Read John 1:19–34 and 3:22–30

“He must increase, but I must decrease” (KJV). I remember hearing this verse as a child and imagining Jesus growing bigger and bigger while John the Baptist shrank! The context of John’s statement clarifies his meaning: John’s disciples have told him that “everyone is going” to Jesus, so John declares, “He must become greater; I must become less.”

John’s ministry began before Jesus’ did, so John watched the number of Jesus’ followers grow from zero to a lot more than John had. This could have been heartbreaking, because “the whole Judean countryside and all the people of Jerusalem” had been going out to the wilderness to see John (Mark 1:5).

The Gospel of John, however, consistently depicts John the Baptist merely as a witness—one who bears testimony—to the identity and greatness of Jesus. Each portion of today’s two passages shows John explaining who he is and isn’t or who Jesus is. Jewish leaders from Jerusalem question John about his identity, and he denies being any kind of Messiah. He is just preparing the way for the Christ. Yes, he has a ministry of water baptism, but his status is greatly inferior to that of the coming one. John points out Jesus as God’s sacrificial lamb, who will take away the sins of the world, and who will immerse people into the power of the Holy Spirit.

Later, when Jesus’ followers have eclipsed John’s in number, John insists this is fully appropriate. He likens himself simply to the best man in a wedding, where Jesus is the groom. John’s analogy in 3:29 is striking, particularly when we understand its cultural context. Ancient Jewish custom called for the best man to wait outside the bedroom when the bride and groom consummated the marriage. Traditionally, the groom would shout for joy to confirm their new marital intimacy, and the best man would share that joy.

The Christian life is all about deferring more and more to Jesus, the Mighty God. A generation later, Paul would say in Philippians 1:18 that “the important thing is that in every way … Christ is preached. And because of this I rejoice.”

I have recently retired and need to learn this lesson more than ever. Being in the limelight is not the point. Humbly magnifying Jesus is. I need to shrink.

Craig L. Blomberg is distinguished professor emeritus of New Testament at Denver Seminary and the author of numerous books, including his Matthew commentary and Interpreting the Parables.

Read Matthew 24:29–44

Questions arise with the first word of this passage: “Immediately”!

Most of the rest of the content in verses 29–31 has almost always been understood to describe Christ’s return, depicted poetically in the language of Isaiah 13:10 and 34:4 as involving cosmic upheaval. (Some have instead taken it as a sort of invisible coming of Jesus in judgment through Rome’s destruction of Jerusalem in A.D. 70—though the idea of gathering the elect from one corner of the world to another doesn’t fit that interpretation.)

When will Christ come back? This message on the Mount of Olives was provoked by Jesus’ disciples asking him when he would come back (Matt. 24:3). He itemized a long list of what must happen first (vv. 4–26) and now says, in essence, “Watch for these things to know when my coming is near,” just as a fig tree in leaf portends the arrival of summer.

Examples of all “these things” occurred by A.D. 70, so the church in every generation since has believed it might see his return. Jesus is not saying he will return in the disciples’ lifetime, merely that all the preparatory events will have occurred. “These things” in verse 34 have to be the same as “these things” in verse 33—which show that Christ’s return “is near” but not yet here. So they can’t include his actual return—just the signs that prepared for his return. When he returns, he will no longer be merely “near, right at the door,” but he will have arrived!

We can’t know the precise timing of all this, so we must always be prepared. Those who aren’t will be caught off guard by the suddenness and surprise of the final events. If we remain alert at all times, we don’t have to worry about a midnight burglar. Of course, Jesus isn’t coming back to steal anything from us; it is the idea of unexpectedness he’s highlighting in this comparison.

But what about “immediately after the distress of those days”? Perhaps the distress here is the distress that characterizes the entire period between Christ’s two comings. After all, 2 Timothy 3:12 promises persecution to all the godly (even amid the many joyous moments in the Christian life).

However we interpret it, here is testimony to Jesus as the Mighty God who will put all things right in his perfect timing. Today, many Christians have recovered the biblical call for justice in this life, and rightly so—we should do all we can to help others. But war, sickness, natural disaster, injury and disability, poverty, and broken relationships all require us to ultimately trust God for complete restitution and restoration in eternity. And in the grand scheme of eternity, his return will probably seem to all of us like it indeed happened “immediately”!

Craig L. Blomberg is distinguished professor emeritus of New Testament at Denver Seminary and the author of numerous books, including his Matthew commentary and Interpreting the Parables.

Read Revelation 19:4–21

The grad student dialoguing with me was heavy with questions posed by her agnostic friends about hell and God’s judgment. She found it hard to reconcile the God of love and the message of forgiveness with visions of fiery torment. As we talked, I explained that there are many orthodox Christian views of what the final judgment will be like, but the main thing Christians are asked to do is to trust Jesus as the Judge. She was visibly relieved.

For whatever reason—we might blame Dante or folk religion or medieval superstition—we often imagine God’s judgment to be impersonal and cold, like a mass execution or a bomb detonated from a distance. But Revelation deliberately shows us Jesus involved in the judgment of the nations. I think there are two reasons for this.

First, justice and judgment are two sides of the same coin. To enact justice, one must execute judgment. If we want Jesus the Mighty God to set the world right, he must deal with injustice and evil together. Here the justice and judgment of Jesus are depicted in a vivid way that would have held sway in first-century minds: a warrior on a horse with a sword. But we must be careful with our assumptions here.

Which leads us to the second reason why Jesus is shown as the one who carries out justice and judgment: The Jesus who is returning is the same Jesus who came. There is no change of identity between advents. “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever” (Heb. 13:8); this conviction helps us consider how Jesus enacts justice and executes judgment. On the cross, Jesus died in solidarity with the sinner and the sufferer. He bore the weight of God’s judgment on evil.

If we were to ask how Jesus responds to injustice and evil, the answer is he bleeds. Judgment fell on him so that justice—wrongs being set right—could come to all. When we see Jesus coming like a warrior whose robe is dipped in blood, the blood could well be his own. After all, this is a king like none other. Jesus embodies might and power in a way we’ve never known before.

Yet this passage doesn’t leave us without a warning. There are those who resist this king, who insist on their own way, their own rule, their own empire. For them, life will meet its end. The gruesome images of being devoured depict the erosion of life.

The King of Kings brings life by his death. But if you resist his life and insist on protecting your own, instead of life you will get death.

Judgment and justice belong together. And the one who will carry out both is Faithful and True. Will we trust him with enacting justice and executing judgment?

Glenn Packiam is the lead pastor of Rockharbor Church in Costa Mesa, California. He’s the author of The Resilient Pastor and coauthor of The Intentional Year.

Read Revelation 21:1–6 and 21:22–22:5

Imagine a boy being bullied on the playground. Kids surround him, taunt him, push him onto the ground. He’s fighting back the tears, but that’s about all he can fight; there’s no way to stop the terror and the torment.

Then, almost out of nowhere, a car pulls up. It’s the kid’s father. “Get in the car, son,” the dad yells. Rolling out of the other kids’ grasp, the boy scrambles to his feet and stumbles to the car. They speed off. As the boy looks briefly out the window, he is sure the bullies are laughing. The boy is safe, but there’s no way to count that as a win. An evacuation is not a victory.

The end of the Book of Revelation—the end of the Bible itself—shows us a picture not of our evacuation or escape but of God’s arrival. Jesus conquered sin and death on the cross. In John’s gospel, Jesus said from the cross, “It is finished” (19:30). Here, in John’s revelation, the one who is seated on the throne says, “It is done.” The first statement was an announcement of completion; the second is a proclamation of things coming to pass. The victory of Jesus on the cross was made manifest in his resurrection, but it will arrive in fullness at his return.

We know that the season of Advent is a time of waiting between two arrivals. But the truth is, it is also a waiting between two victories. Jesus the Mighty One has overcome, and Jesus the Mighty One is coming again.

And when he comes, he comes to dwell. The vision of the end that Revelation provides is of God making heaven and earth new, uniting the new heaven and the new earth as one, and filling it with his presence and light. This is a victory that comes with an occupation—only in this case, the occupation is good news, the best news the world could receive! The Creator has redeemed his creation and has come to fill it with his glory. The story that began in Genesis has been perfected and completed.

Back to the playground. Creatively imagine a totally different scenario: Instead of the dad yelling for his kid to get in so they can drive away, the dad parks the car, gets out, and walks slowly over. The authority of his very presence drives away the bullies. He embraces his son. He calls out to other kids who are hiding, who are hurting, to come out into the light. He decides to settle in and remake the playground entirely, now with better equipment and brighter delights. Food and drinks arrive. Then comes the music. And ice cream. Laughter abounds. Somehow the place of pain has become the place of joy.

Glenn Pakiam is the lead pastor of Rockharbor Church in Costa Mesa, California. He’s the author of The Resilient Pastor and coauthor of The Intentional Year.

Read Isaiah 2:1–5 and 9:6–7

Perhaps the greatest evidence that the Promised One is the Mighty God is this: He is the one—the only one—with a power great enough to bring lasting peace. He not only brings peace, he is peace. The Prince of Peace.

We are, of course, accustomed to a world in which peace is maddeningly elusive. In 2003, journalist Chris Hedges set out to determine whether there have been any sustained periods of peace on the human record. Defining war as any “active conflict that has claimed more than 1,000 lives,” he reviewed 3,400 years of history and discovered just 268 war-free years. In other words, approximately 92 percent of recorded history is marked by active conflict.

Of course, the people of ancient Israel did not need a journalist to tell them that human existence is plagued by wars and rumors of wars. They had plenty of firsthand, trauma-inducing experience with conflict, violence, and oppression. What they did need was a prophet who could provide them with a vision of peace vivid enough to counter the horrific images already seared into their memories.

Isaiah brought them—and us—just such a vision. Consider the images in the second chapter of Isaiah. All the nations come streaming together to the mountain of God. That’s where they discover that the supposed dichotomy between peace and justice has been false all along. The Lord brings peace through justice. He judges between the nations and settles disputes, resolving not only wars but also their underlying causes.

And then watch what happens when humans find themselves in the presence of the Prince of Peace: The swords and spears they’ve brought to the mountain—weapons they’ve long assumed were necessary to their survival—seem suddenly out of place. The people lay down their arms. But the Prince of Peace has something even more beautiful in mind. Soon, the people are working together to convert their weapons into gardening tools. Human ingenuity is redeemed and redirected from destructive ends to creative ends.

Isaiah is not naive. He has seen the brutality that can and does characterize the human condition. But he’s also caught a glimpse of the verdant, vibrant, peace-infused future the Prince of Peace has planned for his creation. It’s the sort of vision that gives a weary prophet hope—a vision about the sort of prince who will one day cause angels to exclaim, “Glory to God in the highest heaven, and on earth peace to those on whom his favor rests” (Luke 2:14).

Carolyn Arends is a recording artist, an author, and the director of education for Renovaré. Her most recent album is In the Morning.

Read Isaiah 35

The Hebrew word that Isaiah uses to describe the peace that the Promised One will bring is shalom. It’s a beautiful word that conveys wholeness, harmony, and health. Where we might settle for uneasy truces and Band-Aid fixes as proxies for peace, shalom represents something much more robust. Beyond the cessation of war, shalom is a transformation of the conditions that lead to war in the first place.

When there is shalom, everything gets to function the way it was created to. Shalom rejects the idea of life as a zero-sum game and dares to imagine the comprehensive flourishing of every person and every thing, all at the same time. Theologian Darrell Johnson teaches that shalom describes “a psycho-somatic-relational-racial-economic-spiritual wholeness.” In chapter 35, Isaiah depicts that wholeness in beautifully poetic language.

Let’s start with the psychological wholeness the Prince of Shalom can offer us. According to Isaiah, there is a peace on offer that says, “Be strong, do not fear” to our “fearful hearts” (v. 4) until “gladness and joy” overtake us and “sorrow and sighing … flee away” (v. 10).

And what of somatic (or bodily) wholeness? In one vivid image after an another, Isaiah describes physical healing: The blind see, the deaf hear, the lame “leap like a deer” and the mute “shout for joy” (vv. 5–6). Even the creation itself is healed, as “water will gush forth in the wilderness” (v. 6) and “the wilderness will rejoice and blossom” like a crocus flower bursting into bloom (vv. 1–2).

As Isaiah 35 builds to its culmination, we are offered a vibrant vision of relational, economic, and spiritual wholeness in the depiction of a redeemed people walking and singing together on a highway of holiness. There are no lions there, Isaiah tells us, and we can safely assume the way is free from all other predatory or opportunistic foes. The people enter Zion together, where “everlasting joy will crown their heads” (v. 10).

This ultimate shalom, Isaiah tells us, is our future. But there’s even more to it than that. Author Jonathan Martin suggests in Prototype that, because the Prince of Peace gives us his Spirit, we are called to be “people from the future”—people who practice shalom here and now.

This Advent, when you face a situation in which peace is sorely needed, ask the Lord: What action or attitude would most move this situation toward the comprehensive flourishing of everyone and everything involved? You may find that the Prince of Shalom makes you a stream in the desert and fills you with gladness and joy.

Carolyn Arends is a recording artist, an author, and the director of education for Renovaré. Her most recent album is In the Morning.

Read Isaiah 11:1–10

One of the great tensions we often feel during Advent is the disparity between God’s promise of peace and the presence of war and violence in our world. Isaiah foretold that the Messiah’s reign would bring a world without worry. Picture a mother at perfect rest, watching her children play by the cobra’s den and not leaping into action. As a father of five, I find this is hard to imagine!

Parents know that feeling of overwhelming panic when their child approaches danger. During the Messiah’s reign, as Isaiah describes it, that feeling will go extinct.

But in our lived experience, the world doesn’t look anything like this. Thomas Hardy’s nearly 100-year-old poem “Christmas: 1924” laments,

“Peace upon earth!” was said. We sing it,
And pay a million priests to bring it.
After two thousand years of mass
We’ve got as far as poison-gas.

How do we reconcile the promise of peaceful rest with the reality of poison gas—or ballistic missiles?

The answer lies in the tension of the now and not yet. During Isaiah’s day, the promises God had made to King David in 2 Samuel 7—promises of an enduring and blessed kingdom—seemed broken. The house of David resembled a felled tree. But from its dry stump a Spirit-filled branch would emerge: Jesus, the Son of David. He would bring peace to both Jews and Gentiles, standing as a rallying flag to unite hostile nations (Isa. 11:10; Eph. 2:15).

This is realized now in part through the church, where even tax collectors like Levi and zealots like Simon find peace through Christ’s blood. God’s worldwide temple is made of living stones, and the bricks God builds with are chosen from every tribe, tongue, and nation. Today we can experience the promised peace of the messiah-king who says to the weary, “I will give you rest” (Matt. 11:28).

But the not yet of Isaiah’s prophecy will arrive with Jesus’ second advent (Isa. 11:4; 2 Thess. 2:8). This is anticipated by the Edenic imagery of subdued predatory animals in Isaiah’s prophecy. Jesus will one day perfectly subdue creation, calming deadly beasts and turning even a serpent into a child’s plaything. The glorified world of the new creation will ultimately satisfy our deepest longings for justice and peace.

Advent reminds us of the glorious rest given through Jesus’s first coming and anticipates the full restoration that will accompany his return. In this time of tension—between the now and not yet—God calls us to be marked by his kingdom grace, a people who pursue justice for the oppressed and spread the knowledge of Christ in our communities (Isa. 11:9; 2 Cor. 2:14). It is through this knowledge that weary sinners receive the glorious rest of Christ’s kingdom.

Adriel Sanchez is pastor of North Park Presbyterian Church in San Diego and the host of Core Christianity, a Q&A radio broadcast and podcast.

Read Isaiah 42:1–4 and Matthew 12:15–21

Isaiah and Matthew knew what it means that Jesus is the Prince of Peace. When Matthew described Jesus as fulfilling Isaiah 42:1–4, we see an image of shalom, the Hebrew word for peace. Unlike our often narrow understanding of peace as simply being “without war,” shalom encompasses a broad picture of how God makes everything wrong with the world right. This shalom of God is a peace that brings order out of chaos and justice in place of injustice.

Isaiah 42 starts by introducing God’s chosen one, “my servant.” This is the first of what some call the Servant Songs; the other songs are found in 49:1–6, 50:4–9, and 52:13–53:12. They tell a story of God’s servant enacting salvation to the ends of the earth (in chapters 42, 49, 50) and saving God’s people through the servant’s own suffering (in 52–53).

Here, in 42:1–4, the servant is the one God holds up and delights in. This servant brings God joy! God’s Spirit is on this servant, so that he can bring justice to the nations. This isn’t a message of peace only for Israel, but for the whole world.

One might expect this Spirit-filled servant to be loud and proud about his chosen status with God, but instead he is characterized by his humility. He’s not shouting out in the streets, but instead he’s caring for those who are hurting. He’s someone who can see that a reed is bruised—that a person is feeling trampled—but he won’t let them break. He’s someone who holds a person who feels like a tiny candle on the verge of going out, and he won’t let their light fade. What does it mean to bring peace to those who are barely hanging on? The servant’s quest for justice is characterized by gentleness. He sees those experiencing vulnerability; he won’t let them fall.

Matthew 12 describes how Jesus fulfills Isaiah’s prophecy. It may look at first like Jesus is fulfilling this prophecy by asking his disciples to keep quiet (v. 16), similar to the quiet of the servant in Isaiah 42. But if we look at the entire chapter, Matthew shows us something different. Jesus, as the servant, cares for those who need healing. In the passages before and after verses 15–21, the emphasis is on how Jesus healed on the Sabbath (vv. 1–14), how Jesus “healed all who were ill” (v. 15), and how he healed a demon-possessed man, bringing him sight and the ability to speak (v. 22).

Jesus’ kind of peace meets us in our weakest places, transforming injustice into justice, setting right what has been bruised, and he does this with the gentleness of his loving touch.

Beth Stovell teaches Old Testament at Ambrose Seminary. She is the coeditor of Theodicy and Hope in the Book of the Twelve and the author of the forthcoming commentaries Minor Prophets I and II.

Read Isaiah 61:1–4 and Luke 4:16–21

When Jesus unfurled the scroll and read Isaiah 61, his hearers had been waiting for many generations for the Promised One—the Prince of Peace, the bringer of justice and freedom. They’d seen countless wars, successive occupying empires, and cultural changes that disoriented them as they navigated having faith in such circumstances.

We too live in times of geopolitical chaos, violence, and confusion. We too wait for the Prince of Peace to come in glory, to bring the final resurrection and restoration to places of death and mourning. It hurts to wait. It fills us with longing.

Isaiah 61:1–4 refers to the Jubilee Year in Leviticus 25—a radical command that called for restoring land and people who had been sold into slavery because of debt. The Jubilee Year was the year of the Lord’s favor, when debt-slaves would be freed and homes and lands would be restored. God desired every daughter and son of Israel to be restored to home. Yet Isaiah 61 also speaks of God’s vengeance—and Jesus unsettlingly says that he has come to bring not peace but the sword and division (Matt. 10:34–36). How then, could Jesus be the bringer of peace?

When Isaiah speaks of the Prince of Peace, he’s speaking of shalom—which is not only the absence of violence or evil, but also the fullness of a good life—of loving one’s neighbor to see her flourishing and following a loving God each day.

The weekly Sabbath breaks our rhythms of work with rest and shalom, and the Jubilee is the Sabbath of Sabbaths. It is the pinnacle of shalom. So when Jesus declares the arrival of jubilean shalom, he not only offers salvation from judgment after this life but also asserts that he is the arrival of deliverance from slavery to both monetary and spiritual debt—into freedom and restoration in this life and beyond.

Thus, Jesus’ birth and life are more than a prelude to the Cross. Indeed, his birth, his life, the Cross, and the Resurrection are all part of the larger story of God delivering his people—a people who trust God and love their neighbor. As the Israelites were called to trust in God for deliverance and provision in the wilderness, so we are called to lean upon the Lord for the same—against all odds and in war, political turmoil, or wandering. And we’re called to love our neighbor as part of that active hope.

Jesus inaugurated the Jubilee in the shadow of the occupying Roman Empire, and he invites us, despite the shadows all around, to follow him and to live in his jubilean kingdom. He bids us to actively yearn, hope, and wait for his resurrection power to break through in unexpected ways as he moves and lives in us.

Sarah Shin is a doctoral student in systematic theology at the University of Aberdeen, Scotland. She is the author of Beyond Colorblind: Redeeming Our Ethnic Journey.

Read Isaiah 52:13–53:12

Expectation mounted as God’s people awaited their Messiah’s arrival, just as we now await the celebration of his birth. Yet this fourth Servant Song in Isaiah reads much more like a eulogy than a birth announcement. It speaks of one who is not just coming, but of one who is sent. Each part of the servant’s biography is imbued with purpose.

The servant’s story is no mere tragedy. On the contrary, this song begins and ends by affirming the promised servant’s triumph and exaltation. The middle of the song fleshes out how he will succeed: through suffering. Physically, the servant would be marred, pierced, crushed, and disfigured. Emotionally, his soul would be weighed down with sorrow, suffering, and anguish. Socially, he would be rejected, despised, and oppressed. His body, spirit, and relationships would be broken. This inestimable yet unenviable life would be cut short, undervalued, and profaned. “Yet,” Isaiah says, “it was the Lord’s will to crush him and cause him to suffer.”

But why? For what purpose? Because “the punishment that brought us peace was on him.” His sorrow-sunk shoulders would carry the grief of the world, his crushing would remove our guilt, his welts would secure our healing, and his ostracization and judgment would purchase our peace. As messianic prophecies, these songs point to a set-apart king-priest who would one day rule and make offerings for God’s people. In the New Testament, both Philip and Peter see Christ as this song’s fulfillment. Philip explains the gospel to the Ethiopian eunuch using this passage (Acts 8:26–40). Peter uses this song to exhort persecuted Christ-followers to endure because their path of suffering was well trod by their Savior (1 Pet. 2:22–24).

As we reflect on Jesus as the Prince of Peace, this passage challenges the tranquil and idyllic images of peace we may conjure up in our minds. Our peace was won through gruesome violence against Jesus—it cost him a lifetime punctuated by sorrow, being misunderstood, and rejection. This suffering is what awaited the peace-bringing baby of our carols.

Our image of the Christ child swaddled and held tenderly by his parents contrasts sharply with the difficult truth of this Servant Song—of the Father not only sending the Son to an early death, but purposing it. While most human parents hope and pray for bright futures for their children, here we see a love-driven death mission that will secure the survival of many. This song doesn’t only tell us about the servant sent to suffer, but also of the Father’s heart: eager to save his people at any expense, even at the gravest personal cost.

Alicia Akins is a graduate student in biblical studies at Reformed Theological Seminary in Washington, DC, and the author of Invitations to Abundance.