Light in the Darkness (Part 1 of 2)

When the war goes out, we start looking around for candles or matches or flashlights, anything that will shed a little light so we can find our way in the darkness. What do we do with spiritual darkness, either in the world or in our own hearts? Alistair Begg takes us to Isaiah today to find answers on Truth for Life. Isaiah chapter 9 and verse 1, but there will be no gloom for her who was in anguish.

In the former time he brought into contempt the land of Zebulun and the land of Naphtali, but in the latter time he has made glorious the way of the sea, the land beyond the Jordan, Galilee of the nations. The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light. Those who dwelt in a land of deep darkness, on them has light shone.

You have multiplied the nation, you have increased its joy. They rejoice before you, as with joy at the harvest, as they are glad when they divide the spoil. For the yoke of his burden and the staff for his shoulder, the rod of his oppressor, you have broken, as on the day of Midian.

For every boot of the tramping warrior in battle tumult and every garment rolled in blood will be burned as fuel for the fire. For to us a child is born, to us a son is given, and the government shall be upon his shoulder, and his name shall be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace. Of the increase of his government and of peace there will be no end, on the throne of David and over his kingdom, to establish it and to uphold it, with justice and with righteousness, from this time forth and forevermore. The zeal of the LORD of hosts will do this.

Amen. There are a number of psalms in the Bible which are clearly laments, and probably Psalm 88 is the saddest of them all, inasmuch as, unlike many of the psalms, it does not end in an upswing. In the course of the psalm, the psalmist asks the question, Are your wonders known in the darkness, or your righteous deeds in the land of forgetfulness or in the land of oblivion? And that lament reaches its conclusion when he declares, You have taken my companions and loved ones from me. The darkness is my closest friend. The darkness is my closest friend. Now, I don't know about you, but I can't read that without it brings to mind the opening line of a song that in 1968 immediately took over the airwaves on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. Yes, it was, as long ago as 1968, when you woke up in the morning and heard the opening line, Hello darkness, my old friend, I've come to talk with you again. I don't know whether Paul Simon had been reading Psalm 88 before he wrote The Sounds of Silence.

I think there's a fair chance that he would be familiar with it, given his Jewish background. But I do know that that lament from Psalm 88 would be capable, I think we can safely say, of expressing the mood of many who are described for us here at the end of Isaiah chapter 8. Isaiah is providing for us the record of what has happened to the people of God as a result of them being unprepared to listen to the Word of God and instead chasing after all kinds of other ideas. And if your Bible is open, you will see that he describes them in verse 21, at the end of chapter 8, as sojourners passing through the land, greatly distressed and hungry, and when they are hungry, enraged and contemptuous in their response. In verse 19, they are looking for answers in all of the wrong places.

They ought not to be paying attention to these mediums and the necromancers. Instead, surely they should be inquiring of the testimony of God. And so they find themselves confronted by distress, confronted by darkness, and living in the gloom of anguish, as he puts it there in the final verse of Isaiah chapter 8. And they will look to the earth, but behold, darkness and distress and the gloom of anguish is all they discover. It has a very contemporary ring to it, doesn't it? I wonder, are you struck by that as I am? Just that phrase, and they will look to the earth. I wonder, has there ever been a time in Western culture when that has been such an apt description of what men and women do? We didn't all grow up with Earth Day, did we? There was no such thing when I was a boy. This has all come about in the last while, as pantheism has taken hold, the idea that the Creator is part of his creation, that we're all wrapped up in it somehow together, and as a result of these things, our focus has become almost entirely horizontal.

And if anyone is crazy enough to suggest that the answer to the problems on the horizontal plane have to do with the vertical axis, then they'll probably be shouted down. But it is a sad and pathetic picture, isn't it? It's a picture, I suggest to you, there they are, with their faces turned upwards in contempt against authority, in contempt against God, looking to the earth and yet only discovering distress and darkness, inquiring of the mediums and the necromancers, those who are described as chirping and muttering. Verse 19.

Actually, the word there might equally be translated, chirping and twittering. And there we have it. Let's just look to these places. It's in the high streets of our nation.

Don't let's kid ourselves. Chagrin Falls is a relatively respectable little spot, isn't it? And yet, on the high street, you don't have to look very, very hard to be invited to come up the stairs into the realm of deep darkness, to inquire about your life by looking to those who only deal in deadness.

And you can go around the corner and find another place. If you don't find the answer that you desired there, then you can go into another spot and see if you can find, in consulting the mediums and the necromancers, in looking to the earth, the answers to the questions that fill your heart. The Bible has a wonderfully contemporary ring to it, doesn't it? These are the people who should be inquiring of God, and yet they find themselves inquiring of the dead on behalf of the living. And as a result, they find themselves in deep misery—a misery which does not drive them to repentance but instead drives them to blasphemy. And people say, Well, why would it be that people confronted by these things, why don't they just immediately turn and look to him who is the life and the light? Well, it's interesting, isn't it? They're not turning to God as a result of their ministry except to turn and curse him—curse the king and curse our circumstances and curse everything about this miserable life.

That's the picture. It's a picture, in one word, of oppression. Of oppression.

I have four words, and the first word is oppression. And the people, we find, not bowing and praying to the neon God they've made, but bowing and praying, essentially, to the lifeless gods they've made. Instead of paying attention to the testimony of God via the prophet of God—words that are marked by clarity and by authority—they've decided that they'll listen to the gibberish of the sorcerers. Those are the circumstances described by Isaiah, and yet it is in that circumstance of oppression that he is going to declare hope for the people. And the hope, we are not surprised, is bound up in the testimony and in the teaching to which he refers in verse 16, and to which he returns again in verse 19. We should be inquiring of the testimony of God—the teaching and the testimony of God. It's actually in verse 20, isn't it?

To the teaching and to the testimony. What Isaiah's envisioning is a dawn of redemption. A dawn of redemption as he comes to chapter 8 and to verse 1—redemption and dawn in the place where darkness had been its thickest. And where had darkness been its thickest?

Well, in the land of Zebulun and in the land of Naphtali. This very place of deep darkness, where there had been disruption and destruction, where the people of God had been taken away and moved into resettlement camps—if we had gone back in time, we would have seen circumstances that have been played out again and again in history as oppressive forces, foreign powers, have come in and dealt a deep blow to men and women, destroyed their structures of society and life and faith and carried them away. And it was there in the gloom of anguish, where they were thrust into deep darkness, that the light was going to shine. Now, I say to you again and again that the way to read your Bible is to read it backwards so that you will be able to understand what is going on in the Old Testament in light of all that is unfolded in the New. And when you look at this opening verse of Isaiah chapter 9, it ought to send you forward to Matthew chapter 4. And when you get to Matthew chapter 4, you discover that Jesus has heard that John the Baptist has been arrested, and as a result of that, we're told that Jesus returned to Nazareth in Galilee. Very quickly after that, he went to Capernaum—to Capernaum by the Sea of Galilee—close to Zebulun and to Naphtali. And Matthew tells us exactly why it is that Jesus has gone there. Why has he gone into this region of Naphtali and Zebulun?

Answer? So that what was spoken by the prophet Isaiah might be fulfilled. What was spoken? That the people who sit in darkness have seen a great light, they that sat in the land of death, upon them the light has broken through. And then, we're told by Matthew, Jesus from that point began to preach, Turn from sin and turn to God, for the kingdom is near. Now, when you think about this, you realize that what Isaiah is doing—Isaiah is describing as a present reality something that yet awaits them in the future. And that which is described as the inbreaking of light in the darkness reaches its fulfillment in the person and work of the Lord Jesus. That's why we always say to one another that the Bible is a book about Jesus. In the Old Testament he is predicted, in the Gospels he's revealed, in the Acts he is preached, in the Epistles he's explained, and in the book of Revelation he is expected. So we come here to Matthew, and we discover, oh, that's what Isaiah chapter 9 was saying—that into the darkness and gloom and anguish of people who were looking in all the wrong places, light has come.

Well, that's our second word, is the word illumination. Into the oppression of that which is before the people, light comes. And what Isaiah is doing is describing the future as something that has already happened, isn't he? These are prophetic perfects, for those of you who like the English language. And what is happening here, what was happening in the experience of the prophets, was that they had, if you like, a kind of prophetic consciousness whereby they were cast forward in time and then able, as it were, to look back on the mighty acts of God and to describe what was yet to take place with the certainty as if it had already happened. So that the prophet is saying, Look forward to it.

It is certain he has already done it. That's the whole point of the vision, that in his eye he saw, in the same way as John on the island of Patmos, looks forward, and he sees this picture of all of the fulfillment of the plans and purposes of God. And he is projected, if you like, into that prophetic consciousness which allows him then, in the moment of time, to say, This is an absolute certainty. God has shown this to me, and you may take his word for it—a word which he, the prophet, speaks. And that's why he places the illumination in direct proximity to the oppression. Not because it is about immediately to happen, but because it is immediately evident to the eye of faith.

Now, I must leave you to think that out for yourselves. But the fact is that only God can bring about this transformation. And that's why, at the end of verse 7, he answers the obvious question, How is this all going to happen? By one sentence, the zeal of the LORD of hosts will do this. How is the gloom and anguish of life to be penetrated by light? The answer is, the zeal of the LORD of hosts will do this.

God will do this. Now, this motif runs through the entire Bible, doesn't it? There are many motifs that run through the Bible. And one of them is this that we consider now that of light in darkness.

The Bible opens with a thought, doesn't it? The triumph of light over darkness. And God said, Let there be light. And there was light. And it triumphed over the darkness. The psalmist says, The LORD is my light and my salvation.

Whom shall I fear? We've already, in our prayer, quoted from the prologue of John's Gospel. In Jesus was the life, and that life was the light of man. Jesus enters the temple precincts, and he declares himself to be the light of the world, the light of the world, and whoever follows him, he says, will not walk in darkness but will have the light of life.

Paul uses the very same picture when he describes what has happened to the Corinthians, moving from creation to the new creation. He says, For God who said, Let light shine out of darkness—in the Genesis record—for the God who said, Let light shine out of darkness, has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus. Then he is describing here what happens when light breaks into the darkness. By nature, we live on the dark side. We are not in a neutral zone outside of Christ. We live on the dark side. And John actually says that people who live on the dark side do not come to the light because they like the dark side because their deeds are evil. I'm quoting John chapter 3 verse 20, Everyone who does wicked things hates the light and does not come to the light, lest his work should be exposed. And that's why Paul's assignment was to preach so that men might be turned from darkness into light. Turned from darkness into light.

We don't need to be geniuses to work this out, do we? A friend took me to a restaurant in Chicago a few weeks ago now. It was very, very late at night.

I don't know. I've never gone to dinner, I don't think, at quarter past ten at night. It seemed a crazy idea to me. But anyway, I went along with it. He was a younger fellow, and I'm getting old, and I have to go to my bed.

But I said I would go along. And I can't go into details. It wasn't a bad place.

It wasn't an immoral place. It was just a horribly dark place. It was so dark that when I went to the men's restroom, I was actually frightened down the stairs.

I said, Dear me, I'm getting very old. But I thought to myself as I looked around at the people, I said, Why is it so dark in here? Why do we have to…? Why can we turn the light on in this place, for goodness' sake?

Well, I suspect it had something to do with the kind of liaisons that were there. In fact, we even felt strange, the two of us, sitting in there in the darkness. Illumination. Thirdly, celebration. The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light. Those who dwelt in a land of deep darkness, on them a light has shone, and you have multiplied the nation, you have increased its joy, they rejoice.

That's celebration, isn't it? What is he saying here? Well, he's saying that the tiny remnant of believing folks would scarcely imagine the way in which God was going to fulfill his promises. Here they are as a little remnant of folks in the midst of all of this darkness, paying attention to the testimony that God has given through the prophet, not going away and inquiring of all these dark and silly ideas. And yet they feel themselves to be so beleaguered, so impoverished, such a minority in the midst of it all, and Isaiah says, Listen, you need to know this, that the people who walked in darkness have seen a great light, and God has multiplied the joy of the nation. The way in which we must surely understand this, again, in light of reading the Bible backwards, is in light of Revelation 7. That the promise of God to Abram was going to be fulfilled insofar as through his seed all the nations of the earth would be blessed. That there would be a company in Revelation 7 of people from every tribe and people and language and tongue that would be gathered and would celebrate God. And so, when you read your Bible, you must read it in light of that. You've got to read the territorial and national pictures that are here in the Old Testament in light of the fact that God has put together a people that are already brought to his holy hill, and that that will eventually be fulfilled in those who are the people of God looking forward to the promises of God in the company here, and Gentile believers who are added into that company, and then the interweaving of this great mass of humanity as nations are added and people from all over the world are finally gathered in this great assembly.

Now, you get inklings of it all the way through. For example, the wise men. What is happening in the wise men? Who are these wise men? How did they just show up in the story?

What's happening? Did they come from China? Where did they come from? They came from the East. We've seen a star in the sky, and we came looking for him.

What's happening there? Well, the exact same thing is happening there as was happening in the census that was being taken. In those days, the census was ordered for all the people, and they had to go up to the place of their birth. And Mary and Joseph went up to the town and city of David, so that at the right moment in time, the virgin would bring forth her son. And cosmically, if you like, God is now moving the nations in the direction of his Son, who is the light of the world.

And the wise men are at least a picture of this, that God is at work in bringing the nations to his Son. Now, where did you come from? That we came from the East.

What are you doing here? We've seen the light. We've been following the light. It's brought us right over the strangest little place. I can't believe it. If we'd thought when we set out that we were gonna end up in a dump like this, I'm not sure that anyone else would have chosen to come.

How bizarre! You see, the joy that will then be experienced is the joy of those who rejoice in the harvest, and it will be the joy of those who celebrate and divide the spoil or the plunder as a result of victory in battle, the picture of a joy in harvest and a joy in plunder that is so clearly a joy that is brought about as a result of the intervention of God. Victory in battle belonged to the Lord, and a harvest was as a result of his goodness. In the gloom the light shines, in the face of insurmountable odds, the people of God will discover victory. You're listening to Truth for Life. That is Alistair Begg reminding us that we can celebrate joyfully no matter what our circumstances.

We'll hear more tomorrow. We won't rest and rejoice in God's promises unless we first understand his word. That's why here at Truth for Life we teach the Bible every single day. If today's message inspired you to become more purposeful, more intentional about spending time with God and his word every day, I have a suggestion for you.

Start each day with a quiet time using Alistair's book titled Truth for Life 365 Daily Devotions. There are two volumes from which to choose. Both books will guide you through a full year of scripture meditations.

There's corresponding commentary that focuses on God's character and his work. Each hardcover volume is available for purchase at our cost of just $8 at truthforlife.org slash gifts or you can call us at 888-588-7884. And whether you purchase a single book or a dozen or more to share with family and friends, shipping in the US is free. Now along with the Truth for Life devotional, we're recommending you start the new year with three classics books that will have a lasting impact on your life. We put together a bundle of pocket-sized soft cover books from three gifted theologians, men who have influenced many believers over the years.

We're calling the bundle Short Classics. The three books are What Did the Cross Achieve? by J. I. Packer, The Expulsive Power of a New Affection by Thomas Chalmers and The Life of God and the Soul of Man by Henry Skugel. You may not be familiar with these titles or authors but these are books Alistair highly recommends. Each book can be read in a few hours but the insights you find will influence you for years to come. Ask for the Short Classics Bundle when you donate to support the teaching ministry of Truth for Life at truthforlife.org slash donate or you can call us at 888-588-7884. We live in a world that is filled with stories of violence and hatred and war. Maybe it leaves you wondering, is peace even possible? We'll hear the answer tomorrow. The Bible teaching of Alistair Begg is furnished by Truth for Life where the Learning is for Living.