Isaiah 9:2-7
The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light;
Sermon Transcript:
Morning, everybody. Invite you to take your Bibles. We’re going to be looking at the book of Isaiah. The Old Testament, Isaiah chapter 9 verses 2 through 7. I encourage you to join me there. Grab a Bible in front of you. and there’s a table of contents. I didn’t get the page number this morning, but it’s Isaiah chapter 9 verses 2 through 7.
I’m going to go ahead and read that passage while you’re turning there.
The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light. Those who dwell 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, 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 trampling fire warrior is 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 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. Let’s pray.
Lord, we gather this morning and we come to this season we call Advent. Lord, even as we’ve celebrated the Advent. Candle this morning as we have joined near to remember this first of gifts of the coming of Jesus to our world, the gift of hope, Lord, I’m conscious that in this room, in the homes of people that are watching online, there are certainly people to whom life does not feel filled with hope.
And Lord, I pray that you would be our teacher, that you would instruct us into truth this morning in Jesus name, Amen.
If we have no hope, if we are hopeless, basically life is not worth living. Viktor Frankl, an Austrian psychiatrist, did some of the most profound work in this topic. As a result of his time in the Nazi prison camp, he was there taken with many other prisoners, many of them Jewish, prisoners. And it was his study that actually entitled Man’s Search for Meaning that brought the issue of hope in prominence.
And the subtitle of his book actually is the classic tribute to hope. It was his belief that when people lost hope, they had lost any sense of purpose for living. And those were the individuals that tended to die in the prison camps, even if they hadn’t faced the horrific death of the ovens, that they just expired over time.
Hope in his book he was presenting gave meaning to life. That you are able to exist and keep going. Shows you are finding hope in something. You may feel it is a flickering hope, but you are entrusting your hope in something. It might be your abilities. It might be your relationships. It might be your resources.
It could be hope in your accomplishments. It could be hope that things are, in fact, going to get better, or something’s going to, in fact, end. Christmas is the reminder of God’s hope, his way of people to find hope. God had promised to his people in the Old Testament that there would be a hope. As a matter of fact, Paul refers to it a few times in his letters.
He calls it the hope. of Israel. This is the promised hope, the hope that, that ultimately gave people a sense that yes, there’s a future, there’s something that God has promised to us, this is what we cling to, will one day happen for us. Paul identified where that hope was fulfilled when he said this.
Again, in his New Testament letters, we have hope. In our Lord Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ came to earth to bring hope, hope in life, hope in death. It is the first gift of Advent. And this morning from this passage in Isaiah chapter nine, which actually is one of the prophetic statements that they called the hope of Israel, we find four, five characteristics about this hope.
The first of those is the hope is for people. Living in darkness. Verse two describes it that way. It makes the statement, the people who walked in darkness have seen a great light. The concept of darkness in scriptures takes on a variety of nuances, but some of those are summarized in these statements.
In the book of Job, it talks about, it says this, those who walked in darkness constantly were shrouded. In darkness. Those that lived in darkness, it says they grope in darkness with no light. Darkness is, is portrayed as a state of hopelessness, a state of confusion and or fear. Jesus’ favorite book of the Bible was the book of Isaiah, and he and verses there said statements like this.
Isaiah 42 7, as he prophesied about himself. To open the eyes that are blind, to free captives from prison, and to release from the dungeon those who sit in darkness. In Isaiah 43, 9, to say to the captives, come out, and to those in darkness be free. Darkness is portrayed in the scripture as a prison. It’s a, it’s a state in which one is in captivity.
It’s a life that is not as God designed human life to be. As a matter of fact, when mankind, humankind, rejected God as the centralizing, influencer in their lives and wanted to live their own lives, as all of us have, it is described as the fall. That what took place was we descended from the state that God had designed for us.
And, and the result is this, this portrayal of this new way of life. This life without God central to us as, as darkness, as subhuman. It debases, distorts, disfigures the beauty of humanity. It’s aberrant. All of the things we look at as maladies in our world today, racism, terrorism, religious radicalism, discrimination, genocide, self absorption, self centeredness, hatred, pride, cruelty are all distortions of God designed human experience.
It is the result of, of darkness that has entered our world as the world has, of mankind has fallen. Christmas is the most. unsentimental, realistic way of looking at life. This is what Christmas declares. It acknowledges that humans are in darkness. It acknowledges that it is not saying that what we need to do to remedy the problem, cheer up, we’ll all pull together and we can fix this.
The message of Christmas is this. Things are really this bad. They’re dark. And we can’t do anything to resolve that in ourselves. Nevertheless, there is hope for those in darkness. Which leads to the second point. This hope is from outside of themselves. If you look at verse 2, it says this here. In this prophetic statement, the people who walked in darkness have seen a great light.
It’s interesting that the hope that is offered is portrayed as light. And the idea is that in the darkness, light is coming. As a matter of fact, at the end of chapter eight, it says this, the problem is the people will look to the earth in verse 22, but behold, distress and darkness, the gloom of anguish End 1 And they will be thrust into deep darkness.
Now we come to verse two of chapter nine. The people walking in that darkness have seen a great light on those living in the land of deep darkness. A light has dawned. The emphasis of light into darkness comes from the Christian belief that the world’s hope comes from outside. That’s why in John chapter one, the Apostle John talking about Jesus coming to the world says this, the true light that gives light to everyone was coming into the world.
He was in the world and though the world was made through him, the world did not recognize him. One of the most thoughtful world leaders of the last handful of generations was actually the first elected president. of the Czech Republic. When communism was broken, this individual, Václav Havel, Havel, if you’re his relative, I apologize, he’s the first elected president, and he’s a remarkably, insightful man, good president, and he came with a unique perspective.
His perspective offered, first of all, an individual that had lived much of his adult life in socialism, communism. And now he was the first democratic president of the Czech Republic. He had seen socialism. He now saw capitalism. He had seen, a total, tyrannous environment. He saw a democratic environment.
He brought the perspective of an individual that knew that science, unguided by moral principles had given us the Holocaust. He had been alive during those times. He concluded that neither technology, nor the state, nor the financial markets could save us from what he saw as the greatest dangers to humanity, nuclear conflict.
Ethnic violence, just overall destruction. And he made this interesting statement, pursuit of the good life will not help humanity save itself, nor is democracy alone enough. A turning to and a seeking of God is needed. The human race constantly forgets. That it is not God. He’s saying there’s something outside of ourselves that needs to deliver us from this darkness, this sub human state, if you will, that is a result of the fall.
That life is not as God designed it to be, as it ought to be. So where does the remedy come? It does not come from within ourselves. It comes from outside. It is light coming into the darkness. I saw this in a more personal experience many years ago in a unique way when I had the chance to befriend an older man named Richard.
Richard actually, I had met him because he, he had known my dad and my dad actually introduced me to him. And they had been associates many years before in business, and Richard had gone on. Richard actually was the vice president of a company called Remington Rand, later merged with Sperry Rand, but it was a very large, corporate entity.
And Richard had become the executive vice president and was in line for the CEO position. At that time of his life, literally had his own private jet, a lovely wife, obviously all the wealth one could envision. He had everything. In the midst of the time, waiting to see if he was going to be the heir to the throne of Remington Rand and become the CEO, he just bagged everything.
He was tired of the corporate life, he was tired of the world, and he bought a giant plantation in Virginia. He described it to me once, just this massive, with massive, multiple buildings, houses, and literally an old plantation. And Richard, for three years, I guess it was two and a half years, bought a big, beautiful tractor, and he Green Acre did, if you ever heard of it, El Abreu, Jaja Gavur, he just got off the carpet thing and he drove tractors, done his own property.
He thought, I just, I got to be out of the rat race, I just got to be a human again, and so he did this for two and a half years and was completely bored to death.
So they returned and came back up to this area. Actually got a job, as a, what was for him, a low level executive position for many people, a very high executive, but for him, much lower. And he thought, I, I, I miss the corporate world, I miss the, the energy, I miss the strategy, I miss the game. But I don’t want to be the top dog.
I don’t, I don’t want to be there. I don’t want that kind of pressure. My family doesn’t want that kind of, that kind of pressure. So he thought I’m going to come in and I’m going to take a moderating position. And so he did and it didn’t work. He began to turn to alcohol. And when I met Richard, Richard had just been, doing a DUI.
Richard, had been in a car accident in which he should have been killed, but God spared him. He was in a hospital room and was there trying to think through the direction of his entire life. God in his mercy enabled Richard to face two things. Number one, he discovered something about himself. He discovered that In terminology of this sermon that he had placed his hope in himself and that his life was lived therefore in the pride that we all have, that I’ll be enough.
I can do it. I can be self sufficient. And he found out it didn’t work. He literally had tried everything he knew to find satisfaction, light. To get out of the darkness and just the emptiness of it all. The meaninglessness of it all. Just one thing after another didn’t satisfy. He learned something about himself.
Secondly, he learned something very special about God. He learned that God, even though he had had some degree of religious background and had learned about God. It turned from God, tried in His words a dozen different things to find satisfaction in His life. And now in the first time in His life when He was really wholeheartedly wanting to turn to God, when He cried out to God, God in His grace showed up.
He was struck as I shared with him the statement that C. S. Lewis, C. S. Lewis calls this the humility of God. And we’ll try everything else until finally there’s just no curtains left except God. And we turn to him and in his astonishing humility as his, as our creator, he says, I delight to show mercy.
That’s the book of Micah said. Richard received God’s forgiveness through Christ. He experienced light that had come into his life. That he had discovered that going to the plantation, the problem was he took himself with him wherever he went. You know, that happens. Wherever you go, whatever you got.
Whatever you are, whatever darkness has seeped in and is influencing the way it’s manifesting itself, it goes with us. We need light to penetrate our lives. And so Richard, like Paul did in 1st Timothy 4 when it says, we have put in 1st Timothy 4 verse 10, Paul said, we have put our hope. In the living God,
we all tend to have faulty gods we put our hope in. Our health, our accomplishments, our abilities, our perfectionist ways, our intelligence, our religiosity, our skills, our ability to make friends, our drive, our tenacity. But they’re all false hopes. They can work for a while, but eventually that sense of emptiness, of tediousness, of being trapped, begins to settle in.
And that’s when we often learn the mercy of suffering. Suffering is one of God’s greatest gifts. You may say, I’d be happy to have him try something else. Suffering shows you the poverty of your gods. Suffering causes us to see we need something outside of ourselves, not something we can design or we can choose.
It makes us see our insufficiency. Our desperation, our hopelessness, it’s designed to point us to the living hope that is found only in the living God, that we need light from outside to come into our darkness. This is what is being portrayed in Isaiah chapter 9 when it says, this is what Christmas is all about.
Light comes into darkness. The hope came from outside of ourselves. And we learn radical faith in the living, merciful God, usually in times of desperate situations of darkness. The hope came from outside. The hope brings light. Light of course reveals the incarnation. The entrance of Jesus in karnas means in flesh.
Jesus coming. In bodily form as a human is the message that brings light. It’s a light that dispels darkness. It’s a light that brings hope that the light reveals. It gives a picture of a mega narrative to large words, mega, which means big. And, or great, even, a narrative, the story. It gives a picture, Jesus coming as, as light, is giving us light to the big story that’s going on.
That, that there is meaning in life. That there is a, a, a story above all other stories. Of every human story is just a part of this giant story that’s going on. The story that begins with creation. And then goes into what is called the fall. And then ultimately comes to what is known as redemption. Jesus coming and leads to future glory.
That this is the mega narrative that is going on throughout world history. And Jesus coming is the light. Sheds light on that story. It enables us to see there is something going on. Where God is drawing people to himself. And it’s accomplished through Jesus. Just coming into the world, there is a united big story that makes sense of my little life in the middle of it.
That I, that I’m not just a random being that climbed out of the, climbed out of the primeval swamp and I just sort of happened and I evolved my way up and, and really, it’s just random, random, random. I mean, there’s no purpose, no meaning. No. The light coming to the darkness, what it reveals is, there’s meaning to your life.
There’s purpose to your life. God created you. The problems you experience in your life is, is a result of the fall in our experience, where we have turned from God. But there is, the story continues that light has come in, in the midst of that darkness, in the person of Jesus Christ. There’s a united, big story of human history that makes sense of life.
Remember reading the article a number of years ago in Christianity Today? Was it, it was in, the story was in, the article was entitled, I Was a Witch. Was a story of a woman, Kimberly Shoemade, and her long conversion to Christ. She tells the story of, of how. she had had a couple of friends that were talking to her about the Bible and, and had actually gone to, a Bible study.
And she was very much 30 years into witchcraft. The incantation, the whole world were hers. She had seen astonishing demonstrations of power of the dark, influence in her life. But she tells her story as she was listening to Verses, over a few weeks in this Bible study of Old Testament verses and New Testament verses and, and, and here’s what she wrote.
She said, I was struck with how the Old Testament and the New Testament had a oddly familiar voice, one tone, one heart. And she said, I wondered, here’s her words. How could a book? Written by so many different people, over the course of hundreds of years, fit together perfectly, as if one amazing storyteller has written the whole thing.
The Holy Spirit began melting my vanity and arrogance with a power stronger than any hex or incantation or spell I’d ever used. Suddenly, the blindfold I’d worn for almost 30 years was stripped away, and instantly I knew what I’d been searching for. It was a person, Jesus Christ. C. S. Lewis, in his book Miracles, says it this way, I believe in the incarnation of Jesus in the same way I believe in the Son.
Not that I can see it all. Because by it, I see everything else. What’s he saying? He’s saying the entrance of Jesus Christ into the world, it’s light. It declares in the midst of our darkness, everything else makes sense. There’s a God that has purpose for my life and meaning. There’s a God that’s designed me, but I rejected Him.
I’ve fallen from Him. But Jesus Christ has come and by his entrance he’s saying, here’s the thing, the reason you feel darkness and you feel purposelessness and you feel lostness is not that your desire for that is hopeless. You were created with that longing for purpose and meaning for life. Your dog doesn’t have that, but you do.
You were designed that way. But sin has darkened the whole thing. You’ve fallen from the state of being able to live out those purposes in your life and fulfill them.
But Jesus Christ has come to shed light and say, there is an eternal value to your life. And I have come to restore you to a relationship, a personal relationship with God. I’ve brought light to it. And Paul and, and C. S. Lewis says, Man, when I realized that, it was the sun to me. Not that I could look into the sun and under every, understand everything about the sun.
But that I could look around and see the sun shows me light for everything else that I need to understand. Jesus came as the light he reveals. Secondly, Jesus comes as the light who satisfies. In this passage, it talks about the light brings joy. When we’re out in the sunlight, there is an invigorating energy you feel.
There’s, there’s joy in light. Where there is limited light, only a few hours of daylight, for instance, Alaska, northern Canada. People struggle. We’re not designed to live in darkness. It’s interesting when the angel appeared to Mary and tells her she’s going to bear the promised one. It says, I bring you tidings of great joy.
A savior is born this day. Actually, that was to the shepherds. The hope is fulfilled in a purpose. A person is the fourth one. Verse 6 and 7, I’m just jumping down here to this famous passage, which Handel memorialized in his great, oratory of the, the Messiah. But we read this in verse 6 and 7, For unto 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.
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 and to uphold it with justice and with righteousness from this time forth and forevermore. And the zeal of the Lord of hosts will do this. The hope is fulfilled in a person. We celebrate Christmas when we remember that hope has come.
It has come in a person, in the Creator, coming among us to deliver us from ourselves, to do for us what we cannot do for ourselves, to begin shaping us for life here and for a world to come. In his great book, Mere Christianity, C. S. Lewis says this, The second person in God. The son became human himself, was born into the world as an actual man, a real man of a particular height, with hair of a particular color, speaking a particular language, weighing so many pounds.
The eternal being who knows everything and who created the whole universe became not only a man, but before that a baby, and before that a fetus inside a woman’s body. And if you want to get the hang of it, think how you would like to become a slug or a crab. He’s portraying that, what it’s like that this Creator God became human, one of us.
I’ve said this before on a number of occasions, but it always helps me and I’m going to just throw it out there for you. I want you again to think of the one who came to the world and I want you to think of our galaxy for just a moment, actually the entire cosmos. If we were trying to measure out things in our universe and we were to say the distance from planet earth to our sun would be portrayed by the thickness of this piece of paper.
And if I were to place this paper here and say, all right, from the, from earth to the sun is the thickness of that piece of paper, that minuscule amount. If we were then to track on that basis of measurement, the distance to the next closest star in our galaxy, we would have to have a pile of papers 70 feet high.
If we were then to use that measurement and to discern the diameter of our galaxy, the Milky Way, we would need a pile of paper 360 miles high. and we are told by recent astro astronomical reckoning that they believe there are billions of such galaxies in the cosmos. And the book of Isaiah says, God stretches out the heavens and measures them with the span of his hand. That God became that baby in Bethlehem. He deigned to come to this world for one reason.
To rescue people in darkness.
He’s described in these words. He’s the mighty God, the everlasting Father. If that’s true, if Jesus Christ is that, you can’t just like him. Well, I, I, I like Jesus. I mean, he’s cool. I got nothing against him. Who is he? He’s this individual. When you listen to who he is, when, when people began to understand the claims that Jesus was making about himself being God, they were furious at him.
Or they fell at his feet and worshiped him. Second, if Jesus is the wonderful counselor and prince of peace, we should want to know him and serve him. He’s called the counselor. When you’re going through something difficult, it’s good to talk to someone who has walked the same path, who knows personally what you’ve been going through.
This creator of the cosmos God knows what it’s like in the person of the sun to suffer. He knows what it’s like to be slandered by friends. He knows what it’s like to be crushed by injustice. He knows what it’s like to be tortured and to die. Dorothy Sayers, a British ethicist and novelist, said this years ago.
It means that for whatever reason God chose to let us fall, to suffer, to be subjects to sorrow and death, he has nonetheless had the honesty and the courage to take his own medicine. He can exact nothing from man that he has not exacted from himself. He himself has gone through the whole of human experience from the trivial irritations of family life and the cramping restrictions of hard work and lack of money to the worst horrors of pain and humiliation, defeat, despair, and death.
He was born in poverty and suffered infinite pain all for us. And thought it well worth his while. And he says, I can be your mighty, wonderful counselor not only because I’m God and I know everything, but I know it by experience. I’ve walked your walk. The last thing about this hope is this, the hope humbles.
For to us a child is born, to us a son is given. It’s a gift. It can be yours only if you are willing to receive it as a gift given by grace. Verse 5 hints at that too. It says here in the passage, it speaks of a great battle, but it says every warrior’s boot used in battle and every garment rolled in blood will be destined for burning, will be fuel for the fire.
The imagery that’s used here is basically saying that the great victory over evil. Will not require our strength. We won’t need a A warrior’s boot. We won’t need armor or a sword. Just melt them down. Burn ’em up. It says someone else will do your fighting for you. This is the great gift, but it’s a challenging one.
Christmas is about receiving gifts, right? But consider how challenging it is to receive certain kinds of gifts. Imagine opening a present on Christmas morning from a friend and it’s a diet book. Really helped him, but, I remember years ago, Marianne, sharing with me her suggestion that I read the book by Norman Vincent Peale, How to Win Friends and Influence People.
She had the best of motives. I actually did read the book, and, which probably isn’t a good argument for it, but, But I really would have preferred if the book’s title was something like this, Why Everybody Wants to Be Your Friend. To accept the true Christian gift, you have to admit your need, that you’re in darkness, and that the emptiness you feel At the longing for meaning, the, the, the wholeness, the sense that life just isn’t how it ought to be.
You have to say this is because of my fault, because of my rejection of God as the central reality in my life because of my sin. That I too need light to come into my darkness. That I’m not going to just climb my way out and find the right light through my job or my family or my, my, my workouts in the gym that, that there’s no other curtain that works except the one that opens to the one that brought light to our world.
And it’s a humble thing to say, God, I don’t ultimately need a friend, an encourager. A defender. I need a savior. I need one who died for me. I need one who rose for me. I need one who gives forgiveness to me. I need the hope that comes of realizing this is all part of the giant story that You created me in a certain way, and I threw it aside going my own way.
But Jesus came to, and the light is, He’s saying, Embrace me, and allow me to begin to restore all that God wanted to have in your life. And we’ll one day completely restore it in a place that is prepared for you called heaven. But we must admit we’re sinners, that we’ve displaced God at the center of our lives.
That it really was, as Isaiah 53 said, All we like sheep have gone astray. We have turned every one of us to our own way. But the Lord laid on Him the sin of us all. That Jesus Christ came to be that for us. I don’t know where you are this morning. But my guess is there’s a number of people in this room are watching online this morning.
Who have never embraced the light of Jesus Christ as their Savior and Lord and living in darkness. You say, well, I, I never thought of myself living in darkness. But every part of your life that is discordant ultimately from the way life is designed to be lived is ultimately traced back to where God is not the center of your life.
That Jesus Christ came to rescue you, to deliver you from that state, and bring you into a relationship with God, both in this world and eternally. My invitation to you this morning is just to embrace Jesus Christ. To lay hold of the hope of the world. It was the hope of Israel. But it is the hope of the world that there is a living hope found in Jesus Christ who came to bring light to people in darkness.
Gonna ask you to pray with me this morning and ask every head bowed and every eye closed.
Lord, we come to you through this simple study, yet with such profound truth. That our lives are all part of a giant story that’s being written. It’s a story that will never end.
And Lord, in this story, you have brought light to us in our darkness in the person of Jesus Christ. Father, you look into the life and soul of every person in this room and in their rooms who are watching online. And I ask you, Father, that you would take away all distractions that they might now personally be able to process where are they in their relationship to Jesus Christ.
With every head bowed and every eye closed, I want to address you this morning, still in a state of prayer. Maybe you’re here today and God, the Holy Spirit is prompting you and saying, Hey, this was for you. This message. This didn’t come from, from Mark. This is something I wanted you to hear because I want you to know that I have created you and that you have turned away from me through your own fall into sin.
But that I sent my own son. To deliver you from the penalty from your sin, both in your life now and the way life is lived and also in the, in the day to come. Won’t you embrace my son as your Savior? And if you’re here this morning and again, no one is looking around but me and God. And you’d say, Pastor Mark, I need the hope of Christ.
I need a savior
right now. I want to receive Jesus Christ as my savior. I’m gonna ask you right where you are to pray this prayer with me quietly speaking in your own heart to God.
Lord, I realize today that I am a sinner,
that I’m separated from you because of my sin. And I realize that Jesus Christ came to be my Savior.
Right now, I’m asking you, Jesus Christ, to enter my life and heart, to be my Savior, to be my Lord.
Jesus, thank you.
If God prompted you to pray that prayer this morning, and again, nobody is looking around, please, but me and God. I’m gonna just ask you right where you are, that I could be praying for you, to just raise your hand. I can ask you to do anything else, but I’d like you to just raise your hand and say, Mark, I’ve received Christ right now.
Yes. Are there others? Yes.
Yes. Thank you. Yes. Thank you.
Yes. Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you. I see those. Thank you. Okay, you can put your hands down. Lord.
The Bible tells us that the angels in heaven rejoice when one person embraces Christ as Savior. We hear this morning, the joy in heaven for all these individuals that have raised their hand and said yes to Christ, Lord, make this the beginning of a life journey now where they grow to know you and to love you and to understand now the fledgling and then maturing steps of walking in the light.
Lord, thanks for being among us. Thanks for wanting us. Thanks for pursuing us. For bringing light into our darkness. That Advent is about hope. And we love you for it. In Jesus name, Amen.