The Coming Of The King; How Is Your Life Governed Light Or Dark? Series

IThe coming of the King; how is your life governed light or dark?

Scipture: Isaiah 9:1-7

I see the King of Glory [(Brooke Fraser) Check out this song, brilliant!]

I see the king of glory

Coming on the clouds with fire

The whole earth shakes, the whole earth shakes

I see his love and mercy

Washing over all our sin

The people sing, the people sing

Hosanna, hosanna

Hosanna in the highest

I see a generation

Rising up to take the place

With selfless faith, with selfless faith

I see a new revival

Starting as we pray and seek

We’re on our knees, we’re on our knees

Heal my heart and make it clean

Open up my eyes to the things unseen

Show me how to love like you have loved me

Break my heart for what breaks yours

Everything I am for your kingdom’s cause

As I walk from earth into eternity.

What a great picture of the coming of the King of Heaven, The Messiah who would come and set his people free from oppression and their physical burdens, giving them great power to defeat their sins and stop their selfishness and wrong way of living.

Beautiful words, allowing ourselves to have our hearts broken for the things that break the heart of God, you have sung those words are you ready to have your hearts broken? This is more than some pretty tune, it is a prayer. Is this how you see God working in your lives? For this is how God will work and has worked since Adam.

If we allow him full access he will take it and our lives will be enriched beyond our imagining, but in ways that will not likely be physical, the enriching is almost always spiritual, it is what is ongoing and everlasting for that is what remains, “the Spiritual”.

Now the Hebrew people some 740 years before Jesus was born had a few dramas going on in their lives and these weren’t Coro Street / Shortland Street or even Days of our lives type dramas these were really nasty dramas.

Because of the way that had acted, The Kingdom of Israel had been divided into two; Israel in the north and Judah in the south. Without going into the nitty gritty of the whole thing, some alliances had been made with foreign nations. So we have a picture of the Hebrew people divided and siding with different foreign superpowers. At this time the superpower of Assyria took control of the Northern kingdom… life for people under this foreign oppressor became a huge big bucket of crud. Life was miserable to the max!

Why, because of sin. We see the old hardy annual with the Hebrew people, they sinned, God judged them; they then had the opportunity to realise their sins and repent coming into God’s grace. The cycle was as we know sin, judgment, grace.

How was this to happen? How would they come into God’s grace, and continue in his grace once and for all?

The Chosen One, The Messiah the one we refer to in English as The Christ!

Let’s look at the words of Isaiah and see what he says about this Messiah bloke!

Read (Isaiah 9:1-7).

It all sounds very much like the story of a great king. Let’s have a look at the various verses and see what God was saying to these people. And what he is saying to us today.

Looking at verses one and two, we see that the gloom will be no more, that the mess that they were currently wallowing in would cease. That those who were at this time walking in darkness would see a great light… could this be ‘The Light of The World’? In the future he will honor Galilee of the Gentiles, by the way of the sea, along the Jordan. How was this to be fulfilled?

Let’s have a look at a couple of passages from Matthews’s gospel, roughly 750 years later this happened.

“As Jesus was walking beside the Sea of Galilee he saw two brothers, Simon called Peter and his brother Andrew. They were casting a net into the lake, for they were fishermen. ‘Come follow me,‘ Jesus said,…” (Matthew 4:18-19a) and this “Large crowds from Galilee, the Decapolis, Jerusalem, Judea and the region across the Jordan followed him.” (Matthew 4:25) Could it be that Jesus is the Great Light?

If we look at verse three of Isaiah chapter nine we see that this is a leader whose nation will increase, it is thought that the ‘You’ mentioned here is God the Father. Also that ‘the great light’ will cause people to rejoice like the joy at a harvest or in the victory of battle, things that we are not overly familiar with now days, but this would be a little like the joy of a massive bonus pay or winning the world cup rugby William Ellis trophy and being on the team; great rejoicing!