January 5, 2020 Isaiah 60:1-6
Arise, shine, for your light has come, and the glory of the Lord is dawning upon you.
2 Look, darkness covers the earth, and deep darkness covers the peoples,
but the Lord will dawn upon you, and his glory will be seen over you.
3 Nations will walk to your light, and kings to the brightness of your dawn.
4 Look up. Look all around and see! All of them have been gathered. They are coming to you.
Your sons will come from far away, and people will carry your daughters on their side.
5 Then you will look and be radiant. Your heart will race with excitement and burst with joy.
For great riches from the sea will be delivered to you. The wealth of the nations will come to you.
6 Caravans of camels will cover your land, young camels from Midian and Ephah.
All those from Sheba will come. They will carry gold and incense,
and they will announce the good news of the praise of the Lord.
Arise! Shine! Your Light Has Come
I had the opportunity to visit Israel maybe about 10 years ago, and it was a fascinating trip to be able to see the actual places where Jesus walked and talked. I was going to ignore the tour guide at first until I found out how knowledgeable he was about Israel and Bible history. He kept me very interested and intrigued throughout, but I found it sad that he wasn’t even a Christian.
So it kind of amazed me to think about it. Here we were, coming from hundreds of miles away. A different country. A different race. We traveled hundreds of miles and paid hundreds of dollars to go to visit Israel, mainly because of our faith in Jesus. There are thousands of tourists who go there every year because of their faith in Jesus. But here there were thousands of Jews who rejected Jesus as their Savior. The tour guide knew all about Bible history and Jesus, but he didn’t believe in Him. Jesus should have been his and their pride and joy, but He wasn’t. And that was the same problem back in Isaiah’s day and Jesus’ day as well. Isaiah said to the Israelites, about 700 years before Jesus came,
Arise, shine, for your light has come, and the glory of the Lord is dawning upon you.
2 Look, darkness covers the earth, and deep darkness covers the peoples,
but the Lord will dawn upon you, and his glory will be seen over you.
What does this tell us? The nations were living in darkness, but so were the Jews! He wanted them to rise and shine and see the glory of the Lord that was coming to dawn on them. He wanted the world to be attracted to HIM through the Israelites!
At the time this was written, the Israelites were facing two threats, the Assyrians and the Babylonians. The 700’s brought devastation on almost all of Israel. Jerusalem was left standing only by a miracle of God. The whole country was devastated, and they would all end up in captivity soon. So the people were living in darkness and despair, and deservedly so. The glory of their country had been devastated. They were sure that God had abandoned them, and in many ways He had - because of their blatant unbelief and rebellion. But Isaiah prophesied the virgin birth of Immanuel. He wanted them to know that a Messiah was on His way! He wanted them to take pride in this child and rejoice over this Child!
3 Nations will walk to your light, and kings to the brightness of your dawn.
4 Look up. Look all around and see! All of them have been gathered. They are coming to you.
Your sons will come from far away, and people will carry your daughters on their side.
5 Then you will look and be radiant. Your heart will race with excitement and burst with joy.
70 years into the Babylonian Captivity, God inspired the king of Babylon to allow the Israelites to return to the Promised Land and rebuild their temple and their wall. He even helped pay for them to do so! The Israelites were taken care of and supported in their return trip. God was preparing the way for the Messiah to be born in Bethlehem. It was similar to what Isaiah prophesied, picturing it as a daughter being carried on the hip. Sooner or later many more nations would come.
God’s ideal was that the Israelite nation would rejoice in the birth of Jesus! He wanted them to be happy and celebrate and welcome His arrival. He wanted them to be excited about it and say, “Come, look at our Christ child! He has come to save the world!” Isaiah even prophesied HOW people would come -
6 Caravans of camels will cover your land, young camels from Midian and Ephah.
All those from Sheba will come. They will carry gold and incense,
and they will announce the good news of the praise of the Lord.
This seems to be an obvious reference to the Wise Men coming from Babylon, bearing gifts of gold, incense, and myrrh. We don’t know how many Magi actually came - but if Isaiah’s prophecy is referring directly to the Wise Men, it would appear to be far more than three.
When you have a child that performs well, you can’t help but tell people about it and rejoice in it. If an all star celebrity or athlete comes from your hometown, you put up banners and celebrate it. God’s ideal would have been that all of Israel would have followed the Wise Men to the stable and worshiped the Christ child with them.
But what happened when they arrived at the epicenter of all of the Israelite religion? All of Israel was disturbed because of King Herod. They were afraid of how Herod would respond. They knew the prophecy of where the Messiah would be born. It was only five miles away from Jerusalem. Yet they failed to even make the trip! Why? Because they lived by fear and they didn’t believe!
If I would have been a Wise Man it would have thrown me for a loop. “Here these people have the prophecies of the Christ. They have all of these wonderful areas of worship. This should have been the moment they were all waiting for! Where is the excitement? How can these people not even know that their King has been born? Why don’t they come along? Why do they look more troubled and angered by us being here?” Instead, it was like they were all living in gloom and doom when the Messiah was right there under their noses! It makes you wonder. They knew the prophecies, and they could quote the prophecies, but they didn’t really consider that they could actually come true it seemed. It shouldn’t have ultimately mattered to them whether Herod liked it or not. And it shouldn’t have mattered to them that the Romans were ruling over them in Jerusalem as well. Jesus had come! They should have been excited about it and rejoiced in it!
Think about this when it comes to YOUR faith and your attitude. Have you let the darkness and the deep darkness of this world beat you down into a dark hole? Have you become pessimistic and angry over what death has done to you or sickness or sin? Are you living in darkness? Does life just seem to be a continual blah? The darkness is real.
It can also affect your faith. Do you look at what we believe in a dark way? This faith is too radical, too focused on sin, too dark, too Bible based? “Nobody is going to want to come here!” Or do you live in gloom because of your own sin and troubles? “I can’t ever do anything right! God hates me!” Do you assume that even though God promises to take care of you and watch over you, He really won’t do anything out of the ordinary for YOU? What good is it to read the Bible if you aren’t going to believe any of it really pertains to you or helps you in any way? How do you expect God to bless you if you don’t believe He even wants to bless you or He will bless you?
When some of the first astronauts circled the moon and came around the back side of the moon, they saw their first “earthrise,” and they were simply amazed at the beauty of the earth. The astronaut said, “We went all the way to moon to discover the moon, and what we really discovered was the earth.” It took them thousands of miles away from the earth to appreciate the beauty of the earth. So it can happen that those who are closest to the beauty of something - who live in it and with it every day - lose sight of the beauty of it. It happened to the Jews in Jerusalem. Has it happened to you?
Think of the beauty of what we have been given here! We haven’t fallen for the scholarly lies that the Bible is all fairy tales. God really sent a flood. God actually came in the flesh of a baby boy through the virgin Mary. God actually died for the sins of the world on the cross. He actually does love you too, in spite of all of the darkness of life. Our sins are actually and fully forgiven through His one sacrifice, and we don’t have to earn a penny of it. Baptism washes us and our children in Jesus. We know that Jesus actually comes to us in the bread and wine with His body and blood for full and free forgiveness. This is not pretend. This is real, and we actually believe it! God hasn’t abandoned this world. He rules in the darkness! He forgives and saves through the darkness. Jesus is the light of salvation! This is meant to give you light and life within - to have hope in the midst of darkness and death. Satan has been defeated, don’t you remember?
This is all given us in the Bible! If you are bored with the Bible and bored with the sacrament, your children will see it. If you are not really active in your faith, and it is more of a chore for you to worship or sing or pray, it is obvious to your friends and neighbors. You won’t attract anyone to come hear about Jesus. If you treat this as nothing but bland garbage, how do you expect your children or your grandchildren to want to come? You are partly causing the darkness for those closest to you if that’s how you look at life.
The Jews of Jerusalem KNEW the prophecies, but it was as if they didn’t really think they would come true! So they sat there in Jerusalem while the Wise Men kept going and found Jesus Himself, just as the Word and the star led them.
But look at the positive of this Sunday! God brought them anyway! Isn’t a miraculous thing how God was able to bring these men from hundreds of miles away and show them Jesus - even as a small toddler living in a tiny house in Bethlehem? It shows us that nothing is impossible with God. It shows us that God truly does want all men to be saved and to see the light of salvation in Jesus. He was able to use two things to bring them to Jesus. It started with nature which drew them to Jerusalem. But it finished with the Bible which pointed them to Bethlehem.
God uses the same yet today! Arise and shine! The glory of the Lord has come for you too! He’s that tiny baby in the manger, who came to live and die for you. Don’t lose sight of this beautiful Savior who still shines on you and gives you His gifts of mercy and forgiveness - which are new EVERY MORNING! He still loves you dearly and wants to shine all the more on you every day. Your sins are still forgiven! God still calls you His own. He still promises to take care of you and bring you to heaven through faith in Him. God can still work through you to bring others to Christ. These are reasons to shine in the midst of darkness!
Now that Christmas vacation is almost over, parents are going to have to retrain their children to sleep in the dark and go to bed at a decent time. No more sleeping until eleven or noon. Monday is going to be brutal for children when they hear the alarm clock go off. But going back to a normal routine is good for you. You should rise when the sun comes up. It is one thing to sleep in the dark, and it is another to sleep in the light. That’s not how God made us.
Epiphany is a time that God calls on us to wake up and recognize the light of Christ - to see that He really is the Savior of the world. Rise and shine! The light of salvation - of Jesus - is shining on you! Jesus, your light has come! Be proud of Him. Be excited! Rejoice! Let your light shine to the world, and see what God can do in the dark. He can draw anyone from anywhere, just as He did the Wise Men. Amen.
