Advent People: Waiting for the Promised One

"The seed of the woman shall crush the serpent's head."

I don't know whether Adam and Eve understood the full import of that promise when it was given, but I imagine they waited for its fulfillment with great expectation.

After all, they had experienced something we never have - the joy of life in the garden of God before sin marred the world.  What a stark and frightening contrast it must have been to be banished from their home…the sanctuary where the living God walked and talked with them!   They suddenly found themselves separated from their source of Life by an angel armed with a flaming sword!  

Since we have only known life in varying degrees of fallenness, we can only imagine what that shift must have been like and the desperate longing of our first parents to return to what they had known before. 

Imagine the heaviness of the slow and perpetual realization that they could not undo what they had done…the if only's…the ever growing grief of loss.  Their anticipation of that promised son must have been great!  And yet…that hope turned to further guilt, grief, and sorrow as that first "promised son" proved faithless by murdering their other son.  How could that promise ever be fulfilled?! 

They waited more than 130 years before the godly Seth was born.  And even though he perpetuated a godly seed, at their deaths, Adam and Eve were still waiting for the Promised One to come and definitively conquer their enemy.

And so, from the very beginning, God's people have been an expectant people. Watching.  Lamenting.  Longing. Anticipating.  Hoping.  Waiting for him to come.

**Illustration by Gustave Dore