Advent 3: Welcoming God’s intervention

As Advent prompts us to look up and challenges us to overcome evil times, it is a season that also beckons us to seek and welcome God’s intervention. This ought to be a natural disposition, some think. The absurdity is that some people actually resent the idea of divine intervention. There are different reasons for this: if God has given us all that we need to make it on our own, why bother Him anymore? For this singular reason some have seen the great privilege of prayer as no more than indulgence in laziness. Some others readily acknowledge that mankind has limits, which honesty constrains us to acknowledge, and to seek help from the strong hand stretched out to shield us.

God does not encourage laziness in anyway, nor does He endorse arrogance. The Psalmist tells us, in Psalm 103:14: “For he knows our frame; he remembers that we are dust.” God our creator knows our frailty more than we do, and He longs to help us where He knows we have come to our limits – either through sin or simply, as a factor of our humanity. He never forgets that we are dust. The hymnwriter, Robert Grant, pens these words: “Frail children of dust/ And feeble as frail/ In Thee do we trust/ Nor find Thee to fail/ Thy mercies how tender/ How firm to the end/ Our Maker, Defender, Redeemer and Friend.”

Sometimes, God’s help comes unsolicited, for He is the perfect Father who knows our needs that we ourselves cannot articulate: “As a father shows compassion to his children, so the Lord shows compassion to those who fear him,” (Psalm 103:13). This was demonstrated early in man’s history during the fall in the Garden of Eden. We are told that when the parents of our race, Adam and Eve, realised they had become naked — following their disobedience; they sewed fig leaves to cover their nakedness. God knew that their solution was doomed to futility and He provided them something more effective in Genesis 3:21, “And the Lord God made for Adam and for his wife garments of skins and clothed them.”

As tragedy became part of the human story, we are told that men began to call upon the name of the Lord in Genesis 4:26. Increasingly, prayer became man’s channel for seeking divine intervention. In the course of time, we encounter an interesting situation in which God invited man to seek divine help, and for whatever reason, the person in question declined. God still proceeded to provide help. That account has been a key prophecy relating to the coming of the Messiah, which was indicative of God’s mighty intervention. It is famous in our Christmas carols: “Again the Lord spoke to Ahaz: 11: “Ask a sign of the Lord your God; let it be deep as Sheol or high as heaven.12: But Ahaz said, “I will not ask, and I will not put the Lord to the test. 13: And he said, “hear then, O house of David! Is it too little for you to weary men, that you weary my God also? 14: Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign. Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel,” (Isaiah 7:10-14). Matthew records the birth of Christ as the fulfillment of this specific prophecy (See 1:22–23).

Advent invites us to seek earnestly for divine intervention in the difficulties of our lives. As we breathe the air of Christmas, there is one big story that heaven is still shouting to humanity: God came down to provide the help that mankind needs most – a Saviour from sin’s tyranny. The birth of Christ who came to die for the sins of humanity by His earthly life remains God’s lifeline to drowning souls. Many, through the ages, have embraced God’s intervention in Christ. Many still do. “The true light, which gives light to everyone, was coming into the world. 10: He was in the world, and the world was made through him, yet the world did not know him. 11: He came to his own, and his own people did not receive him. 12: But to all who did receive him, who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God. 13: Who were born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of Go,”(John 1:9-13).

• Most Reverend Emmanuel A.S. Egbunu is the Bishop of Lokoja