Advent and Descent in the Upside Down World
Introduction: The Feast of Vapors
Satan loves Christmas.
Every December, we are invited to a feast of lights, music, gifts, and endless consumption. We are told to delight in joy, to shop, to check boxes, to wrap, to click, to send. The calendars are full, the schedules crowded, and the heart of the celebration seems to have disappeared, suffocated under ribbons and paper. Christians, too, can be swept into this current, becoming top-tier celebrants of a feast of vapors: pleasures that vanish, celebrations that distract, gifts that end with a receipt.
Against notions conveyed in far too many Christmas songs, Advent is not a lullaby. Against the baptism of consumerism, Advent is not a glittering interlude to amuse or comfort us. Advent is a trumpet sounding in the chaos, calling our attention to a world turned upside-down. It announces the arrival of the One who descends lower than we can imagine, the One who stoops into the dirt of our lives, the vulnerability of our weakness, the very filth and fear we flaunt in our hubris,[1] or hide in shame and secret enslavement.
This is the descent of God into the world He has made, that we have marred: a world where the true Gift, Christ Himself, arrives not in splendor, but in rags, in a cave, among animals, in the trembling hands of a young mother. This is Advent: the God of heaven stooping to meet us, the ultimate Gift entering a world that cannot contain Him, in need, and offering life to the full, a call to see all things anew, and a summons to live as those who have received and now give in His image.
He Descended into Hell[2]
The Creator of all descends. He does not arrive in splendor or ease, but in dirt, fear, and weakness. Luke 2:7 tells us: “And she gave birth to her firstborn son and wrapped him in swaddling cloths and laid him in a manger, because there was no place for them in the inn.”A cave, a trough, animals’ breath, and manure mixing with the air. This is not the Christmas of Christmas cards, but the Incarnation in history. God stoops to the slums of our world, into vulnerability, suffering, and the human condition. As one poem captures,
“Look, He's covered in dirt, and the blood of His mother has mixed with the earth,
and she's just a child who's throbbing in pain from the terror of birth
by the light of a cave. Now they've laid that small Baby
where creatures come eat, like a meal for the swine who have no clue that
He is still holding together the world that they see, they don't know just how low,
but He has to go lower still. There is greater love to show! Hands to the plow! Further down now! Blood must flow!”[3]
It was not a silent night. There were not three kings, and the shepherds did not follow a star. There is no place “away in a manger,” where there are no tears. As the baby Jesus was hidden, born to suffer at a later time, the babies of Bethlehem were butchered, and their mothers and fathers wailed, awaiting the day when the serpent’s head would be crushed.
“A voice was heard in Ramah, weeping and loud lamentation, Rachel weeping for her children; she refused to be comforted, because they are no more…and the people of Israel groaned because of their slavery and cried out for help. Their cry for rescue from slavery came up to God. And God heard their groaning, and God remembered his covenant with Abraham, with Isaac, and with Jacob. God saw the people of Israel—and God knew.” (Matthew 2, Exodus 2)
This is how and why the Son came into the world. Truly, “Out of Egypt I called my son” (Hosea 11, Matthew 2). We may ask the honest question, “Why does God allow evil and suffering to continue?” As Christians, when we look at the cross of Christ, the answer as to why evil exists and continues is not entirely clear. “However,” Tim Keller writes,
“we know what the answer isn’t. It can’t be that he doesn’t love us. It can’t be that he is indifferent or detached from our condition. God takes our misery and suffering so seriously that he was willing to take it on himself. … So, if we embrace the Christian teaching that Jesus is God and that he went to the Cross, then we have deep consolation and strength to face the brutal realities of life on earth.”[4]
The Son of God did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped. He emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. After enduring a life of poverty spent among the weak and lowly, he humbled himself by becoming obedient unto death, death on a cross.
Beat in His face; tear the skin off His back. Lower still.
Strip off His clothes; make Him crawl through the streets. Lower still.
Hang Him like meat on a criminal's tree. Lower still!
Every step of the descent of the Christ-child, the swaddling cloths, an animal stall in a cave, a mother’s trembling hands, is a cosmic inversion. In God’s kingdom, strength is revealed in weakness, glory is hidden in humility, and the seemingly insignificant becomes the instrument of salvation. In His descent, He lifts all creation.
Edwin A. Abbott captured something of this in his novel, Flatland. Flatland is a two-dimensional world, inhabited by beings who cannot imagine a third dimension. One day, a Square encounters a three-dimensional Sphere, a visitor from a higher reality, who moves freely through the Flat Dimension and reveals the world of the Third Dimension. The Square is stunned, irrevocably changed, yet when he tries to explain what he has seen to his neighbors, he finds his words fail: he can only fall back on a seemingly meaningless formula, “Up, but not North.” The Sphere gently reassures him: “Distress not yourself if you cannot at first understand the deeper mysteries…By degrees they will dawn upon you.”[5]
The Incarnation is much like this revelation. God enters our two-dimensional world, our plane of perception, our finite understanding, and in Christ makes visible the unseen realities of heaven, the depth of divine love, and the shape of creation as it truly exists. Humanity is, in a sense, “flat,” limited in vision, yet God moves freely into our plane, revealing the eternal, bending space and expectation in ways we can scarcely comprehend.
What is the strangeness of Christ to our world? The one who enters the world in rags, who kneels with a towel to wash feet, who endures betrayal, and who submits to the cross, claims to be King, descended to redeem the world He loves.
“Now He's kneeling, He's washing their feet! Though they're all filthy fisherman, traitors, and thieves. Now He's pouring his heart out and they're falling asleep, but He has to go lower still.”
To follow Christ is to begin moving “Up, but not North.” It is an ascent by descent, wisdom in what appears foolish, strength in what appears weak. It is to live with eyes open to dimensions beyond the flatness of our own experience, to perceive the richness, depth, and glory of God’s kingdom in ways that transform everything we see and do. Modernity itself can resemble Flatland: a world flattened by materialism, convenience, and distraction, where most cannot see what lies above and beyond. Advent calls us to be drawn out of the flatness of our expectations, to behold the radical descent of God, and to allow our hearts and imaginations to expand toward the infinite.
Thomas Watson writes, “In his humiliation he descended so low, that it was not fit to go lower; and in his exaltation he ascended so high that it is not possible to go higher.”[6] Advent calls us to see this radical descent and to marvel, not at the tidy, sanitized story of a baby in a stable, but at the God who stoops to lift us, who enters our weakness to reveal His glory, and who inaugurates a right-side-up Kingdom in our upside-down world, where true strength, beauty, and joy are found in the lowliest of places.
Kenosis for Theosis
Advent calls us to dwell in the tension of heaven and earth meeting. Christ, in His incarnation, stoops low, fully God and fully man, to lift creation toward its true telos, its ultimate end. His kenosis[7] (the Greek word in Philippians 2 for Jesus’ “emptying”) is not merely his becoming like us; it is the means by which humanity may participate in God’s life, sharing in His glory, hope, and love. Through His vulnerability in the manger, His obedience unto the cross, and His resurrection, we are invited into communion with the living God, entering the path of theosis[8] (becoming like God, not in our being, but in our imaging, through sanctification, renewal, and glorification). In descending, He opens the way for our ascent.
Modern life often flattens our vision, leaving us to inhabit shadows of reality, blind to the fullness God intends. As Dostoevsky observes, “What is hell? I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love.”[9] Without the generosity and grace of God, our lives can be consumed by emptiness, isolation, and despair. Advent is the invitation to receive Christ fully, so that our hearts may be restored to love, hope, and participation in the divine life.
Receiving God’s gifts rightly awakens wonder. As Chesterton reminds us, “The world will never starve for want of wonders; but only for want of wonder.”[10] In Christ, we encounter the ultimate wonder, the Giver of life, joy, and eternal hope. Advent trains our imagination and our practices, forming us as humans capable of marveling, of delighting, and of giving in imitation of the generosity we have received. Every act of mercy, every thoughtful gift, every moment of care is a rehearsal for the fullness of the Kingdom, shaping our hearts to anticipate the coming reign of God.
Kenosis for theosis may not be our common language, but it is both theological and practical. The God who descends shapes our imagination, our practices, and our hearts. Advent awakens a longing for the true meeting of heaven and earth, where creation fully reflects the generosity, wonder, and glory of its Creator. To live in this anticipation is to rehearse heaven now: receiving freely, giving generously, and delighting in the promise of the coming Kingdom.
Gifts for the Ungrateful
The world teaches us that gifts are obligations, transactions, and performances. Christmas is reduced to gift lists and checklists: buy, wrap, deliver, smile, repeat. True need and dependence are causes of shame in our affluent and decadent society,[11] and our wants and desires are ladled out of the ocean of God’s majesty and Creation’s beauty, and placed in the shallow puddles of what the latest cycle of materialism, consumerism, and acquisitionism can offer.[12] We are trained to measure value in convenience, price, and social expectation. In this landscape, gratitude is often shallow or absent; gifts are given and received as commodities, not as expressions of love. The season can turn even Christians into top-tier consumers, delighting in wrappers and ribbons while ignoring the Giver Himself.
But God’s gifts are nothing like this. He gives not out of obligation, calculation, or expectation of return. He gives freely, lavishly, and at great cost. Christ is the ultimate Gift, given to a world that had done nothing to deserve Him. R.R. Aldhizer writes, “The Son of God needed nothing from us. Yet he became someone who needed shelter, food, care, friendship, family, and community. He came to humble himself, even to his death.”[13] Christ became the great Gift, and yet he was in need, dependent on God and his fellow man. No one takes from Him. We cannot earn, claim, or buy this gift.
“Oh do you see? Do you see just how low He has come? Do you see it now?
No one takes from Him. You can't take what he freely gives away.”
Every ordinary blessing of bread, wine, beauty, and friendship is a shadow of the greater Gift. To receive rightly is to receive as Christ did, to see the divine generosity behind it. To give rightly is to imitate Christ the Giver: freely, thoughtfully, sacrificially, creatively, and with love that costs us, just as it cost Him. And the greatest gift we can give is ourselves, gifts imaging the Gift, laying down our lives, and sharing our very selves.
Advent calls us to enter this posture of reception first. We are to marvel that the Creator enters our plane of existence, stooping into dirt and weakness, giving Himself for the undeserving.
O come, O Branch of Jesse's stem, unto your own and rescue them!
From depths of hell your people save, and give them victory o'er the grave.
O come, O Key of David, come and open wide our heavenly home.
Make safe for us the heavenward road and bar the way to death's abode
Rejoice! Rejoice! Immanuel shall come to you, O Israel.[14]
The secular model of Christmas teaches obligation, comparison, and convenience. God teaches desire, gratitude, and costly love. To participate in His economy is to become models of generosity, living as image bearers whose giving reflects the ultimate Giver. Each act of generosity, each thoughtful gift, each sacrificial kindness is a witness to the world that the true Gift has come and that all other gifts are meaningful only in Him.
Gift Giving as Image Bearing
To be made in the image of God is to be made to give. In creation and re-creation, God establishes a pattern of generosity: “Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights.” (James 1:17)
God’s gifts come in two primary forms. First, He gives what we need: life, sustenance, relationships, order, and ultimately salvation in Christ. These gifts are necessary for our existence and flourishing. Second, He gives what we desire: beauty, joy, creativity, friendship, music, laughter, and wonder. These gifts are not essential for survival, but they make life rich, delightful, and meaningful. God gives both, and both reflect His character: life-giving, attentive, and good. Christ is the fulfillment of both, “My highest good and my unending need.”[15]
To be made in His image is to reflect this generosity in our own lives. But we cannot give what we have not first received. Gift-giving begins in reception. Children of God, aware of their dependence on the ultimate Giver, learn to give thoughtfully, creatively, and joyfully, imitating the God who provides both our needs and our delight. The whole of the Christian life can be summed up as receiving and reciprocating the love of God for us in Christ, to God, and to neighbor.
Leah Libresco Sargeant writes that when we rightly recognize our dependence on God as the ultimate Gift and Giver, it makes asking for help, sacrificially giving, and avoiding consumeristic score-keeping easier; receiving and reciprocating are natural and uncalculated. She writes,
“It takes practice to learn that we can be loved when we cannot ‘earn’ it. We rely on others to instantiate the utterly unmatchable love of God. If our worldly relationships depend on being ‘even,’ we will not be prepared to accept the unrecompensable gift of the Atonement.”[16]
Our salvation by grace alone is a liturgical reality, realized and formed in us by the renewing of our minds, a change of affections, and a reorienting of our practices. Our greatest gift is not just something we receive, but something we become: sons and daughters of God, people of grace.
Humans are inherently liturgical beings.[17] We are shaped not only by formal worship on Sundays but by the daily practices and rhythms through which we live. Every sermon, meal, hymn, love song, act of care, and celebration is a mini-liturgy: a shaping of the heart, imagination, and desires. Orthodoxy[18] and orthopraxy[19] are inseparably intertwined. When we give thoughtfully and freely, we participate in God’s ongoing work of creation and redemption. When we give selfishly, or without care, we flatten the world, turning sacred acts into routine, transaction, and, without repentance, dead orthodoxy.
Our liturgical practices, from Sunday worship to shopping, reflect our understanding of God and, in turn, shape it. A culture of shallow, consumer-driven gift-giving trains us to see others and God in limited ways, but a life oriented by God’s generosity forms imaginations capable of delighting in what is true, good, and beautiful. Advent calls us to inhabit this truth: our giving and receiving, our daily practices, and our celebrations are not incidental. They are formative, shaping both our understanding of God and our reflection of His image in the world.
Thus, gift-giving is not merely a duty or an act of social convention. It is the ethical and liturgical practice of living as God’s image-bearers: receiving all things from Him with gratitude, and passing them on to others with care, creativity, and delight. In doing so, we learn to worship God not only with words but with our hands, our time, our attention, and our love, shaping a world more fully aligned with the generosity of its Creator.
Conclusion: Christ, Given for You
If Christianity disappeared, the world would still celebrate “Christmas,” because it is already celebrated either in Christless fashion or in such a way that Jesus would hardly be missed. If we default to what the world has on offer (and what, sadly, too many Christians have bought into), it will be like, in C.S. Lewis’ terms, “winter and never Christmas.”[20]The peace, hope, and joy that is offered to us according to the Christmas of culture, much like a sugar rush, will be off the walls and then gone. We long for the peace, hope, and love that the Spirit of Christ offers, and these do not come and go according to December. Let us test the holiday spirits and hold fast to what is true, good, and lasting.
Advent calls us to see the world as it truly is: a world both loved and broken, full of gifts yet craving the Giver, flat in perception yet capable of soaring in hope. Christ descends into the muck of human existence, lower than we can imagine, to lift creation toward the fullness of life. In Him, we see the ultimate Gift, the pattern for our own giving, and the horizon of our hope.
We are called to participate in the grandeur of His generosity, not as passive observers, not as consumers of fleeting delights, but as recipients who are reshaped into givers. Our practices, our celebrations, our ordinary rhythms of life, all are formative, liturgical acts that teach us to see, receive, and give as those made in the image of the ultimate Giver. Advent trains our hearts to long for the true Kingdom, to practice generosity that reflects God’s character, and to cultivate the imagination capable of perceiving heaven breaking into earth.
The hope we celebrate cannot be captured within the immanent frame of modernity.[21] It is the hope of God entering our world, bringing life to death, light to darkness, and beauty to brokenness. It is the hope that transforms our ordinary days into rehearsals of the Kingdom, that shapes our celebrations, our gifts, and our hearts into reflections of divine love. The manger points to the cross, the cross points to the resurrection, and the resurrection points to the coming Kingdom where creation itself will join in the song of redemption.
So let us anticipate, with awe and wonder, the coming of Christ, not merely as a baby in a manger, but as the sovereign Lord who conquers death, redeems the earth, and restores all things. Here is our hope,
“Bury His corpse in the earth like a seed, like a seed. Lower still!.
The earth explodes, she cannot hold Him. And all therein is placed beneath Him.
And death itself no longer reigns, it cannot keep the ones He gave Himself to save.
And as the universe shatters, the darkness dissolves, He alone will be honored, we will bathe in His splendor, as All Heads Bow Lower Still! All Heads Bow Lower Still!”
This is the Advent we celebrate: a season to rejoice in His descent and our ascending hope, of receiving and giving, of anticipation that lifts our hearts to the glory of God’s coming Kingdom. Let us live in this tension, with eyes fixed on the true Gift, with hearts formed by generosity, and with imaginations awakened to the wonder of Emmanuel, God with us.
[1] Hubris, the intentional practice of dishonoring others, was a potent term of moral condemnation in ancient Greece; in Athens, and likely elsewhere, it was also considered a serious criminal offense. Aristotle defines hubris as “doing and saying things at which the victim incurs shame, not in order that one may achieve anything other than what is done, but simply to get pleasure from it.”
[2] See The Apostles’ Creed, and Matthew Y. Emerson’s essay “Christ’s Descent to the Dead” and book "He Descended to the Dead": An Evangelical Theology of Holy Saturday
[3] “Lower Still” by Aaron Stone, Jeremiah Austin, and Jesse Stone.
[4] See Tim Keller, The Reason for God: Belief in and Age of Skepticism
[5] See Edwin A. Abbott, Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions
[6] See Thomas Watson’s, A Body of Divinity: Contained In Sermons Upon The Westminster Assembly's Catechism
[7] See Stephen J. Wellum, “Why Did God Become Man?”, the excellent essays by Stamps, Letham, and Wellum on Jesus Christ at The Gospel Coalition, and Wellum’s, The Person of Christ: An Introduction
[8] On Theosis in Eastern Orthodoxy and Protestant and Evangelical theology, see Donald Fairbairn’s article, “Salvation as Theosis: The Teaching of Eastern Orthodoxy”, James Salladin’s essay, “Jonathan Edwards, Theosis, and the Reformed Tradition”, and Samuel Parkison’s book, To Gaze Upon God: The Beatific Vision in Doctrine, Tradition, and Practice
[9] See Fyodor Dostoevsky’s, The Brothers Karamazov
[10] See G.K. Chesterton’s, Tremendous Trifles
[11] See Ross Douthat’s, The Decadent Society
[12] See Bobby Jamieson’s, Everything Is Never Enough: Ecclesiastes' Surprising Path to Resilient Happiness
[13] See Rachel Roth Aldhizer’s, “The Presence of Christ in Our Dependence” in Mere Orthodoxy, Fall 2025
[14] Veni, Veni, Emmanuel, translated by J. M. Neale (1851)
[15] O Lord, My Rock and My Redeemer, Music and Words by Nathan Stiff
[16] See Leah Libresco Sargeant’s, “Response” article in Mere Orthodoxy, Fall 2025
[17] See Sihle Xulu’s article, “Reclaiming the Remarkable Power of Liturgy”at TGCAfrica, Alastair Robert’s article, “Beyond Rituals: How Liturgy Shapes Ethics”, Tish Harrison Warren’s, Liturgy of the Ordinary: Sacred Practices in Everyday Life and Nathan A. Finn’s review at Themelios vol. 42, Issue 3, James K.A. Smith’s, You are What You Love: The Spiritual Power of Habit, the resources on liturgy at the Center for Baptist Renewal, and talk to Nate Cure, who spends a lot of time studying and implementing liturgy in all of life.
[18] Orthodoxy, from the Greek orthos (ὀρθός, right, straight, true) and doxa (δόξα, opinion, belief, glory), means holding right belief; thinking and honoring God in a way that is true.
[19] Orthopraxy (n.) correct practice, action, or procedure, from Greek ortho- + Greek praxis (a doing, action, performance). In Christianity it means right living connected to right doctrine.
[20] C.S. Lewis, The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe
[21] See Our Secular Age: Ten Years of Reading and Applying Charles Taylor edited by Collin Hansen, James K.A. Smith’s, How (Not) to Be Secular: Reading Charles Taylor, and Brad East’s article, “The Church in the Immanent Frame”
