CHAPTER 1
A LIGHT HAS DAWNED
The people walking in darkness have seen a great light; on those living in the land of deep darkness a light has dawned. . . . Every warrior’s boot used in battle and every garment rolled in blood will be destined for burning, will be fuel for the fire. For to us a child is born, to us a son is given, and the government will be on his shoulders. And he will be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace. Of the greatness of his government and peace there will be no end.
—Isaiah 9:2,5–7
One of the first indications of the Christmas season is the appearance of lights. Lights on trees, candles in windows, radiance everywhere. The Christmas lights of New York City delight even blasé residents. Everything seems to be wrapped in millions and millions of stars. This is appropriate, because December 25 follows the darkest time of the year in the Mediterranean world and Europe, where Christmas celebrations took shape. But the lights are not just decorative; they are symbolic.
THE DARKNESS OF THE WORLD
No matter what you want to do in a room, you have to first turn on the light, or you can’t see to do anything else. Christmas contains many spiritual truths, but it will be hard to grasp the others unless we grasp this one first. That is, that the world is a dark place, and we will never find our way or see reality unless Jesus is our Light. Matthew, quoting Isaiah 9:1–2, tells us “the people living in darkness have seen a great light; on those living in the land of the shadow of death a light has dawned” (Matthew 4:16). John says about Jesus: “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” (John 1:9–10).
How is the world “dark”? In the Bible the word “darkness” refers to both evil and ignorance. It means first that the world is filled with evil and untold suffering. Look at what was happening at the time of the birth of Jesus—violence, injustice, abuse of power, homelessness, refugees fleeing oppression, families ripped apart, and bottomless grief. Sounds exactly like today.
The other way our world is “in the dark” is that no one knows enough to cure the evil and suffering in it. Isaiah 9:2, “The people walking in darkness have seen a great light,” is a famous Christmas text, enshrined in Handel’s Messiah as one of the prophecies of the birth of Jesus. It is the end of Isaiah 8, however, that explains why we need the light from God. In verses 19–20 we see people consulting mediums and magicians instead of God. Then the chapter ends: “Distressed and hungry, they will roam through the land. . . . They will look toward the earth and see only distress and darkness and fearful gloom” (verses 21–22).
What is going on here? They are “looking toward the earth” and to human resources to fix the world. They are looking to their experts, to the mystics, to the scholars, for solutions. Yes, they say, we are in darkness, but we can overcome it ourselves. People make the same claim today. Some look more to the state, some more to the market, and everyone looks to technology. Yet they share the identical assumption. Things are dark but we believe we can end that darkness with intellect and innovation.
Years ago, I read an ad in the New York Times that said, “The meaning of Christmas is that love will triumph and that we will be able to put together a world of unity and peace.” In other words, we have the light within us, and so we are the ones who can dispel the darkness of the world. We can overcome poverty, injustice, violence, and evil. If we work together, we can create a “world of unity and peace.”
Can we? One of the most thoughtful world leaders of the late twentieth century was Václav Havel, the first president of the Czech Republic. He had a unique vantage point from which to peer deeply into both socialism and capitalism, and he was not optimistic that either would, by itself, solve the greatest human problems. He knew that science unguided by moral principles had given us the Holocaust. He concluded that neither technology nor the state nor the market alone could save us from nuclear conflict, ethnic violence, or environmental degradation. “‘Pursuit of the good life will not help humanity save itself, nor is democracy alone enough,’ [Havel] said. ‘A turning to and seeking of . . . God, is needed.’”1 The human race constantly forgets, he added, that “he is not God.”2
THE REALISM OF CHRISTMAS
Despite the sincerity of the Times advertiser, the message of Christmas is not that “we will be able to put together a world of unity and peace.” Actually, it is the exact opposite. Havel puts it well—humanity cannot save itself. In fact, he argues, the belief that we can save ourselves—that some political system or ideology can fix human problems—has only led to more darkness. If, like the philosopher Bertrand Russell, you don’t believe there is any God or supernatural, transcendent dimension to reality at all, and you turn to science to illuminate you, things end up looking even darker:
Such, in outline, but even more purposeless, more void of meaning, is the world which Science presents for our belief. . . . That Man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labors of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man’s achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins . . . Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul’s habitation henceforth be safely built.3
That is a dark view indeed! And it confirms what we saw in Isaiah 8, that if we look only to the earth and human resources, the darkness only gets worse.
Christmas, therefore, is the most unsentimental, realistic way of looking at life. It does not say, “Cheer up! If we all pull together we can make the world a better place.” The Bible never counsels indifference to the forces of darkness, only resistance, but it supports no illusions that we can defeat them ourselves. Christianity does not agree with the optimistic thinkers who say, “We can fix things if we try hard enough.” Nor does it agree with the pessimists who see only a dystopian future. The message of Christianity is, instead, “Things really are this bad, and we can’t heal or save ourselves. Things really are this dark—nevertheless, there is hope.” The Christmas message is that “on those living in the land of deep darkness a light has dawned.” Notice that it doesn’t say from the world a light has sprung, but upon the world a light has dawned. It has come from outside. There is light outside of this world, and Jesus has brought that light to save us; indeed, he is the Light (John 8:12).
THE MEANING OF LIGHT
When Isaiah speaks of God’s light “dawning” on a dark world, he is using the sun as a symbol. Sunlight brings life, truth, and beauty.
The sun gives us life. If the sun went out, we would freeze. The sun is the source of all life. So too the Bible says that only in God do we “live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28). We exist only because he is upholding us, keeping us together every moment. You are borrowing your being from him. This is true not only of your physical body but also of your spirit, your soul. According to the Bible, we have lost the original, full, right relationship with God we had at the beginning (Genesis 3:1–24). That is the reason we will eventually know physical death, and it is why we experience spiritual death now—loss of meaning and hope, addictive, inordinate desires, deep discontent that can’t be satisfied, shame and struggles with identity, and an inability to change.
The sun shows us the truth. If you drive a car at night without your headlights on, you will probably crash. Why? Light reveals the truth of things, how they really are, and you will not have enough truth to steer the car safely. So too the Bible says God is the source of all truth (1 John 1:5–6). At one level, the only reason you can know anything is because of God. God made your mind and your cognitive faculties. At another level, we can’t possibly know who God is unless he reveals it to us, which he does in the Bible. Only through him does your reasoning capacity work, and only through his Word can you truly understand who he is and, therefore, who you are, his creation.
The sun is beautiful. Light is dazzling and gives joy. That is true literally. In places where there are only a few hours of daylight at certain times of the year, many suffer from depression. We need light for joy. God is the source of all beauty and joy. St. Augustine famously said, “Our hearts are restless until they find their rest in thee” (Confessions 1.1.1). Augustine believed that even when you seem to be enjoying something else, God is the actual source of your joy. The thing you love is from him and is lovely because it bears his signature. All joy is really found in God, and anything you do enjoy is derivative, because what you are really looking for is him, whether you know it or not.
THE DAWNING OF THE LIGHT
God alone, then, has the life, truth, and joy that we lack and cannot generate ourselves. How can this divine light “dawn” or, as Isaiah 9 says, literally “flash” upon us? Verses 6 and 7, the most well-known verses of the chapter, answer with stunning directness. The text tells us the light has come “for to us a child is born.” This child brings it, because he is “Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.” It is remarkable that the four titles applied to this child belong to God alone. He is the Mighty God. He is the Everlasting Father, which means he is the Creator, and yet he is born. There’s nothing like this claim in any of the other major religions. He is a human being. However, he is not just some kind of avatar of the divine principle. He is God!
It’s almost too limiting to say that we “celebrate” this at Christmas. We stare dumbstruck, lost in wonder, love, and praise. In the rest of this book we will be touching on the numerous implications of God being born into our world. Let’s mention only two here at the start.
First of all, if Jesus Christ is really Mighty God and Everlasting Father, you can’t just like him. In the Bible the people who actually saw and heard Jesus never reacted indifferently or even mildly. Once they realized what he was claiming about himself, either they were scared of him or furious with him or they knelt down before him and worshipped him. But nobody simply liked him. Nobody said, “He is so inspiring. He makes me want to live a better life.” If the baby born at Christmas is the Mighty God, then you must serve him completely. We will return to consider this implication in chapter 3.
Second, if Jesus is Wonderful Counselor and Prince of Peace, you should want to serve him. Why is he called a “counselor”? When you are going through something very difficult, it’s good to talk to someone who has walked the same path, who knows personally what you have been going through. If God has really been born in a manger, then we have something that no other religion even claims to have. It’s a God who truly understands you, from the inside of your experience. There’s no other religion that says God has suffered, that God had to be courageous, that he knows what it is like to be abandoned by friends, to be crushed by injustice, to be tortured and die. Christmas shows he knows what you’re going through. When you talk to him, he understands.
Dorothy Sayers, a British essayist and novelist, said this years ago:
The incarnation means that for whatever reason God chose to let us fall . . . to suffer, to be subject to sorrows 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.4
Isaiah calls him the Wonderful Counselor, which means he’s beautiful. And perhaps now we get a glimpse of why he is. He had the infinite highness of being the Mighty God, yet he became one of us, enmeshed in our condition, in order to know our darkness. He saved us by going to the cross, and he did it all voluntarily, freely, out of sheer love. That is beautiful. When we find something to be beautiful, not just a duty, we dwell on it and stand before it because it is satisfying in itself. And so the reason we should obey him, not simply because we have to but also because we want to, is that, in light of all he is and has done for us, he is wonderful.
In short, Jesus is the divine Light of the world, because he brings a new life to replace our spiritual deadness, because he shows us the truth that heals our spiritual blindness, and because he is the beauty that breaks our addictions to money, sex, and power. As Wonderful Counselor he walks with us even into and through the shadow of death (Matthew 4:16), where no other companion can go. He is a Light for us when all other lights go out.5
THE LIGHT OF GRACE
How, though, can this light become ours? Notice it doesn’t just say, “For to us a child is born.” It also says, “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 of grace.
Verse 5 hints at this too. 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.” This imagery means that the great victory over evil will not require our strength. We won’t need a warrior’s boot. We won’t need armor or a sword. Melt them down. Burn them up. Someone else will do your fighting for you. Who?
Isaiah doesn’t tell us here. You have to wait until you get into the “Servant Songs” of Isaiah 42–55, where the prophet points to a mysterious deliverer who is to come. About him it is said, “He was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was on him, and by his wounds we are healed” (Isaiah 53:5). When Jesus went to the cross, he paid the penalty for our sin. When we trust in Christ’s work on our behalf, rather than in our own moral efforts, God forgives and accepts us and implants his Holy Spirit in us to renew us from the inside out. This great salvation, this light that flashes upon you with all its new life, truth, and beauty, comes as a gift. The only way you can receive it is to admit it’s an undeserved grace.
Christmas is about receiving presents, but consider how challenging it is to receive certain kinds of gifts. Some gifts by their very nature make you swallow your pride. Imagine opening a present on Christmas morning from a friend—and it’s a dieting book. Then you take off another ribbon and wrapper and you find it is another book from another friend, Overcoming Selfishness. If you say to them, “Thank you so much,” you are in a sense admitting, “For indeed I am fat and obnoxious.” In other words, some gifts are hard to receive, because to do so is to admit you have flaws and weaknesses and you need help. Perhaps on some occasion you had a friend who figured out you were in financial trouble and came to you and offered a large sum of money to get you out of your predicament. If that has ever happened to you, you probably found that to receive the gift meant swallowing your pride.
There has never been a gift offered that makes you swallow your pride to the depths that the gift of Jesus Christ requires us to do. Christmas means that we are so lost, so unable to save ourselves, that nothing less than the death of the Son of God himself could save us. That means you are not somebody who can pull yourself together and live a moral and good life.
To accept the true Christmas gift, you have to admit you’re a sinner. You need to be saved by grace. You need to give up control of your life. That is descending lower than any of us really wants to go. Yet Jesus Christ’s greatness is seen in how far down he came to love us. Your spiritual regeneration and eventual greatness will be achieved by going down the same path. He descended into greatness, and the Bible says it’s only through repentance that you come into his light. C. S. Lewis puts it perfectly. In the incarnation, he says,
we catch sight of a new key principle—the power of the Higher, just in so far as it is truly Higher, to come down, the power of the greater to include the less. . . . Everywhere the great enters the little—its power to do so is almost the test of its greatness. In the Christian story God . . . comes down; down from the heights of absolute being into time and space, down into humanity; down further still, if embryologists are right, to recapitulate in the womb ancient and pre-human phases of life . . . down to the very roots and seabed of the Nature He has created. But He goes down to come up again and bring the whole ruined world up with Him. . . . [O]ne may think of a diver, first reducing himself to nakedness, then glancing in mid-air, then gone with a splash, vanished, rushing down through green and warm water into black and cold water, down through increasing pressure into the death-like region of ooze and slime and old decay; then up again, back to color and light, his lungs almost bursting, till suddenly he breaks surface again, holding in his hand the dripping, precious thing that he went down to recover.6
When Jesus died on the cross, darkness fell over the land (Matthew 27:45). The Light of the world descended into darkness in order to bring us into God’s beautiful light (1 Peter 2:9). The promises of Christmas cannot be discerned unless you first admit you can’t save yourself or even know yourself without the light of his unmerited grace in your life. This is the foundational truth from which we can proceed to learn the hidden meanings of Christmas.