One On One: 100 Days With Jesus--ADVENTSample

Gabriel--The Angel with a Message

As real as this world feels to us, we need only engage our imaginations a bit to realize that another world exists that we cannot see or touch. Something in us tells us it’s that world that is the most real world of all. 

That is the angel Gabriel’s world. A created reality of power and principalities beyond our dimension. Of heaven’s hallways and throne rooms. Of mission and mystery. Of a grandness surpassing space and time, older than the earth. 

Our journey through Advent begins in this reality. And on that ultimate day, just imagine how the room buzzed with the news. God says it’s finally time. 

The mission, rustling as a rumor since the first days of creation, is that God Himself will step onto terra-firma—actually go there—and become one of the them. Why would He do that? “To get His own back,” someone supposed. 

That was the message Gabriel was tasked to explain to the small, favored ones. He was to unzip the curtain that separates our worlds, step through it, and announce the mystery to a young girl and an old man. 

“I stand in the presence of God, and I was sent to tell you this good news.” The young girl would believe him; the old man, not so much. 

To be fair, even Gabriel had a hard time grasping news so good. God of God, Light of Light, very God of very God come down from heaven. Here? To do that? He and his colleagues would give anything, anything to have this gift for themselves. What is beginning here is so strangely wonderful that the host of them dared to peek around the curtain to watch it unfold. 

Gabriel’s other job, (as if), was to announce His Creator’s human name—Jesus. Like a gift, he presented it to the young woman who seemed much too small to carry such a weight. Could she fathom how the universe spun on this Name? Or imagine that someday every knee will bow and every tongue will confess His worth? 

For now, she just whispered it after Gabriel, as he said it aloud for the first time. 

Tomorrow: One on one with the man who doubted an angel