The Christ Will Shine In Isaiah

The Shepherd's Church

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One of the themes of Christmas that I kind of find the most fascinating is the in -breaking of light.

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Before the widespread availability, this is especially a theme in America by the way, but before the widespread availability of electricity, there is record that actually among the

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Dutch communities and some others that there were extra candles that were lit and they were placed throughout the homes during the

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Christmas season. They were placed in the windows and on the trees and other places throughout the home in order to celebrate the

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Christ, Heaven's true light, who was born into this dim and dark world.

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Well, today it's estimated that 150 million strands of lights are sold each year.

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That's 80 million homes are going to string up lights in this country in order to cast light into this world.

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And that addition of all of those lights adds to a modest 6 % energy increase in this country every single

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December, which gets a few of the South Pole elves like AOC and Ed Markey a little bit frustrated and they go to Twitter and TikTok to bemoan that.

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But while the symbolism behind the addition of light has faded away from many in this nation, meaning that Jesus Christ is the light who came into the world, even though that symbolism is faded, the original

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Christmas morning was in fact a celebration of light. In fact, the biblical message is that light has come into this darkened world.

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For instance, on that night in the night sky, a massive ball of peculiar star celestial light was hanging royally guiding the wise men to meet the child.

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In a nearby field, the shepherds witnessed the sky exploding with the glory of God as the angels broke in and announced the birth of the

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Christ. But by far the most important and the most theologically rich instance of light, peculiar light, external light invading the world on that Christmas morning was the humble child lying in a manger.

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The light of the world had been born in human flesh and the darkness was finally and forever put on notice.

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Light came down into this dark world at the birth of Jesus Christ, but the story did not begin that way.

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You see, in order for the story to have climaxed with Christ, it must have actually begun quite differently.

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One can imagine that such a triumph of light must have been preceded by the rise and the great stranglehood of darkness.

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As bright as the events of the first Christmas morning must have been, as radiant as the birth of heaven's king must have been, the lead up to it all was actually bleak and dank and filled with the thickest sort of darkness.

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The prophecy foretelling all of these events was given in Isaiah 700 years before that first Christmas morning, when the people were living in the throes of the darkest night.

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Now, today we will explore how all of this transpired and how it was that light finally broke into this dark world.

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But as we begin this morning, let us pray. Let us pray that the Lord would use his words to encourage us, to teach us a little bit of the context that's going on in the book of Isaiah, and to remind us what this season is all about.

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So let's pray. Lord Jesus, you are the light of the world.

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You are the reason 2 ,000 years later that we gather. You're the reason that we have any insight whatsoever into God.

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Lord, in our sin and in our failure and in our immorality, we were born into the kingdom of darkness. We were born dead, spiritually stillborn, incapable of sight, incapable of anything other than blindness and darkness.

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And yet, because of you, Lord, you have brought night back into the world.

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You have brought light to our souls and to our eyes. You have revealed things to us that we would have never been able to see without you.

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And Lord, I pray as we consider the prophecy that really gave people hope, gave them something to cling to for the next 600, 700 years as they waited for your birth.

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Lord, I pray that we who are on the other side of your birth, we're not waiting for your birth now. We're celebrating your birth.

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Lord, I pray that we would celebrate it with all of our hearts, that the light of the

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Christmas season would fill our hearts to the point to where we would be full. As Matt prayed earlier, the whole world knows that it's

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Christmas. And in America, at least, there's some vague understanding that Christmas has to do with Jesus, even if it's been replaced with lights and trees and presents and a fat man in a red suit and everything else that's counterfeited

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Christ. But Lord, I pray that they would see

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Christ in us. They would see heaven's light shining through those of us who have been ransomed and paid for by Jesus Christ.

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Lord, I pray that with all my heart. And I pray that in Jesus' name. Amen. So if you'll remember last week as we're talking about light invading the world and as we're talking about the darkness that was the backdrop of this prophecy,

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Isaiah has just given the shocking word to the wicked King Ahaz about the downfall of Israel in Syria.

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And as we saw last week, this nation Israel comprises the ten northern tribes.

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They lived in the northern kingdom and they were the people who traced their lineage back to the patriarch

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Jacob. They were the people who were once united under King Saul and under King David and under King Solomon in a united empire with the southern kingdom.

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And they're a nation that God covenanted to love when he brought them out of Egypt. But under Ahaz, both the northern and the southern nation was in an all time low.

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And in just three short years, Assyria was going to come in and utterly destroy Israel and Syria because of their longstanding covenantal unfaithfulness.

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But perhaps the most shocking part about this prophecy is that the same thing was going to happen to Judah.

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You see, Judah was the southern nation. They were the nation that comprised the remaining two tribes of the twelve tribes of Israel.

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Ten were in the north, two were in the south. And it was Judah to whom some of the most incredible promises of God were ever uttered.

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They were the ruling tribe. They were going to be the tribe of the Davidic kings. They were going to be, in 1st

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Samuel 7, it says that they would always have someone sitting on the throne. Always. They would be the tribe from which everyone expected that the

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Messiah would come. In Micah 5, 2, it says, O Bethlehem, you're least among the tribes of Judah, but yet from you will come a ruler.

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Everyone expected that the tribe of Judah would be where the Messiah would come. But because of Ahaz's foolishness,

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Judah was experiencing great suffering. Because of Judah herself, her refusal to repent, and because of her great crimes against God, the

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Lord promised that all of these things in this prophecy were going to happen to them as well.

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Assyria was going to come in and wreck them. And while Assyria would, while they would be spared in some sense, and the fact that Jerusalem would not be overtaken, they would experience great, great pains and sufferings.

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At first Assyria would come in and strap them with a financial burden that was both heavy -handed and crippling.

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They would steal much of the sacred items from their temple, if not all be it given to them by the wicked kings.

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And they would eventually attack their cities one by one, leaving only Jerusalem, which, as we read later on in the book of Kings, is an actual miracle by God.

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But in the meantime, before this three -year prophecy comes to pass, in the meantime, in the three years leading up to it, the response to Isaiah's prophecy among the people of Judah was much like our own day.

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It was much like the response to the election, in fact. It was quite divided. See, on the one hand, there were those who believed the words of Isaiah, who trusted in the holiness of God, even in the darkness of their circumstances.

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That was the people who were called the remnant. If you read about it in Isaiah, when you hear the word remnant, those are the people who believed the prophecies of Isaiah and were looking forward to the coming of Christ.

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But there were those who, in their panic and in their dread over Assyria, did not believe.

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These were the people who treated Isaiah's words like a conspiracy theory. It says that even in the text.

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They treated this like the ravings of a far -right delusionist. And as we know that because in Isaiah chapter 8, verses 11 through 12,

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Isaiah actually tells us this. So for a moment, before we consider Isaiah 9, which is the key text that we're going to be considering.

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It's the text that we read just a moment ago. I want us to look at what goes into all of this.

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The response that the people were having, because that's going to teach us a lot about why the darkness actually existed in the land.

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And that begins in Isaiah 8, 11 through 12. Isaiah says, For thus the

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Lord spoke to me with mighty power and instructed me not to walk in the way of this people.

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That's the people of Judah. Saying, you are not to say that it is a conspiracy.

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Meaning, you're not to say like the people of Judah are saying that Isaiah's prophecy is a conspiracy, that it's not going to happen, that it's just made up.

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You're to believe the words of the prophet. He's saying this to the remnant. In regard to all that this people call a conspiracy, and you are not to fear what they fear, and you're not to be in dread of what they dread.

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This is a powerful point, and it's well needed in our own day as well. You see, there will be many who dismiss the words of God, like there were back in Isaiah's day.

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They will call biblical orthodoxy a conspiracy. They will call truth outdated, irrelevant, or repressive.

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They will scoff at the harsh words that are found in the word of God, and they will reject it because their enlightened consciences can no longer stomach it.

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And it's not only that. They will laugh, and they will mock, and they will shame anyone else who believes these words are true as well.

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This is what was going on in Isaiah's day, and it's what's going on in our day as well. You see,

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Isaiah had shared a message from God, but because that message was too hard for them, because it was too awful for the people to bear, they rejected it.

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And they looked for truth in other, less truthful places. Much like a person who refuses to accept a terminal diagnosis,

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Judah was living in a sort of denial that left her clinging to her own delusions. And more than anything, those delusions were not bringing peace and hope and joy.

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Those delusions were bringing fear and misery and hopelessness. The same can be said for us as well.

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Truth cannot be found outside of God. Truth cannot be found outside of the word of God.

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What you find when you depart from Him and when you depart from His word is not peace, is not hope, it's not joy.

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It's nothing more than a delusion that will rob you. You may find a rosier picture of reality filled with flowery placations and niceties, but you won't find truth and you won't find peace.

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You may find the exact right crutch that will prop up your wounded soul, but you will not find joy.

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You may find the very thing that your ears would rather hear rather than the truth, but you will not find truth, which will leave you in the exact same boat as Judah, clinging to white -knuckled fantasies.

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And because your soul, because my soul, because all of our souls at their deepest level craves the truth of God, our souls will not be satisfied with anything less than the truth of God.

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Any reality, any truth, any claim, any point that perverts or contradicts from the truth of the word of God will not only leave us living in error, but it will ultimately leave us living in misery.

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Let me say it this way. Following God is hard, but it's full of joy.

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That's the way he designed it. While following the world and your flesh or the devil may seem easier in the moment, but eventually you will end up in a bed of shame and guilt and misery.

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Think about the original first couple in the Garden of Eden. Following the

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Lord had some difficulty about it. They couldn't eat from one of the trees of the garden, but it brought about joy and life and flourishing.

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And yet the easier path, it seems, the path of compromise and the path of giving in and the path of temptation seemed like it was going to open up all of these possibilities, but the only thing that it opened up for them was misery, shame, and guilt.

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And that pattern has continued ever since. When we depart from the Word of God, when we depart from truth, we introduce misery into our lives.

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You were not meant to be satisfied by such small things. You were meant to be satisfied by the

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Word of God and by his truth alone. Like the people of Judah, they just heard this message that their country is going to be destroyed in three years.

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And you think, how can joy come from a message like that? It was a hard pill to swallow for sure. It certainly was for these men and women of Judah, but it would have been infinitely better for them to believe the truth of God and to repent and to cling to God than to go on believing their lies and their fantasies that they were deceiving themselves with.

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I guess what I'm getting at in all of this is that pain is not the enemy of our pleasure, that trial is not the kryptonite to our joy, that we can have pleasure and joy in the world even in the toughest seasons and in the most difficult circumstances that we've ever walked through so long as we have

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God and so long as we cling fast to his Word. We can walk through anything with God.

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But if we do what Judah did, laughing, scoffing, rejecting, and mocking the message of God, then we will end up in the kind of misery the people of Judah ended up in.

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His Word was given to be obeyed. Some of it may be hard for sure.

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Some of it may ruffle our feathers. Some of it may cause consternation to our constitutions.

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But it's true, and it's worthy of our belief, and it's worthy of our thoughtful consideration and our trust.

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His Word is the cord of nourishment that feeds us. It's the anchor that connects us to the rock of ages.

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To dismiss his Word is to willingly cut ourselves off from life. It's to be left spiritually starving.

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It's no longer to be anchored to the rock, but it's to be adrift in a sea of dread and gloom with nothing left to hold on to.

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This is where the people of Judah are, walking deeper and deeper into their own self -imposed darkness, miles away from the light of truth, which is shared bluntly and honestly in verses 9 and 10 of chapter 8.

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Isaiah says this, Be broken, O peoples, and be shattered, and give ear all remote places of the earth.

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Gird yourself, yet be shattered. Gird yourself, that means armor up, yet be shattered.

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Devise a plan, and it will be thwarted. State a proposal, it will not stand, for God is with us.

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Isaiah is telling them, God has determined this thing is going to come about, and you will certainly be shattered by the

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Assyrian Empire. Because of your faithlessness, because of your rebellion against the

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Lord, believe this message. God Himself is most certainly with us, and He is not abandoning us even now while He is punishing us.

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Believe that message before anything worse happens to you. But instead of repenting,

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Instead of finding that peculiar comfort that is available to them in God's hard message, they frantically scrambled to find a way out of it, to avoid

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God's punishment. But their attempts were futile. God says, gird yourself, put on armor, get your weapons ready.

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You will be shattered nonetheless. Make a plan, submit your proposal, sit down with all of your generals and draw up the most incredible strategy imaginable.

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All of it is going to fail. You will not stand. Stop wasting your time,

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Judah. Looking for a way out and start embracing the God that you've offended.

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That is really the only way out of this. To accept the punishment, turn to God and eagerly wait for His Son who is going to come and rescue us.

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The only alternative is to keep on in misery, trying to do it in their own way, which is going to bring failure upon failure and pain upon pain.

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Isaiah continues in verse 14 through 15 of chapter 8. He says, but to the house of Israel, the houses, that means both the north and the south.

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That means Isaiah is talking about both Judah and Israel, the entire collection of the 12 tribes. To them,

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God is going to wield Assyria as a stone to strike and a rock to stumble over and a snare and a trap for the inhabitants of Jerusalem.

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Verse 15 says, many will stumble over them. Then they will fall and then they will be broken and they will even be snared and they will be caught.

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Notice how God is going to use Assyria, that mighty and that powerful army. He's going to use them as an offensive weapon.

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He's going to hurl them at His people and they will strike as they are inclined to do.

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But what I find fascinating about this passage, because that's not very controversial, if an army comes in to attack you, they are going to attack.

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So God is using the Assyrians as an offensive agent against His own people. But notice the way that God is going to use

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Judah in this battle. He's not only going to cause Assyria to strike

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Judah, He's going to render Judah incapable of defending themselves. You see, in any battle that's ever fought, even among such unmatched opponents as these, both sides is going to do some measure of striking.

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In sports, for instance, both teams compete against each other. In football, for example, you can have the most unmatched teams imaginable.

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The last place team playing against the first place team, but usually both of them are going to score some points.

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It might be a thoroughly lopsided blowout sort of win, but the losing team usually gets a few points.

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They usually get a first down or two. They usually move the ball forward at least inches.

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They strike in some level. In basketball, this is even more clear. I cannot remember a game in the history of basketball.

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I'm sure there's maybe one or two, but I can't remember of one where one team scored zero points and where the other team scored 150 or whatever else.

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I can't remember a single basketball game where a single point wasn't scored. Even in the most extreme blowouts, both teams usually end up scoring.

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The same is true in war. One army may decimate another army, but I don't know that there's been a serious battle in history where someone on both sides did not give their own life because both sides of the battle strikes.

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But in this battle, God is saying that Assyria will strike, which is normal, but they're saying that Judah will not strike back.

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Judah will stumble. Like a blind man attempting to run on a rocky mountain path on the side of a cliff,

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Judah will stumble and fly over the edge because her foot is not rooted in truth.

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Her sight has been taken away from her, and like a blind man, she is living in total darkness.

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Look at how Isaiah concludes chapter 8 as he gives us a picture of how deep this darkness really is.

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He says, when they, that's the people of Judah, say to you, that's the remnant. They're going to come to you, and they're going to try to convince you.

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They're going to say, consult the mediums and the spiritists who whisper and mutter, should not a people, this is

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Isaiah talking now, in anger even, should not a people consult their God? Should they consult the dead on the behalf of the living?

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Isaiah is telling us how far the people of Judah have actually fallen. Instead of believing the message of Isaiah, instead of trusting their

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God, turning to him and believing the prophecy, even as hard as it was, they were turning to mute and dumb and dead idols.

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They were turning to necromancers and mediums. They were turning to demonically inspired spiritists who were leading them down the road into unquenchable darkness.

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They were turning everywhere imaginable but to their God, and it did not help them.

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It was not enlightening them. It was actually darkening them. It was polluting their soul.

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And as we see again, there's a lesson for us here today. When we turn away from the light of the word of God, and when we seek truth in idols, the idols of our age, then we don't bring more light into our lives.

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We actually kill the light. We throw a bucket of cold water onto the flames, but it's even worse for the people of Judah because God declares this to them, verse 20, to the law and to the testimony.

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If they do not speak according to this word, meaning if they go against the word of God and the manifold testimony of the law of God and all of the words of the prophets that have gone before them, it is because they have no don.

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Now, trust me, he's not talking about dish soap here. When he says that they have no don, he means that they have no light, and they have no light for two reasons.

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First, because they keep willingly turning to idols and they keep turning to darkness. They are self -imposing darkness upon their life.

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They're choosing evil. They're reveling in sin. And because of that, darkness has invaded their life.

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They can't see. But the second reason, and I would say maybe an even more primary factor, is that God has brought darkness upon his people.

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He's not only reacting to their sin, he's proactively pulling his light away from them. And we'll see that very clearly in just a moment.

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He's abandoning them to their darkness. He's leaving them to their own devices. He's condemning them to their own sin and blackness.

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They had reached a point as a nation when God had totally abandoned them.

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Isaiah says it outright in verse 17. He says, I, Isaiah, and the remnant, we will wait upon the

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Lord, who is hiding his face from the house of Jacob. God is hiding his face.

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It's not just that Judah was just so sinful that they had brought darkness into their life.

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God is hiding his radiating and shining face from them. Verse 21 tells us because God does that, they will live in an ongoing and eternal midnight, shrouded in an unconquerable sort of darkness without a photon of light to penetrate it.

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Verse 21 says, They will pass through the land hard -pressed and famished, and it will turn out, when they are hungry, they will be enraged, and they will curse their king, and they will curse their

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God as they face upward, meaning as they lay on their back in misery.

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Then they will look to the earth, they will flip over and beat their face into the soil, and behold distress and darkness, the gloom of anguish, and they will be given away into the darkness.

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What Isaiah is teaching us here is twofold. First, that human beings were made to live in the light with God, but in our sin, we willingly choose the darkness.

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That's true for all of us. Romans 3, 23 says, For all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God, that no one is righteous, not even one.

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We've all chosen to live in the darkness, and that's true for the people of Isaiah's time, and it's true for us.

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We were made to live in the light of God, but in our sin, we keep on choosing darkness. But as you can see from this passage, there are some people that God decides to keep in the darkness, meaning that he will not let them escape from the darkness, and he does that by pulling away his face, by turning away from them, by abandoning them, and by leaving them to their own devices.

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It is these people who will never know God because all of the light needed for them to reach out to him is gone.

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He's left them, groping away in the darkness, lost forever, but that's not the end of the story.

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You see, when Isaiah says in verse 17, I will wait for the

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Lord who is hiding his face from the house of Jacob, and I will even look eagerly for him,

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Isaiah is saying that some will remain in the darkness, but some like Isaiah, some like the remnant will wait for the

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Lord. Some will eagerly look for him, and as we see in chapter 9, some will find him.

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Some will find the light in a similar way as those who can't find the light and remain in darkness.

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What do I mean? Well, to those who remain in the darkness, they're there because God has withheld his light from them.

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He has turned his face away from them. He has pulled his presence back from them, and no matter how hard they reach, they can't find him because he's pulled away his face.

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Well, in the same sort of way, God has taken an active role in providing light so that those who find the light are not just better at detecting photons.

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They're not just more spiritual. They're not just better people. Those who find the light of God is because God aids them, because God takes an active role in helping them.

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The same God who turns away from the wicked is the same God who graciously turns toward his people, and we know that not just because Isaiah is alluding to that here, but because Isaiah is alluding to one of the most beautiful promises of blessing and light that can be found anywhere in the

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Bible. When Isaiah says that God turned his face away from Jacob, it's clear that he's alluding to a particular text.

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It's clear that there's a text in the book of Numbers that's forefront in Isaiah's mind, and it's a passage that I want to share with you right now.

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In Numbers 6, 24 through 26, God does not lay out a method for human beings to find the light.

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He doesn't lay out a promise for us to be able to find our own self -activated blessings.

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He doesn't show us a pathway that we can reach out and grab onto the light.

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No, what he does is he lays out a process by which God will find us.

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He lays out an expectation of how we will be blessed by God, not through our own self -efforts, but by the effort of God alone.

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It's one of the greatest blessing passages in the Bible, and it has nothing to do with our effort and our ability and our skill or any of that.

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We are blessed by the working of God alone. This is what it says.

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The Lord bless you. This is Numbers 26, 24. The Lord bless you and keep you.

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The Lord cause his face to shine upon you and be gracious to you. The Lord lift up his face to you and give you peace.

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Do you see what this means? The Lord is the one who blesses, not us. The Lord is the one who keeps and sustains and who holds us, not us, not our effort.

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The Lord is the one who brings light into the darkness, not us. It's not your education.

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It's not your wokeness. It's not your political affiliations. It's not your self -discovery. It's not counseling sessions or anything else.

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The Lord is the one who brings life and light and understanding and blessings into this life, and he does this by his power, and he does this by his choice and by his election, and he does this by his direction.

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He chooses when and how a person is blessed. He chooses who is blessed, and he chooses the means by which that person is blessed, which is through encountering his radiating face.

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It means that to be blessed is to encounter the face of God, and what that means is relationship with God.

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We know that God, being infinite in nature and being, has not so limited his expression to an earthly human face.

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We know that. We don't anticipate that in heaven we're going to see a face on the

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Father of God. No one can see God. God is spirit. Those who worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth.

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We know that. So what does it mean that in order to be blessed, in order to experience the light, in order to experience life, that we have to have

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God's face shine upon us to shine on those he loves? Well, it's a way of saying that God's love and affections are aimed at us, pointed at us, poured out onto us, and being given to us.

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Let me say it this way. It's like a newborn baby staring into the eyes of his mother or father, finding his or her identity in that stare.

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It's being sustained and being held and being built up in that state of relational intimacy.

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It's having joy poured out onto him through that stare, and it's similar to the way that God looks at us.

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We are totally dependent, like an infant child looking at our mother. We are totally dependent upon God.

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We're fragile, we're broken, we're needy, and he is the one who holds us and keeps us and blesses us in his stare.

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And how does he do that? By graciously bringing us into his presence, by revealing himself to us, by opening our eyes and allowing his light to shine in us so that we can see and so that we can know him and so that we can enjoy him forever.

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I'll give you an example in my family. My child, Jackson, my baby, six months old, he's my youngest.

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He comes alive when someone smiles at him. He can be sitting there in the most pouty or grumpy mood as someone looks at him and shines their face on him.

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His body jerks with energy. His little toes wiggle. His fingers clench with joy.

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When I smile at him and when I let him see my face aimed at him in love, his little plump face bends into the most beautiful smile that you've ever seen.

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His whole body gets involved in it just because I turned my face towards him in grace and smiled at him.

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That is what it's like when God's face shines on you. That's what

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Isaiah is alluding to, that human beings are blessed and full of life and light when

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God aims his face at us. Our whole life, our bodies, our emotions, our toes, our souls, energy, all of it springs into life when

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God's face turns towards us. You and I will beam with love when his love shines on us.

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We will overflow with joy in the light of his joyful face when his face shines on us.

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We become like Moses, lit up to the point that people around us can see that there's something different about us when his face has shined on us.

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That is the metaphor that I think that Isaiah is getting us to think about. We have intimacy with God when he turns towards us, when he reveals himself to us, when he brings his light on us, we light up.

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We have joy and we have peace, which means that God initiates relationship with us.

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And if he does not, we do not have these things. You see, at the time of Isaiah, the people were so sinful that God pulled himself back so that the exact opposite thing is happening in the time of Isaiah.

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These ruined sinners were not experiencing God's shining face. They were experiencing his turning from them, his abandoning them and leaving them in darkness, the darkness of their sin, because they refused to believe.

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I mean, we may as well take this great blessing, this benediction found in Numbers 24 from above and flip it on its head to see what it means and to see what really is going on in the passage.

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There's some Bible verses that you can take the inverse of it and understand what is going on.

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So instead of it saying, the Lord bless you and the Lord keep you and the Lord calls his face to shine upon you and to be gracious to you, instead of saying that, instead of the

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Lord taking an active role in blessing, we see from Isaiah that the Lord was taking an active role in cursing them.

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Instead of this being a benediction for the people in Isaiah 8, it was a divine malediction.

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It was a divine initiated curse upon his faithless people. And if you want to see what it looks like, just look at this passage in the inverse.

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Instead of it saying the Lord bless you, imagine it saying the Lord curse you, the

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Lord remove you, the Lord calls his face to turn from you and bring darkness upon you.

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The Lord turn his face from you and leave you in chaos instead of peace.

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This is where the people of Judah are. And let's be honest, this is where you and I deserve.

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As beautiful as this benediction is, none of us deserve the Lord's blessings. Like Judah, we've all sinned against this

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Holy God. Like Ahaz, we've bowed down at countless idols.

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We've stubbornly refused to trust God. A million billion times, we've refused to believe the message, his word.

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We've provoked the wrath of God. And instead of the

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Lord preserving us and keeping us, he would be totally just in removing us. He would be just if he pulled his face away from us.

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And if he did, you and I would live in darkness. He would be just if his light fled from us.

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He would be just if we were cast off into a pit of eternal darkness for our sins, for our rebellion against him.

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We've brought this darkness upon our own heads, and we deserve the divine curse that the people of Judah were feeling during the time of Isaiah when

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God pulled his face away. We deserve that. The most obvious conclusion from this passage is that the people of Judah and all of us deserve to live in a land of darkness with no way out, no way of escape, which, of course, begs the question, what is

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God going to do? Because if that's what you and I deserve, then how would we ever be saved?

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Will God, that's the question, abandon all of us in humanity to our own darkness?

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Will he go on hiding his face forever? Because we deserve to never see the face of God in our sin.

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Will God go on hiding forever, or would God do the unthinkable? Would God once again turn his face towards his helpless, broken people?

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Would he cast his light upon them in their sin and in their failure and in their rebellion?

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Would he open their eyes that they blinded in their sin? Would he do that?

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And that is where we come to the hope of Isaiah 9. It's like the climactic end of Handel's Messiah.

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So Isaiah 9 rises to the heights of joy when it declares, this is what it says, but in spite of all of the darkness, in spite of all of the failure, in spite of all of the misery, and in spite of the fact that God has removed his face from his own people, but there will be a day when no more gloom for her who was in anguish.

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In earlier times, he treated the land of Zebulun and the land of Naphtali with contempt, but later on, meaning in the future,

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Isaiah is gonna prophesy this, he shall make it glorious again by the way of the sea on the other side of the

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Jordan. Galilee of the Gentiles, the people who walked in darkness will see a great light.

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And those who live in a dark land, the light is gonna shine on them. Do you see what

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Isaiah is saying here? He's saying that God himself is gonna intervene, that God himself is gonna rescue his bumbling, stumbling, broken people out of the darkness of night.

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God is gonna turn their gloom into joy. God is gonna turn their darkness into light. God is gonna do this at the birth of his son,

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Jesus Christ. The people who have been walking in darkness have seen a great light.

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And when the face of Jesus touched the cold night air on Christmas morning, that is when the shining face of God broke into the darkness.

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When Mary looked into his eyes, she saw the very face of God. When the shepherds came, they saw the radiance and the beauty of heaven's son.

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When the magi from the east followed the star, they saw something brighter in the face of baby

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Jesus than they did in the sky that night that led them to the manger. It was

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God's light that had broken in. The light had come to this world of darkness. The radiance of God's holy face, the one that we did not deserve, the one that could only bring light and life to men has now appeared in Bethlehem, in a stable of all places, in a manger in the arms of a virgin mother.

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Light had broken in so that the people who are walking in perpetual darkness could see.

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And the significance of this event was not lost on the people who experienced. I wanna read you a passage from Luke where Zechariah, who is, this is the father of John the

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Baptist. He's reflecting upon the words of Isaiah under the Holy Spirit when he says this.

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And what he says is breathtaking. This is Luke 1, 67 through 79. He says, and the father,

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Zechariah, was filled with the Holy Spirit and he prophesied saying, blessed be the

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Lord God of Israel for he has visited us and he has accomplished redemption for his people.

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And he has raised up a horn of salvation for us in the house of David, his servant.

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As he spoke by the mouth of the holy prophets, he's talking about Isaiah here. Salvation has come from our enemies and deliverance from the hand of all who hate us.

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God, in order to show mercy towards our fathers and to remember his holy covenant, the oath which he swore to Abraham, our father, has granted us that we will be rescued from the hand of our enemies and that we might serve him without fear and serve him in holiness and righteousness before him all the days of our life.

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And this is the point of it all. He says in verse 78, because of the tender mercy of God, the sunrise, the light from on high will visit us to shine upon those who sit in darkness and the shadow of death to guide our feet into the way of everlasting peace.

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Zechariah is saying to us that those of us, all of us who have been living in the land of darkness, that the sun has come, heaven's sun.

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The eternal sunrise that has come to make an end of the ongoing darkness has come in the birth of Christ Jesus, our

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Lord. The light of God came down on Christmas and visited us, which means that no one needs to go on living in darkness.

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And our sin, we certainly deserve that. We deserve to live in darkness, but God, by his grace, for God so loved the world that he gave his one and only son so that all of us who were living in deep darkness might see that the light of God has come.

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This Christmas, if you don't know Christ, turn to him. He will bring light and life into your dark soul, and that light will be the life of men, and that salvation will not just be for today.

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It will be an eternal salvation where one day you will stand before Jesus Christ, your King, and you will be made whole, and you will stand in his perfect light, and you will have perfect life for all of eternity.

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If you do not know Jesus Christ right now, I would tell you to go to him.

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Run to him. Pray to him because light has come. And if you're a Christian, this does not need to be a season of darkness for you.

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Light has come. He came 2 ,000 years ago. He lived as the light of men.

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He says that I am the light of the world. Anyone who has me will not have darkness, and he accomplished that on the cross of Christ for you.

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For a moment, it seemed like the light of the world was snuffed out by the darkness. In the grave, in the darkness of the grave, it looked like that the light was broken, that it wasn't going to be able to accomplish

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God's purpose. But on the third day, on the rise of the sun in the morning, the Son of God rose from the dead, and light burst forth into the world again.

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And even in his ascension, he went and sat at the right hand of the Father so that he could rule as the

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King of light over this dark world. And by the power of the Holy Spirit, he has brought that light inside of you so that if you're a

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Christian, you have the light of God in you. Jesus says that we are the light of the world.

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He was the light of the world who came to bring the light of God to earth, but yet he deposited that light into us, and he is sending us out of the world as candles.

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We began the sermon by saying that 150 million strands of light are bought each and every single

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Christmas to light up the dark sky. What if the church of Jesus Christ accepted the fact that we are the light of the world and that we get to go out into the world as the light of God and that we went out into the world to showcase the light of Jesus Christ to the world?

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What would we be able to do? And how bright would this planet be if it was lit up by the faithful witness of the church of Jesus Christ?

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As Christians, if you are here, don't live in the darkness. Don't settle for that. Live in the light of Christ, and it will bring life and light and joy to every part of you.

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Let's pray. Lord Jesus, thank you so much for the prophecy of Isaiah, that the people who are living in anguish and gloom and darkness have seen the light.

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And Lord, we on the other side of this have seen the light. We've seen you, and heaven's light has invaded us by the power of your

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Holy Spirit so that we're no longer blind and we're no longer broken and we're no longer wounded.

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But Lord, because of you, you've healed us and you filled us with your love and with your light.

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Lord, I pray that this church, I pray that every member of this church would be a light and a witness to the gospel of Jesus Christ, that this

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God has come, and he's come in human flesh, and he's come to break the darkness.

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Lord, I pray that we'd be witnesses to that. Lord, I pray that that light would fill us this season. And Lord, I pray that that light that fills us would cause our hearts to praise you for all that you have done,