The Everlasting Light
It was Christmas Eve 1865 and the Reverend Phillips Brooks of Philadelphia was on a trip to Israel. The Civil War that had racked the United States for four years had ended months before. President Abraham Lincoln had been assassinated just days later. Our broken nation was still recovering. We needed peace. We needed light.
Where did Reverend Brooks find himself that Christmas Eve? In the countryside. In the dark. In the quiet. With the starlight. Just outside Bethlehem.
Two years later he drew on that experience to write our beloved Christmas carol, O Little Town of Bethlehem.
“O little town of Bethlehem
How still we see thee lie
Above thy deep and dreamless sleep
The silent stars go by
Yet in thy dark streets shineth
The everlasting Light
The hopes and fears of all the years
Are met in thee tonight”
Where other carols emphasize the glory of God with the grand chorus of angels, Brooks focuses on the quietness of Jesus’ birth. The everlasting light. Born into obscurity. In the night.
“The people walking in darkness have seen a great light; on those living in the land of deep darkness a light has dawned,” wrote the Prophet Isaiah (9:2) 700 years before Jesus’ birth.
Jesus said of himself, “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)
And note how John foretells Jesus’ coming as he writes his Gospel (1:9-10), “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.”
He is The Light.
The Great Light.
Dawning on us in sin’s darkness.
To give light to every one of us.
That we would no longer walk in darkness.
And though eternal and our Creator, we did not recognize him.
May you recognize Jesus, the Everlasting Light, as your Savior.
Merry Christmas, friends.