deut 31:6; Josh 1:5; Heb. 13:5). You see Him be near in the tabernacle and temple, and you see Him lead his people by pillar of cloud and fire. We’ve already mentioned it, but Jesus fulfills the promise of being Immanuel, which literally means, “God is with us” (Isaiah 7:14; Matt 1:22-23).
That’s when Jesus came, but He didn’t stay, did He? He was on the earth for 30 something years, ministered for three, died on the cross, rose from the dead and ministered for another 40 days. Then, He left. He ascended into heaven. The God who came was leaving. Do you know what the last words Jesus said before He ascended into heaven was? “I am with you always, to the end of the age” (Matthew 28:20).
He left, but how is He with us? He’s with us by faith, and He’s with us in Spirit.
Read John 1:12-14.
Jesus came near when He was born, and He remains near when we are born again.
And He promises to come back again to bring all those who are His to Himself. In the next to last chapter of our Bible, God says, “And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Look! God’s dwelling place is now among the people, and he will dwell with them. They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God.”[3]
Because we can trace God’s plan of redemption from the garden to the incarnation and into eternity, we can know that nothing has happened in this evil world outside of God’s control and nothing will happen unless it goes through God first. Since the beginning of creation, God has been setting his plan in motion to bring an end to evil and suffering by sacrificing His own son, Jesus. And since God has been faithful in the past, we can trust him to be faithful no matter what the future holds.
So even if your situation feels unbearable and out of control, know that God is working amidst any battles you face. God promises to be with you wherever you are, giving you strength to face whatever hardship you’re in. He is Immanuel. God with you. Dwelling with you. Walking with you. Talking with you. Singing over you. He is celebrating every triumph and consoling every loss. He is holding you up when you cannot stand and pushing you from behind when you cannot run. He is encouraging you when your doubts are loud, and he is near to you when your heart is broken. He is speaking words of wisdom when sin is enticing, and he’s giving you words to speak when you’re standing alone for him. He knows your pain, your struggle, your joys, and your desires. He provides your every need, knows you better than you know yourself, and fights battles for you that you could never win on your own. He knows what lies before you, and he is not afraid. Therefore, you should not be either. He promises you peace and hope and joy and love (all the things we celebrate at Advent). He says you have no need to worry. No need to fear. No need to doubt. And it’s because he is near. He is right where you left him, waiting with open arms to show you more of himself that is greater than you can imagine. He might not be who you are expecting but he is exactly who you need. Will you turn to him and trust him to be enough for you today?
