Comfort, comfort my people, says your God. Speak tenderly to Jerusalem, and proclaim to her that her hard service has been completed, that her sin has been paid for, that she has received from the Lord’s hand double for all her sins. … You who bring good news to Zion, go up on a high mountain. You who bring good news to Jerusalem, lift up your voice with a shout, lift it up, do not be afraid; say to the towns of Judah, “Here is your God!” See, the Sovereign Lord comes with power, and he rules with a mighty arm. See, his reward is with him, and his recompense accompanies him. He tends his flock like a shepherd: He gathers the lambs in his arms and carries them close to his heart; he gently leads those that have young. (Isaiah 40:1-2, 9-11)

In the opening verses of these beautiful and familiar words from Isaiah 40, we hear that the Israelites’ exile was directly related to the presence of sin in their lives and in the life of their nation. Not only was their hard service completed, but their “sin had been paid for.”

Fine for the Bible to say so, but when we or someone else associates the word “sin” with our own losses and griefs, we start to cringe. It’s indelicate, insensitive, and not always a shoe that properly fits the story—which is certainly true. But it is also true that unless we associate the losses and griefs of our lives on some level with sin—we can’t really hear these words of comfort from Isaiah as words that are addressed to us, either.

In some sense that’s what Advent is about—meeting the harder, more difficult and painful truths of who we are and how our world is so that we can honestly receive the comfort of our God through the Saving work of His Son. Because Jesus was not born into a world that was happily at peace, or a world that was whole. He was born into a sin-broken world full of loss, where nothing was as it was supposed to be.

There was pain, injustice, oppression, addiction, disease, estrangement and more. And that was true, because there was sin. The sin of one person against another. Or the sin of one person that unintentionally affected another. Or the sin without any real discernable origin at all that continues to ricochet down the halls of history affecting everyone.

That’s still world we live in. It is sin-broken. The drinking, the adulteries, the injustices, the lies, the shouts, the abuse, the mistakes, the theft, the shirked responsibilities—all of them together from all of humanity—ricocheting down the halls of history—bouncing into this person, knocking the legs out from under that one.

Whose fault is it? In some cases, mine. In other cases, yours. But in other cases, it’s simply ours, as sin-broken people in a sin-broken world—our inheritance from our mothers and fathers before us. A place where awful things like death, pain, loneliness, and other forms of tragedy live.

All this to say: it’s too big for us to handle on our own. We need a Saviour to rescue us from this mess. We need a Shepherd to gather us up to his heart and bring comfort, healing, and peace when our world falls apart. We need, in other words, to see our God—this God of the sin-afflicted—like us—who acts to save and who speaks tenderly to comfort. For surely, he is our God, and he is with us.