Sermon
Everlasting Light
December 28, 2003
Pastor Donald Sheley

Would you take your notes? And the subject that we have chosen to talk about today is everlasting light. The ancient prophet announced: "The people walking in darkness have seen a great light; on those living in the land of the shadow of death a light has dawned." And that prophecy came to fulfillment in the person of Jesus Christ for when Jesus spoke again to the people, He said: "I am the light of the world. Whoever follows Me will never walk in darkness, but will have the light of life."

I am the light of the world -- was a tremendous claim. Now in order to understand the impact of that statement we have to understand some historical background for the occasion on which it happened. When we study the religion of the Jewish people, they had a multitude of festivals that they joined in throughout the year, and one of the outstanding festivals was known as the Festival of Tabernacles. It was celebrated because hundreds of years before the nation of Israel had made a journey from Egypt and they had lived in temporary quarters, in tents, and so to celebrate their escape from Egypt and their trip to the Promised Land they would come to Jerusalem and there they would build booths.

And they were going to be there for eight days, and they would come by the tens of thousands. Now that's an amazing thing because Jerusalem was no larger then than our little city of San Bruno. But Josephus, the great historian, tells us that on occasions there were over 2 million people. Can you imagine 2 million people in San Bruno? All at once? But Jerusalem became that place where everybody decided: I'm going to go and I'm going to join in the festival. In fact, they were required if they were of a certain age. So they would build their little booths and it lasted eight days.

And on the very first morning of the first day of the festival it started with a lot of excitement because the priest would go down to the Pool of Siloam, he'd take his pitcher, dip his pitcher in the pool and then he would march through the city and they would pour that water up on the altar and the festival now began.

During the day they constructed these four large candelabras, and I think the historians tell us they were between 40 to 70 feet tall. They had to have ladders to get up to the vessels in order to put the oil in. And so they chose the youngest of the priests to climb those ladders with a pitcher of oil in their hands, and they would take that pitcher and pour it into the vessel at the top of the candelabra, and what they used for a wick was interesting. They took the priest's old clothes and they would wind them up and they put them in that vessel and then light them afire and that became the wick.

Those candelabras burned so brightly. At that time Jerusalem was only a village, but historians tell us that the light was so bright from those four candelabras that every home in the little village of Jerusalem was filled with light. It was called The Illumination of the Temple. Now when dusk settled they started the process of lighting those candelabras, and then when darkness came those that were considered the most spiritual of the men that were there started singing and started dancing. And they danced until dawn singing the great psalms that we now read from the book of Psalms. But it was a marvelous day of celebration and all of Jerusalem was lit by the light, and it was in that setting that Jesus stood and said, I am the light of the world.

In our notes midway down on the page I suggest that what Jesus is saying is:
You have seen the blaze of the Temple illuminations piercing the darkness of the night... and I AM THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD, for the man who follows Me there will be light, not only for one exciting night, but for all the pathway of life. The light in the Temple is a brilliant light, but in the end it flickers and dies. I am the Light which lasts for ever!

Now of course in saying that, he brought tremendous irritation among the religious leaders. In fact, they met him with hostility. Why? Because light, the word light, was especially associated in Jewish thought and language with God. In Psalm 27 it says, "The Lord is my LIGHT." In Isaiah 60:19, "The Lord will be your everlasting LIGHT." In Job 29, "By His LIGHT I walked through darkness," and Micah says, "When I sit in darkness the Lord will be a LIGHT to me."

So you can understand...you're a Jewish worshiper there at the festival and when the announcement is made that the light has come, immediately they realize that Jesus is making a claim to be the Messiah. The Rabbis declared that the name of the Messiah was light, and so when Jesus claimed to be the 'light of the world', He was making the highest claim that one could make. Now the Jews insisted that a statement such as Jesus made could not be regarded as accurate because it was backed by insufficient witness, for Jewish law stated that any statement must be founded on the evidence of two witnesses before it could be regarded as true. But for Jesus, His witness was enough, for He was so aware of His closeness to God that He needed no other authority for His claims. So there's the setting. The lights of those candelabras beaming and Jesus says, I am the light of the world.

Now the opposite of light is darkness, and you'll find this theme. When darkness is referred to in the Bible it speaks of spiritual ignorance, it speaks of not knowing God, not understanding spiritual things. Look at what it says -- Psalm 82:5 says, "They know nothing, they understand nothing. They walk about in darkness; all the foundations of the earth are shaken." And Proverbs says, "But the way of the wicked is like deep darkness; they do not know what makes them stumble."

Isaiah says, "So justice is far from us, and righteousness does not reach us. We look for light, but all is darkness; for brightness, but we walk in deep shadows." Jeremiah says, "Therefore their path will become slippery; they will be banished to darkness and there they will fall." Isaiah says, "Like the blind we grope along the wall, feeling our way like men without eyes. At midday we stumble as if it were twilight; among the strong, we are like the dead" (Isaiah 59:10).

Paul writes, "The god of this age has blinded the minds of unbelievers, so that they cannot see the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God." And he writes to the Ephesians, "They are darkened in their understanding and separated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them due to the hardening of their hearts." And Jesus said, "But if your eyes are bad, your whole body will be full of darkness. If then the light within you is darkness, how great is that darkness."

Now move quickly with me to page 3. I want to cover some thoughts with you. So darkness speaks of spiritual ignorance, and Jesus the light of the world makes the claim to be the Messiah. And we go back to that passage found in Matthew which also we quoted from the Old Testament, "The people that sat in darkness have seen a great light."

Now for us to understand that one phrase, again, we have to go to history. You'll notice that I enjoy history because I think when you put truth in the context of its historical setting it becomes very, very vivid. This phrase says they sat in darkness -- a people, a nation. You go back and realize that the time span between the Old Testament, the book of Malachi, and the New Testament, the book of Matthew, is 400 years. Historians refer to it as the 400 silent years. There was no prophet. There was no voice from God. Heaven was silent -- 400 years!

But God was at work with a nation. He had told Daniel and Daniel had written down prophecies that were very precise, and in Daniel's prophecies it was stated that the nation of Israel would be captured by kingdom after kingdom, and that's the way it was. We go back 530 and some odd years before Christ and we have the Persian Empire and they've conquered the world, and as a result they take over Palestine. But they were quite generous towards the Jewish people and they even sent them back from Babylon to build the wall and the temple.

But then after 200 years of the Persian Empire, in the year of 332 a man comes on the scene by the name of Alexander the Great. He's a Greek warrior and his goal is to capture the world. I think he was only 33 years of age when he had captured all of the known world, in fact, the historians tell us that he sat down in his tent and he cried at the age of 33 because he had no more worlds to conquer. But he had a goal. He wanted the entire world to speak Greek, and he wanted the entire world to believe the philosophers of Greece, and it was called Hellenization. He wanted to Hellenize all the world after conquering them.

He only lived for about three years and died shortly thereafter, but that was his goal. He wanted everybody to be the same, speak the same language and believe the same philosophies. This policy, of course, carried on by Alexander's successors after he died was as dangerous to the religion of Israel as the cult of Baal, because the Greek way of life was attractive, sophisticated and humanly appealing, but it was utterly ungodly.

Now when Alexander the Great died his generals divided up his empire, and, of course, one took over the land of Palestine. Again, there was the allowing of certain religious freedom, but they were still controlled. Then a sad day happened. In the year of 198 B.C., nearly 200 years before Christ, a man by the name of Antiochus Epiphanes; he was brutal and he hated the Jewish people. He took over the land of Palestine. He ordered them to forget their own religion and to turn to the philosophies of the Greek gods.

He kept them from keeping their laws. He did not allow them to observe the Sabbaths any longer. All of their festivals were discontinued, and he took the book of the Torah, which was the book of God, the book of divine instruction, and he had it destroyed. Then he had altars built throughout the land and on those altars he had all kinds of offerings, and he even took and offered swine, which of course was totally against Jewish religion. He desecrated, desecrated everything that was religious.

Here you have a nation that was blessed by God, led through the wilderness, talked to by prophets, and now you've got 400 years of silence. Heaven isn't talking. Rulers have robbed them of all of their faith, burned their Bible, and religion was silent.

About the year 160 Mathathias who was a priest said I'm not going to put up with this any longer. He has five sons, and he has a 23-year war and ultimately drives out Epiphanes and the priests take over, and they control Palestine until the year of 63 B.C. when Pompeii the Roman General came in and conquered Jerusalem. But the sad thing about those priests they had lived under the Hellenization of their leaders for so long they lost the sacredness of their religion, the religious leaders became corrupt, people didn't want to go to church, the synagogue was silent, and religion was almost gone -- a few flickers.

Little Anna according to Luke has been in the temple praying, waiting for the coming of the Messiah. There's old Zacharias. He's been promised that he would not die until he saw Emanuel. There were just slight flickers, but it was a land that sat in darkness.

Think with me folks -- if in America there were no churches or if there were, they would have been nailed shut, no Bibles, no Sunday services to go to like we enjoy coming to, and religion died in America.

I was talking to Ray just before one of our services. He said, you know pastor, I live in Canada; here's a nation going into darkness very, very rapidly. In fact, there's a law being readied for action where they're going to outlaw the Bible as a book of hatred. Darkness is coming. So that line that says, people who sat in darkness as a nation without a faith. And the Bible says they sat in darkness then they saw great light.

You see, Jesus being the light of the world comes and His blessings and His benefits to our world are immense, but let me name just a few of them. First of all He comes to reveal God. When you go back in Greek literature in the history of around the time of Christ, they did not have a concept of God. They couldn't put their thoughts together. How you define God? What is God like?

In fact Paul reaches into Greek literature and he pulls out the word logos because in a Greek philosophical mind they said, somebody runs this world, but we don't know who it is so we'll call him logos. Somebody sets the charts of the seasons. We don't know who it is, but it's logos. And what John says that logos that you've talked about in your philosophy is none other than Jesus Christ. You see they didn't know how to define God. In fact, they said if you knew how to define him you couldn't explain him to anybody else.

Jesus comes and He's God in the flesh. Emanuel with us! God with us, and because of Jesus we know what God is like. We know Him as being lovingly. We know Him as being merciful, being gracious, being powerful and being personal. That was something so strange in the times of Christ. But Jesus comes and you and I don't question what God is like because Jesus said, if you have seen Me, you have seen the Father. And in knowing Jesus, we know God. What a priceless privilege to know God; to know Him and His love. Not only that -- Jesus came to take away the fear of death.

Again you go back into all of that Hellenization and the teachings of the Greeks, and you'll find the things they feared most was dying. And why? Because the gods they had to face were the gods they never liked during their lifetime because their gods were always angry at them. Why die to meet one of those God that has treated me like he has? So there was tremendous fear of dying.

When Jesus came He said I am the resurrection and the life. If you'll follow Me you'll walk in the light, and you'll have life. One of the great blessings you and I enjoy as Christians is knowing that when we close our eyes in death we're going to spend eternity in His eternal presence. To know that is a marvelous, marvelous gift. So Jesus came not only to show the world what God is like, but He came to take away the fear of dying. But you say the fear of dying? I think all of us have a natural fear of dying.

One comedian says, I don't mind death but I don't want to be there when it happens. No, it's not natural for us to die. We were made to live. But there's one thing very true -- when we pass through the portals of death, we'll be with our wonderful Savior. That's something that they didn't know before Jesus came.

Now, one other item, and that is, light is always symbolic of that which guides. When you're out in the darkness turn on a flashlight and that light will guide you to your destination. Jesus came to be our guide through life because He said if you walk without Christ you walk in darkness, you grope as people clinging to a wall. You don't know where you're going. And that's true if a person does not believe in Jesus Christ, life is just something you work out every day. It's without purpose. It's without plan. It's without eternal destiny, and you wrestle with every problem of life and you do it as a person.

When you're Christian you can believe with all your heart that all things are going to work together for good to those who love God; that He's guiding our lives. The steps of a righteous man are ordered by the Lord. And so in knowing Jesus I don't know about tomorrow, but I know who holds tomorrow and He's the one who holds my hand. So Jesus the light of the world came to reveal God to us, to take away the fear of the world to come, and to guide us through this life in a away that we end up on heaven's shores. Aren't you glad we have the light of life?

But just a minute, Jesus said as long as I'm in the world I am the light of the world. He left. And then He says you are the light of the world. When Jesus left this world He passed the baton to us. Not that there's light in us, but He intended for our lives to reflect Him. And so you and I have a tremendous assignment that comes with the Christmas message. He was the light of the world and now He's assigned us the task of being the light in our world.

You know if you sit here today and you've never turned your life over to Jesus Christ, the darkness that surrounds your soul is just as dark as the darkness that surrounded the nation of Israel. And the way that darkness flees is to go to the light. You know there's something very amazing about light...you can walk into the darkest room and turn on a very small light and the darkness never puts out the light. Darkness has no power over light. And that's why it says in John and the light was never extinguished. The world has tried over and over again to get rid of Christian faith and all that Jesus taught. It never succeeds because He is the light that will never go out.

And I turned to the back page of my Bible, and do you know what I found? When I get to heaven there'll be no need for a light there because He's going to be the light when I arrive there. Amen?

Lord Jesus, thank you for being the light of our life, the light of the world; and thank you for revealing to all of us the very nature, the loveliness, the majesty of God. Thank you for taking us out of our darkness, translating us into the kingdom of light, putting a peace within our heart that passeth all understanding. Set a guide on our path to that eternal shore. Thank you. Thank you, O light of the world. Amen. God bless you all. Have a wonderful day.