The first candle of Advent is the candle of Hope – the Prophet’s Candle.
The Israelites’ hoped that the promised Messiah would come. They had been waiting for the Messiah for centuries, wondering what He would look like and what He would do when He arrived. When Jesus was born, that hope was finally fulfilled.
The Hope candle is also called the Prophet’s Candle because multiple Old Testament prophets had told people about the Messiah’s coming for a long time. Alfred Edersheim figured that 456 Old Testament passages reference the Messiah.
Jesus was the Messiah, but not the one that people expected. He came as a suffering savior, to die as the ultimate Passover lamb (Exodus 12:1-51), a sacrifice for people’s sins. He was rejected by those He had come to rescue (Isaiah 53:3) and killed by them. As Isaiah 53:7 predicted, He was “led like a lamb being led to the butcher.”
Our hope is in the perfect lamb of God, who was prophesied for hundreds of years and came exactly when He was supposed to.
