Seeing Christ as the Great Light in Isaiah 9:2



From our walk on the first day of Spring

     Have you ever wondered why the first thing God said in Genesis was "Let there be light?"  I found the answer in chapter 37 of the Life-Study of Isaiah.  Listen to this concise, Einstein sounding sentence—“In the entire universe, light is the key to life.”  I also read in this chapter that if the sun didn’t shine for just 3 weeks many things would die.  I know I feel more energetic when it’s sunny.  One time I did a Google search on the benefits of sunlight, and I was impressed.  

      Anyway back to where I was going with all of this.  Light in the Bible and in most literature usually symbolizes God or some noble characteristic of God. And anything dark or sinister usually symbolizes something evil. And because of the fall there’s now something called spiritual darkness.  That’s no doubt because Satan God's enemy is the prince of darkness.  Keep this in mind when you read Isaiah 9:2 which says: ”… The people who walked in the darkness have seen a great light; upon those who dwell in the land of the shadow of death light has shined.”

    God showed Isaiah hundreds of years before God's incarnation that Christ would come as that light.  This is echoed again in Matthew 4:16 "The people sitting in darkness have seen a great light: and those sitting in the region and shadow of death, to them light has risen."

     And John clearly tells us in his gospel that Jesus is the true light:   "In Him was life, and the life was the light of men. And the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it. (John 1:4-5)"  In the book of Colossians Paul tells us that when we're saved we're transferred out of the authority of darkness and into the kingdom of the Son of His love (Colossians 1:13). I enjoyed reading Witness Lee’s testimony  on page 255 about how he experienced Christ’s shining into him when he got saved:

Our salvation was a shining of Christ as the great light upon us.  When He shined upon us, we were saved….By His shining, darkness is gone. When darkness is gone, everything negative is gone. Before I was saved as a teenager, my mother had a difficult time dealing with me, but when I was nineteen years old, Christ shined upon me. My love for the things of the world was gone. My mother wondered what had happened to me. Even though many outward negative things were dealt with, many inward negative things remained within me. This is why we need more shining.  The inner shining is Christ’s saving” (Lee, Witness. Life-Study of Isaiah. Anaheim:  Living Stream Ministry, 1994 Print).

  He brings out in this chapter when people's hearts are enlightened, they open up  to receive the Lord.  This puts a prayer in my heart that the Lord would shine into the hearts of all the people around us!