Do you ever Long for the Return of Christ?

"Longing" is Advent’s most sobering theme.  Here we embrace the tension of longing for the coming Christ-child in a manger while longing for the return of Jesus Christ as King of Kings and Lord of Lords. 

This longing has caused me to ponder some of the atrocities in the world (as noted in the picture of Jewish children in a Nazi death camp), and thus live my short life on earth with as few regrets as possible.

It was announced this week that 1,000 American troops now have been killed in Iraq.  Reports are that tens of thousands more Iraqi soldiers and civilians have died.  It’s a sad mess.  During the Vietnam War the U.S. averaged 150 dead a week for seven years.  In World War II, we lost 200 men every day for four years.  In the Civil War, 400 Americans a day, Union and Confederate, died from the fall of Ft Sumter to Appomattox.

Consider the genocides of the 20th century.  Germans killing Jews during WW II (6 million); Turks killing Armenians in 1914-1915 (1.5 million); Stalin killing 60 million people in Russia during his Communist regime in the 1930s and 194s; the Khmer Rouge killing Cambodians from 1975 to 1979 (2 million); Saddam Hussein’s troops killing Iraqi Kurds in 1987 and 1988 (100,000); Serbs killing Bosnian Muslims from 1992-1995 (200,000); Hutus killing Tutsis in tiny Rwanda in 1994 (800,000), and that in an African country largely Christianized by well-meaning Western missionaries.

You might look back on the horrors of recent decades and ask, "How can God allow such things?" or, "How can there be a God if such complete moral anarchy reigns?"  Would any argue that the Nazi death-camps and Soviet Gulags were utterly anti-God?  And though Hitler was born and brought up a Roman Catholic and Stalin was once a Russian Orthodox apprentice-monk, it is hard to imagine any two men in history who were more bereft of basic Christian instincts or more systematically committed to the destruction of Christian values.

And yet, experience shows that very few people do actually ask the above questions.  Most people react to the horrors of war by turning to God for protection, solace and comfort, not cursing Him.  When I think of the terror of recent decades or the on-going quagmire in Iraq, it makes me tremble at the prospect of living a trivial, self-serving, comfortable, middle-class, ordinary, untroubled American life.

I sometimes wonder why God hasn’t destroyed this world yet.  II Peter 3 says the destruction of the world by fire is coming.  Still, the text insists that God is patient, not wishing to destroy anyone.  A thousand years to us is just a day to God, says II Peter 3:8.

The delay of Christ’s return actually is an act of mercy and patience.  Reflecting on this dreadfully broken world during the Christmas season makes me exceedingly thankful for God’s mercy toward my family and me while longing for his imminent return. 

Emmanuel, Christ child, Savior of the world, king of kings and Lord of Lords …  Come and save your people…