One of the great gifts that we receive from biblical faith is the ability to move, as life’s circumstances change, back and forth between patiently waiting for God to act and urgently acting ourselves. Sometimes life calls for waiting; other times life demands that we do something. It isn’t always easy to tell when we ought to do one or the other. God has promised to rescue all creation from the effects of sin, and yet we know that this promise doesn’t excuse us from acting to care for the world around us.

This aspect of the journey of faith, this call both to wait and to wait, is nowhere more visible than in the lives of the prophets who proclaimed God’s promise that God would restore his people Israel and give them a new and better King “David”, the one we call Jesus Christ.