Isaiah speaks of people who “walk in darkness” suddenly seeing “a great light.” He describes a land smothered by the shadow of death, then pierced by a dawning glow that no one saw coming. That is not just ancient poetry; it is our story. On this first day of December, as the days grow shorter and our hearts turn toward the coming of Christ, this promise confronts our gloom and invites us to step out of the night we’ve accepted as normal and into a Light we could never produce on our own.

A World That Forgot the Sun

Darkness in Scripture is more than the absence of information; it is the presence of sin, deception, and despair. Israel in Isaiah’s day had traded the living God for idols, and the result was moral confusion, political chaos, and deep spiritual misery. Their world looked advanced on the outside—but heaven called it “darkness.” That is uncomfortably familiar. Our generation is brilliant and connected, yet anxious, angry, and hollow. We are surrounded by screens that glow, yet souls that grope. Without God, we are like people trying to build cities under a midnight sky, pretending it’s daytime.

Into that reality, God reminds us who He is: “And this is the message we have heard from Him and announce to you: God is light, and in Him there is no darkness at all” (1 John 1:5). If God is light, then any life lived apart from Him must, by definition, be dark. Darkness is not just “out there” in the culture; it is the selfishness, lust, bitterness, and unbelief lodged in every human heart. We do not merely stand in darkness; by nature, we contribute to it. Isaiah 9:2 is stunning because it announces that into this self-made night, God Himself chooses to shine—uninvited, undeserved, unstoppable.

The Light Has a Name

Isaiah’s promise is not an abstract glow; it is a Person. “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” (Isaiah 9:2). Centuries later, Matthew will point to Jesus beginning His ministry in Galilee and say, in effect, “This is it. This is the Light Isaiah saw from a distance.” The Child born in Bethlehem, the Son given (Isaiah 9:6), is the blazing fulfillment of that ancient dawn. God’s answer to our darkness is not a new philosophy, a fresh program, or a better mood—it is His own Son stepping into our night.

Jesus does not hesitate to claim this identity. “Again Jesus spoke to them, saying, ‘I am the light of the world. Whoever follows Me will never walk in the darkness, but will have the light of life’” (John 8:12). The cross is where that promise becomes personal. On Golgotha, the Light of the world entered our deepest darkness—bearing our sin, absorbing our judgment, tasting our death. In His resurrection, the sun rose on a new creation. As Paul writes, “For God, who said, ‘Let light shine out of darkness,’ has shone in our hearts to give us the light of the knowledge of God’s glory in the face of Jesus Christ” (2 Corinthians 4:6). The Light Isaiah saw from afar is the same Jesus who now stands near, calling your name.

Walking in the Dawn

If a light has dawned, the most insane thing we could do is keep living as if it were still night. Many of us try to do just that: we say we believe in Jesus, yet we cling to secret sin, cynical habits, or hopeless scripts that belong to the darkness. But the gospel is not simply that a Light exists; it is that you are invited to walk in it. “He has rescued us from the dominion of darkness and brought us into the kingdom of His beloved Son” (Colossians 1:13). Being a Christian is not adding a spiritual night-light to an otherwise dark room; it is moving houses—out of the domain of darkness and into a kingdom ruled by Light.

Walking in the dawn is wonderfully practical. It means dragging hidden things into the open through confession, trusting that “the blood of Jesus His Son cleanses us from all sin” (1 John 1:7). It means letting Scripture aim its beam at your decisions, because “Your word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path” (Psalm 119:105). It means speaking hope into gloomy places, because the Light in you is not meant to be concealed. Today, on this first day of December, ask: Where am I still living like it’s midnight? Then deliberately, prayerfully, take one concrete step into obedience, truth, and trust. The sun has risen in Christ; don’t stay in the shadows.

Lord Jesus, Light of the world, thank You for shining into my darkness with saving grace. Today, help me to step out of every shadow and walk boldly in Your light, so others may see and be drawn to You.

In a previous piece I said that hope is unique in being at once the most precious and the most treacherous of all our treasures. I have shown that, as Goldsmith says, "Hope, like the gleaming taper's light, Adorns and cheers our way."

But we do not listen long to the voice of the keen and experienced teachers of the race until we detect a note of bitterness when they speak of hope. Dryden says bluntly, "When I consider life, 'tis all a cheat. Yet fooled with hope, men favour the deceit."

And the cynical La Rochefoucauld writes: "Hope, deceitful as it is, serves at least to lead us to the end of life along an agreeable road."

Why this contradiction? Why is hope thought to be both good and bad, both cheerful and deceitful? A little observation will show us why.

Hope has sustained the spirit of many a shipwrecked sailor by painting for him a tender picture of rescue and reunion with loved ones, only to leave him at last to die of thirst and exposure on the vast bosom of the sea. Hope has kept many a prisoner believing he could not hang, that a pardon would surely come, and then stood calmly by and watched him die at the end of a rope. Hope has cheered a thousand victims of cancer and tuberculosis with whispered promises of returning health who were never again to know one single day of health till they died. Hope has told the mother that her son missing in action was surely alive, and kept her watching till the end of her days for the letter that never came and that never could come because the boy that might have written it had long been sleeping in an unmarked grave on a foreign shore.

Surely for the fallen sons of men, the Hindu proverb is true: "There is no disease like hope." Hope that has no guarantee of fulfillment is a false friend that comforts us a while with flattery and leaves us to our enemies. Expectation of a bright tomorrow when no such tomorrow can be ours will be bitterness compounded by despair in the day of the great reckoning.

Hereby know we love, because He laid down His life for us. - 1 John 3:16

The love of Jesus Christ is a love which is faithful to the obligations of its own past. Having loved, He loves. Because He had been a certain thing, therefore He is and He shall be that same. That is an argument that implies Divinity. About nothing human can we say. Because it has been, therefore it shall be. Alas! about much that is human we have to say the converse, Because it has been, therefore it will cease to be. And though, blessed be God! they are few and they are poor who have had no experience in their lives of human hearts whose love in the past has been such that it manifestly is for ever, yet we cannot with the same absolute confidence say about one another, even about the dearest, "Having loved, he loves." But we can about this Christ. There is no exhaustion in that great stream that pours out from His heart; no diminution in its flow.

The terror, the agony, the shame, the mysterious burden of a world’s sins were to be laid upon Him. All these elements are submerged, as it were, and become less conspicuous than the one thought of leaving behind all the limitations and the humiliations and the compelled association with evil which, like a burning brand laid upon a tender skin, was an hourly and momentary agony to Him, and soaring above them all, unto His own calm home, His habitation from eternity with the Father, as He had been before the world was. How strange this blending of shrinking and of eagerness, of sorrow and of joy, of human trembling consciousness of impending death and of triumphant consciousness of the approach of the hour when the Son of man, even in His bitterest agony and deepest humiliation, should, paradoxically, be glorified, and should leave the world to go unto the Father!

They tell us that the central light of our system, that great sun itself, pouring out its rays exhausts its warmth; and were it not continually replenished must gradually, and even though continually replenished, will one day cease to flame, and be a dead, cold mass of ashes. But this central Light, this heart of Christ, which is the Sun of the World, shall endure like the sun; and after the sun is cold, His love shall last for ever. He pours it out, and there is none the less to give. There is no bankruptcy in His expenditure, no exhaustion in His effort, no diminution in His stores. "Thy mercy endureth for ever"; "Thou hast loved, therefore Thou wilt love," is a syllogism for time and for eternity on which we may build and rest secure.