FINDING THE LIGHT ON A DARK NIGHT
I’ve told you about my telescope before. My Visa card has these reward points with which you can redeem for various items. I traded mine in for a refracting telescope. It has always been my desire to gaze at the moon and the stars and just observe their beauty.
Well a few weeks ago when after several cloudy days the moon came out I got my chance. If you have never used a telescope before you might think it was as easy as pointing the instrument towards the moon and looking into the eyepiece. That’s what I thought. I was wrong.
The moon was full and bright but I couldn’t find it in the eyepiece. There’s a little star finder scope on the top but that didn’t help either; I think it needed alignment. Swinging the telescope up, down, left and right, it occurred to me that this should not be that hard. Of course it wasn’t my fault, the scope must be broken.
Finally I took out the eyepiece and looked at the mirror inside and saw a flicker of light. Moving the scope slightly I found the moon and centered the scope on it. Slipping the eyepiece back in, I finally observed the elusive moon in all its glory. But in only a minute the moon moved a significant distance out of range and I was surprised that I had to retrain the telescope. I spent a good hour doing this until the moon was out of range.
On the dark night of the soul, when hearts are at their lowest and your zeal is flagging, how do you find the light? The Bible is our telescope for finding God. Like the moon it may seem obvious where God is, yet finding the Scripture that meets our needs, that tells us about God in a way that we need him, can be elusive. We may not even have the energy to look.
When night seemed to be darkest, Judah was wondering if they would ever see the light of dawn. At that point God gave Isaiah a song – the Song of the Servant. The words of this song told not how to find the light but how the light would find you.
1. Are you a bruised reed?
The song begins by introducing the servant of the Lord: “Here is my servant, whom I uphold, my chosen one in whom I delight; I will put my Spirit on him and he will bring justice to the nations” (v. 1).
There is an immediate question of who the servant might be. Was Yahweh talking about Israel? He has at times referred to them as his servant (in the singular). Yet as we read on we find that the servant of the Lord is an ideal figure. Where Israel has failed and been spiritually weak, we don’t get that impression of the servant of the Lord. In fact, the servant is God’s answer to their weakness and failure.
Whoever he is, his mission is clear: he will bring justice to the nations. What is this justice? We think of justice as being fairness. Justice is more than fairness, it is nothing less than putting God’s plans for his people into full effect and to make known the truth about the LORD. We could say that justice is a summary word for “revealed truth.” Everything that is not of Yahweh, that is not godly, is unjust. So to know Yahweh is to know justice.
The servant of the LORD will reveal God to the people. And this is how he will do it: “He will not cry out, or raise his voice in the streets” (v. 2). His ministry will be quiet, unaggressive, and really unthreatening. Then it says, “A bruised reed he will not break, and a smoldering wick he will not snuff out” (v. 3a). What is the servant of the LORD saying about God with reeds and wicks?
A bruised reed he will not break. What are bruised reeds good for? Reeds would be common along the Sea of Galilee. They are hollow stemmed and quite fragile. All it would take to bruise or break them is a strong wind or a fisherman’s boat coming to shore.
When I thought of reeds I wondered what good they were anyways. Then I remembered that we used to use them on the mouthpieces of clarinets and saxophones. You would wet your reed, slip it into the mouthpiece and blow. If it was cracked however, it was no good – the sound would be distorted. You would throw it away.
Isaiah’s song is talking about people though. Bruised reeds he will not break and throw away. Who of us thinks they are a bruised reed? Life has a way of knocking us down. Society can declare us bruised and unusable and we tend to believe it. We easily subscribe to the false idea that we are useless.
The servant of the LORD doesn’t see us that way. He binds the broken parts and heals the bruised among us. Consider the Leper (Mt 8:1-4) who came to Jesus. Everyone said he was unclean, cast off and shunned. Standing a proper distance so as not to come too close he said to Jesus, “If you are willing you can make me clean.” Jesus reached out and touched the untouchable.
A demon-possessed man, naked and tormented by his past and his sins, came before Jesus. He was bound by the demons but Jesus spoke and released him from his bondage.
A woman caught in adultery was about to be stoned. The Jews were legally in their rights to stone her. But Jesus touched her and forgave her sins.
A woman who had been bleeding for twelve years, weakened by her sickness, came up in a crowd and touched Jesus. He turned and confronted her, not to scold her, but to touch her heart as well as her body.
These are the bruised reeds Jesus came to touch. Are there untouchables among us? Jesus ate with tax collectors and sinners; I believe he would eat with homosexuals too. Are there sins that torment you still? Has society put a label keeping you from living? Are you sick of being sick?
Are you a smoldering wick?
In those days flax was used as a wick. As the oil ran out, the light would go dim in the house. Before it would go out and fill the room with smoke, the man or woman of the house would get up and snuff it out and go to bed.
Who are these smoldering wicks? These are people who have started out strong with the LORD and have had a good relationship with him. They were burning brightly, on fire for God. But as time goes by, the relationship starts to flicker and go faint. Why do we burn low? We may have neglected our time with God, talking to him in prayer or listening to him in the Word. We may have experienced disappointment in our prayers. Or somehow Church people or Church itself has taken the life out of us.
Jesus does not snuff you out. You are not cast aside by Him. When your wick begins to smolder he comes, not to put us out and go to bed, but to trim the wick, add some oil, and fan the flame. He comes to bring you back. Jesus gives us his oil. In the OT oil represents the Holy Spirit. With the Holy Spirit freshening your life you will not burn out.
Yes the servant of the LORD is Jesus. And his mission was to reveal God’s justice. That’s kind of odd isn’t it? No, not really. He came to reveal the truth about God. Our God does not want to snuff you out but bring you back to himself.
2. Are you sitting in the dark?
To reveal is to shed light on. Light is essential to revelation. When I come home from hockey on Monday nights and am loathe turning on the lights for fear of waking anyone, I must grope in the dark for the bed corners. This can be a painful experience. Light shows the way.
Isaiah’s song says this: “This is what God the LORD says – he who created the heavens and stretched them out, who spread out the earth and all that comes out of it, who gives breath to its people, and life to those who walk on it…” (v. 5). Isaiah appeals to creation for what he says next. Why would he do that? After God created the heavens and the earth, what did he create next? God said, “Let there be light” (Gen 1:3). The verbs of our verse describe the 4-fold unchanging relationship between the LORD and the created order. God is light and in him is no darkness at all.
It makes sense then that the mission of the servant of the Lord involves light. “I, the LORD, have called you in righteousness; I will take hold of your hand. I will keep you and will make you to be a covenant for the people and a light for the Gentiles, to open eyes that are blind, to free captives from prison and to release from the dungeon those who sit in darkness” (6-7).
The Lord speaks to his servant here and says that he will make the servant a light for those in darkness. What is darkness? There is an interesting email going around that depicts a debate between a professor and a student. The student asks the professor if there is such a thing as darkness. The professor says there is. But the student replies that there isn’t. Darkness is not something; it is the absence of something. You can have low light, normal light, bright light, flash light, but if you have no light constantly you have nothing and its called darkness. In reality, darkness isn’t. If it were you would be able to make darkness darker.
Darkness is a metaphor for the absence of a relationship with God. Darkness can also be a metaphor for the feeling that God is not present when in reality he never left. That is the dark night of the soul, the time when a person feels abandoned and spiritually, emotionally or even mentally impoverished.
For those who have experienced depression, this is their world. They are literally blind to God, they are like a prisoner in a dungeon, and they are sitting in darkness. While others say “snap out of it” or “pull up your boots” they are actually largely unable to do so.
In times like that we need the hope of light. If you have ever been in a very dark room you know the feeling of disorientation. You even begin to imagine you see things. A light would reveal what is really there or isn’t there and you would be free from fear and bondage.
In the NT light often precedes a great thing of God. When Peter was in prison in Acts 12 people were praying for him. “Suddenly an angel of the Lord appeared and a light shone in the cell. He struck Peter on the side and woke him up. ‘Quick, get up!’ he said, and the chains fell off Peter’s wrists” (Acts 12:7).
Jesus is the light and by that essence is our hope in what we call a dark world. Jesus said, “I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness, but will have the light of life” (John 8:12). The oppression of spiritually dry times or mental depression are dark times. But with Jesus as our light we have a direction to help us out of that darkness. He is our hope when nothing else makes sense.
3. Are you longing for God?
In the final part of the song, God speaks to his servant with this strong assurance: “I am the LORD; that is my name! I will not give my glory to another or my praise to idols” (v. 8).
Why such a bold statement here? In the previous chapter God challenged the people to bring their idols out and have them perform some feat to show that they were alive. Do something good or bad. Do anything, God challenges. But they can’t because these idols are just useless pieces of wood or stone. And yet people give these lifeless idols glory and honor as if they were something more than wood or stone.
Idols are nothing at all. People lift up objects or other people as an icon of perfection or as a desire of something they would like to be. American Idol appeals to singers with the prospect of fame and money. Hollywood has been overly glamorized so that society imagines actors as living life on top. And yet we have seen only recently another life cut short, a tragedy spawned by the lifestyle that is so idolized. Heath Ledger was only 28.
What is it that people really want? Life…life that is truly life. John, whose favorite theme in his gospel and his letters was light, said, “In (Jesus) was life, and that life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, but the darkness has not understood it” (John 1:4-5).
This is why God, using his proper name, said “I am Yahweh; that is my name! I will not give my glory to another…” For there is no life or light apart from Yahweh. But longing for God, the people of Jerusalem, the people of the whole world, could not train their telescopes on God to understand him, to reach him or to know him…
Till Jesus came. Paul understood all this when he said, “For God, who said, ‘Let light shine out of darkness,’ made his light shine in our hearts to give us the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ” (2 Cor. 4:6). Yahweh gives his glory to no one. But here we see the intimate connection between Father and Son. The Son is so wrapped up in the Father that there is no difference, except that Jesus walked among us. And in his face, the face of Jesus, we have seen the glory of God. That light of knowledge shines in our hearts. It shines so that we are never really ever in darkness again, though we may feel it, though our days may seem dreary. We know Jesus therefore we know God therefore we know life and therefore we have the light that saves us.
“See the former things have taken place, and new things I declare; before they spring into being I announce them to you” (v. 9). Can you hear Paul echoing this saying “the old life is gone; you are a new creation”?
Are you longing for God? All we need to do is step into the light. “…if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus, his Son, purifies us from all sin” (1 John 1:7). Do you want more instructions? There are no more. Walk in the steps of Jesus, follow his life, and you will walk right into the light.
Conclusion
When did Jesus rise from the dead? Early in the morning, at the dawn of a new day. A fresh light burst over the horizon and broke the power of darkness.
I may have told you this story in passing or from the pulpit but I will tell it again. Years ago when an EMC team went to Paraguay we were housed in an abandoned building at La Esperanza. There was no electricity thus there were no lights. Since it was winter in July the nights got pretty dark.
Coming down with a cold I took some cold medicine, or so the nurse told me it was. I crawled into my sleeping bag and fell asleep. But some time in the night I woke with a sudden fear. My sleeping bag was twisted around me and I panicked. It was so dark I could not see my hand in front of my face. At that point I did not remember where I was.
Thankfully the other guys woke up and fumbled for a flashlight and calmed me down. They reminded me where I was. Later that night one of the guys’ alarm clock went off. The flashlight was out of reach so the guys starting hitting the floor where the clock was supposed to be. They got it.
In the morning near where the alarm clock sat was a dead scorpion, apparently killed in the incident.
Light was the only thing that gave me assurance on a dark night. Light would have revealed the dangers near the alarm clock. Light is what makes the difference, gives direction and shows the way.
Jesus is the light. And you don’t have to go looking for him because he has found you.
AMEN
