Prophecies of Messiah Part 4
Prophecies of Messiah • Sermon • Submitted • Presented
0 ratings
· 6 viewsNotes
Transcript
The Greater Light
The Greater Light
Light in Hebrew אוֹר ‘or meaning a light, to be light, to become a light. Ma’or מָאוֹר is to be a bright, shining, or radiant light. Na’or נָאוֹר is to exhibit glory. And Ha’or הֵאִיר is to lighten one’s countenance, bring joy or make one’s face to shine as in, “May the Lord make His face to shine upon you and give you peace.” Together these present a concept, relative to God and us, of a perpetual light.
The definition of the word “perpetual” is lasting forever; never-ending; continuing or being so for an indefinitely long time. You might say that the sun is a perpetual light. Even though when night falls and the light of the day fades away to your natural sight, the sun and its light remains. You can no longer see it. It’s not that the source of the light has moved but because you have become distant from it.
In Leviticus 6:12 the Priests of the Lord are commanded to never let the fire burn out.
The fire on the altar shall be kept burning on it; it shall not go out. The priest shall burn wood on it every morning, and he shall arrange the burnt offering on it and shall burn on it the fat of the peace offerings.
Prior to this God is speaking to Moses and Aaron about the instructions for sacrifices when someone has sinned against God and their brother or sister. Sin always brings darkness to your heart, your soul, your mind, your relationships with others and with God. Sin separates you from God and it becomes a hindrance to right relationships. When there is sin darkness comes. It is not that the source of the light of life is far from you, but you have chosen something that distances you from Him. This is where the world around us is today. They are in darkness.
And this is the judgment: the light has come into the world, and people loved the darkness rather than the light because their works were evil.
There are all kinds of lights in the world. There are lights created by the hands of men to light the darkness. Then there are lights of man’s own arrogance and humanistic ideologies that seek their own prideful light to justify their darkness. All of these are false lights that must be sustained and maintained by the efforts of men, or they die out. They are like idolatrous lights that have no real lasting life in them.
John Eckhardt states, “God stirs prophets whenever there is darkness.” The Prophet Isaiah said it this way:
Arise, shine, for your light has come, and the glory of the Lord has risen upon you. For behold, darkness shall cover the earth, and thick darkness the peoples; but the Lord will arise upon you, and his glory will be seen upon you. And nations shall come to your light, and kings to the brightness of your rising.
Now this was prophetic of Messiah, but it is also directed at you and I if the light of the Christ remains in us. But it must be a perpetual light. Not a Sunday only light. Not a light in your crisis only. But a perpetual light of the life you now live. This light was from the beginning.
And God made the two great lights—the greater light to rule the day and the lesser light to rule the night—and the stars.
This is not just a sun, moon, and stars verse about the galaxies. At the heart of this is the revelation of the source from which these perpetual lights derive their existence. What, or better yet, who keeps them burning perpetually? It is the Christ. So, if Christ be in you, it is time to “Arise and let the glory of the Lord shine in a dark world.”
Note here that it speaks again of the Messiah. The Lord declares, “The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light.” The word “Galilee” means to turn like hinges on a door that allows it to turn around and go another direction. It also means district or circuit. Galilee was a district of mostly Gentiles. Yet, lower Galilee is where Yeshua was born and spent most of His adult life and ministry. It is important to note that Galilee was a district of twenty towns that Solomon sold to the King of Tyre for the building of the Temple to Adonai. However, that temple and its light is long gone yet the light of Adonai and His glory remains in a new temple not built with human hands.
“We heard him say, ‘I will destroy this temple that is made with hands, and in three days I will build another, not made with hands.’ ”
Do you not know that you are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit dwells in you?
And just as that lesser light of an altar burning with the fat of rams was to never go out, so this Greater Light of the Christ that was sacrificed for your holy redemption is to burn perpetually through you for the glory of the Lord to be seen in all the earth. His glory is to be a perpetual glory in the midst of a dark world.
and from Jesus Christ the faithful witness, the firstborn of the dead, and the ruler of kings on earth. To him who loves us and has freed us from our sins by his blood and made us a kingdom, priests to his God and Father, to him be glory and dominion forever and ever. Amen.
Jesus Christ is the High Priest. But you are now a priest with responsibility over God’s holy, sacred, consecrated temple and you must keep the fire burning. In our flesh we experience desperate times, and our inclination is to do what we must to sustain life. But the life we seek to sustain is spark-less without the light of Christ. It’s like a sticker you keep clicking and clicking hoping it will light when you know it is empty of fuel. But you just keep on clicking it. Do what you must to keep the light of Christ, the fire of His righteousness perpetually burning on the altar of your soul and spirit.
Look at what the Apostle John says about this Great Light.
In him was life, and the life was the light of men.
In Christ was life. What life? We see His words raise the dead. We see His virtue heal the sick. We see His love deliver us from enslavement to sin and unrighteousness. We see His resurrection give us hope. The life He speaks of is indeed eternal life. And eternal life does not begin when you die. It began long before you were even conceived. We only see it’s beginning in Genesis when God breathed into man. But in fact, this eternal life has no beginning and no end thus the reason it is eternal life. It has always been and will continue to be eternal. And this life is life in and with the Lord. This is the light of Christ, the life of perpetual communion and intimate relationship in righteousness.
Jesus said it this way:
As long as I am in the world, I am the light of the world.”
Again Jesus spoke to them, saying, “I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will not walk in darkness, but will have the light of life.”
Notice the command to follow and not walk (halak) or live in darkness. We are living in days of great darkness but the greater light is greater than the darkness. The darkness is not perpetual, but the light is.
The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.
But you cannot walk in darkness and light at the same time.
If we say we have fellowship with him while we walk in darkness, we lie and do not practice the truth.
I admonish you today, if you are living in the darkness of sin, shame, guilt, and hopelessness, come into the light of the Christ who gives true life and not just a shadow of it. Without Christ in your life, you are just living in a shadow of real and true life. You can never truly know the joy, peace, purpose, and destiny God has ordained for you. But you MUST Follow in the Light and flee from darkness. The fellowship with others in the light is essential.
Do not be unequally yoked with unbelievers. For what partnership has righteousness with lawlessness? Or what fellowship has light with darkness?
Folks, when Jesus was hanging and dying on that cross for your redemption He did not look down to John and say, “Bro, are you getting this on TikTok? Mary, is anyone streaming this as a YouTube short? Hey, can one of you at least do a selfie to capture this moment so that others will know who I was and what I did for them?” No, it was a statement of covenant fellowship to the faithful disciple John and the earthy woman through whose birth canal Yeshua, the Greater Light, entered this dark world. The point is this, we need each other to keep the fire burning and the light on. We need each other to burn as one the light of Christ in this darkened world. We need each other to keep one another from being overcome or taken captive by the darkness. We need each other to continually speak the life of Christ because the thief seeks to snuff out your light.
The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy. I came that they may have life and have it abundantly.
This is what this means. The abundant life is true life, the life of Christ that must become your life. The life you attempt to live on your own, even religiously, is not real life just a copy of the real deal. So, even if you are a professing Christian and have been doing this Jesus thing for years, if you have not embraced the fulness of Christ’s birth, life, death, resurrection and Words of Truth, then your light might be burning a little dim.
We live in an age filled with so much information that truth is rarely heard. We live in a age of light emitting diodes (LED) where we seek to sustain light in the darkness with advanced technologies. Folks, social media and the internet alone will not sustain the light of Christ in your temple. We live in an age where vain philosophies flood our culture posing as false light through the humanistic knowledge of man. But where is the light in the church? We have mega churches filled with counterfeit converts, we have progressive churches compromising the truth, and we have so many ways to give to keep the lights of the buildings on. But where is the light in the church? Hear the words of the Prophet Isaiah and let them ring in your spirit this day:
O house of Jacob, come, let us walk in the light of the Lord.
