Isaiah’s Song – Hope (Christmas Songs #1)
I know it is still November. Yesterday was actually a nice day, so it may not feel like Christmas yet. But it is officially the Christmas season, which means you now have permission to listen to Christmas music.
Some of you heathens have been listening since July. Those of us who are purists have only started in the last two days.
Since we now have permission, let us start with a game. I am going to read a phrase — a reworded version of a famous Christmas carol — and you shout out which one it is.
Practice round: Smack the passageways. Deck the Halls. Got it? Another: Not here, in an animal’s feeding dish. Away in a Manger.
All right, here we go.
Move and speak upon the extremely large hills. — Go Tell It on the Mountain. (I could barely finish reading it, you were so fast.)
The thing approached on a cloudless 12:00 a.m. — It Came Upon a Midnight Clear.
Get here, everyone who is reliable. — O Come, All Ye Faithful.
Spill the 411 on the baby. — What Child Is This.
And the last one: Tiny village outside of Jerusalem. — O Little Town of Bethlehem.
The Hopes and Fears of All the Years
That last one opens like this: “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.”
Phillips Brooks wrote that hymn, and I think he did something beautiful with it. He sets up this ancient town — no electricity, no streetlamps, nothing happening after dark. It is genuinely black. And because the streets are so dark, you can look straight up on a cloudless night and watch the stars crawl slowly across the sky. What a sight that would have been.
Then he sets the dark streets and the starlight against something else: an everlasting Light that shines. He means the baby. Scripture calls Jesus the light of the world.
But it is the last line that gets me: the hopes and fears of all the years are met in thee tonight.
Have you ever gone through a genuinely brutal stretch? Every hand should go up. Maybe you moved somewhere you did not want to be. Maybe a relationship collapsed. Maybe you were fighting a health crisis. Maybe you lost a job. Maybe you lost someone. Maybe you were fighting depression.
And you would probably describe that stretch as dark — like your emotions and your soul were as unlit as a Bethlehem street.
And it is in that darkness that we wrestle with exactly what Brooks names: fear. Fear of the unknown. Fear of the future. Fear that this will never end. Fear that we are stuck here.
And what we are aching for in the middle of that fear is hope. Some hope that the darkness ends. Some hope that better days are coming. Some hope that we will actually come out the other side.
Today we are looking at another Christmas song about hope — but not one you will hear on the radio in December. This one comes from the Bible.
Through this whole Advent series we are going to look at four songs from Scripture that either surround the Christmas story or point toward it, and in each one we will find one of the four themes of Advent. Today: hope.
And today’s song is a classic — not a throwback to the 1940s. We are going back seven hundred years before the first Christmas, to Isaiah 9.
Isaiah 9:2–7
“The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light; those who dwelt in a land of deep darkness, on them has light shone. You have multiplied the nation; you have increased its joy; they rejoice before you as with joy at the harvest, as they are glad when they divide the spoil. For the yoke of his burden, and the staff for his shoulder, the rod of his oppressor, you have broken as on the day of Midian. For every boot of the tramping warrior in battle tumult and every garment rolled in blood will be burned as fuel for the fire.
“For to us a child is born, to us a son is given; and the government shall be upon his shoulder, and his name shall be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace. Of the increase of his government and of peace there will be no end, on the throne of David and over his kingdom, to establish it and to uphold it with justice and with righteousness from this time forth and forevermore. The zeal of the Lord of hosts will do this.”
Many of you know this passage well — either from years of Advent readings, or from Handel’s Messiah, where “For unto us a child is born” comes straight out of this text.
But the fame of verses 2, 6, and 7 tends to overshadow verses 3 through 5. Skim those again, because they are a little odd.
“You have multiplied the nation; you have increased its joy.” So there is a nation whose joy is increasing — like the joy of a bountiful harvest. Why? Verse 4: “For the yoke of his burden, and the staff for his shoulder, the rod of his oppressor, you have broken.” So there has been an oppressor, a slave master, ruling by tyranny — and now that has been shattered. Verse 5: the boots of tramping warriors and the blood-soaked garments will be burned as fuel. In other words, war is over.
This is political language. War. Slavery. Their end. And the joy that follows.
What makes it strange is that when Isaiah wrote this, Israel was not at war. They were nobody’s slaves. Things were going fine.
So what is he talking about?
What Was Coming
About a hundred years after Isaiah writes this, an empire called Babylon begins rolling over everyone. First they defeat Assyria — which no one thought possible. Then they take Egypt. And on the way home they swing through Israel and defeat them too.
Hundreds of thousands of Jewish people are carried off to Babylon. That is roughly nine hundred miles on foot — probably a three- or four-month journey.
At that point you feel like God is against you. Like He abandoned you. Like He is not even there. You start to wonder whether the Babylonian gods are stronger than yours. Why would God allow this? Was He really that weak all along?
It would plunge you into a deep, dark season.
So why would God allow it? Go back one chapter. Isaiah 8:19, where God is speaking directly to Isaiah:
“And when they say to you, ‘Inquire of the mediums and the necromancers who chirp and mutter,’ should not a people inquire of their God? Should they inquire of the dead on behalf of the living? To the teaching and to the testimony! If they will not speak according to this word, it is because they have no dawn. They will pass through the land, greatly distressed and hungry. And when they are hungry, they will be enraged and will speak contemptuously against their king and their God, and turn their faces upward. And they will look to the earth, but behold, distress and darkness, the gloom of anguish, and they will be thrust into thick darkness.”
They are consulting psychics and people who claim to speak with the dead, chasing wisdom anywhere but from God. And God says: go to the teaching and the testimony — go to My word. If they will not, it is because there is no dawn in them. No spiritual light.
God repeatedly describes Himself as light. So when you follow His word and walk in relationship with Him, you are in the light. Which means that when you drift away from His teaching and His testimony, you are walking into spiritual darkness.
And you know what it is like to move through a pitch-black room. Even in your own house you put your hands out and slide your feet — and then you step on a plastic building brick and discover what eternal torment actually feels like. It hurts to walk in the dark.
That is God’s warning: you are leaving My teaching, you are walking into darkness, and you are going to get hurt.
And because He loves them, He keeps calling them back. He keeps sending prophets — Isaiah, Jeremiah, Hosea, Amos — warning them to come back into the light, back into relationship with Him, or else He will allow a nation to defeat them and carry them into exile.
They did not listen. And a century later, Babylon came.
Suddenly their language was being erased. They were being taught the gods of Babylon. Their God was treated as a nobody. They were taken out of the promised land and put into servitude. All of it discipline — all of it aimed at turning their hearts back to the Father.
If you have ever been through a dark night of the soul, you have a glimpse of it. You may not have been physically exiled, but you felt alone — in a kind of spiritual or emotional exile. You tried to pray and felt like God had His phone on Do Not Disturb, uninterested in you. Everything felt off and wrong. You were in the dark. It is a lonely, hard place, and it is usually laced with fear.
Hope, a Hundred Years Early
God knew exactly how dark it would be. So a century in advance, He gave them hope.
“The people who walked in darkness” — they walked nine hundred miles from Jerusalem to Babylon, three or four months on foot — “have seen a great light. Those who dwelt in a land of deep darkness” — they stayed in Babylon seventy years — “on them has light shone.”
Put yourself there. Imagine watching friends and family die when Babylon invaded. Imagine being rounded up and marched for four months — nothing but walking, day after day, your feet and legs and whole body giving out. You finally arrive, and they set about erasing your language, telling you your God is a fraud, teaching you their gods and their ways and their culture, and putting you to work like property.
That is a horrific, dark existence.
And then a friend pulls you aside: “Did you hear? There was a secret meeting. One of the rabbis found an ancient document from the prophet Isaiah — written a hundred years ago — and it talks about these days. They think it is describing exactly this. And it says a light will shine. They think that means we get out of here someday.”
Can you imagine what that spark would do to you?
The Power of Hope
A few months ago my family and I watched the film Just Mercy. If you have not seen it, I highly recommend it — it earns its PG-13 rating, so not for little ones, but watch it. And when you do, watch what hope does to people.
It follows attorney Bryan Stevenson, whose book it is drawn from, as he goes into Alabama and begins finding inmates who were unjustly tried and convicted of crimes they did not commit — and works to get them released.
He has to sort out the truth, of course, because every inmate says he is innocent. But as he works through the files and interviews and identifies the men who genuinely are, he starts explaining to them how the process could work.
And you watch their whole bearing change. Their eyes change. The way they hold themselves changes. The way they talk changes. They begin to have hope. They are still in prison — nothing about their circumstances has moved — but now there is a possibility.
Then watch the ones who do not believe him. I know I am innocent, but there is no way I am getting out. Not for someone like me. Not with no money. There was a deal and I was the fall guy. You can try, but it will not work.
Those men move around that prison like the walking dead. They are alive. They can talk to you. But something inside has gone out, because they are caught in the dark with nothing ahead.
That is the power of hope. Without it, you cannot see an end. With it, you can keep going.
Which is exactly why, a hundred years before the exile, God handed Israel a spark: a light will shine in the darkness.
What Is the Light?
Is it a flashlight to show the path? Is God going to make the moon enormous as a signal that it is time to leave Babylon? Hang a second sun in the sky?
No. It is a child.
“For to us a child is born, to us a son is given.”
If you are a parent, you know the moment you hold your newborn for the first time. For most parents it is staggeringly beautiful. You are holding this small bundle of human DNA with all that potential packed inside, wondering what God is going to do with this little one.
And it is strange, because there is so much joy in it while you also know how many sleepless nights are ahead. You hold this child asleep in your arms and there is this deep calm, even though at any second the shrieking could start over a diaper. Somehow, holding a child, everything feels right with the world. You suddenly have hope.
But this child is not an ordinary child, and Isaiah describes Him in astonishing terms.
“The government shall be upon his shoulder.” Imagine carrying the weight of an entire government. He can, because of who He is.
Wonderful Counselor. This child will be extraordinarily wise — a king who simply knows the right thing to do to lead the people.
Mighty God. This is Immanuel — God with us. God in the flesh.
Everlasting Father. I know that sounds odd for a baby. He is not born having already fathered children. He comes as a spiritual Father, who will bring millions upon millions into new birth. And “everlasting” — He is from outside of time. He is the Ancient of Days, stepping into time as an infant.
Prince of Peace. A King who will bring a peace the world has never known — “of the increase of his government and of peace there will be no end.”
There will be no one like this child. He will be the greatest King ever. He will bring freedom. He will overthrow the oppressor. The warriors’ boots and blood-soaked clothes will be burned like fuel. And because of Him there will be enormous rejoicing.
God Kept the Promise — Twice
That would have given the Israelites hope. And because God always keeps His promises, He delivered.
You are probably thinking about Christmas — but He did it first for those ancient Israelites. Seventy years into the exile, Cyrus leads the Persians, defeats the mighty Babylonians, and permits the Jewish people to return home. You can read about Ezra bringing people back to re-establish the temple, and Nehemiah bringing people back to rebuild the city walls.
God fulfilled His word. The light shone in that dark place. They got out. Their oppressor was overthrown. There was great rejoicing. And they realized God had not abandoned them — He had been with them the entire time.
But here is the remarkable thing about prophecy: it usually has layers.
An illustration from the mountains
I started my two-month sabbatical this summer with two weeks in Colorado. A retired pastor I got connected with converted an old garage into a cabin and lets pastors on sabbatical and missionaries on break use it for a week or two, free. It sat about twenty minutes from a national forest, so nearly every day I would eat breakfast, spend time in the Scriptures, and then head up to the mesa to hike.
On my third day I found a gorgeous lake with a mountainside rising next to it, and I decided to climb it so I could look down on the water. I found a trailhead and took off — but instead of switchbacking up the mountain, the trail just kept going. I later found a map and figured out I had gone about three and a half miles straight south and climbed a thousand feet, from ten thousand feet above sea level to eleven thousand.
When I reached the top and looked out, I could see layer after layer of mountains. My phone camera could not capture what my eyes could. Right in front of me was another range, still part of the same national forest. Beyond that, another layer. And beyond that, snow-capped peaks of fourteen and fifteen thousand feet — which I later learned were about seventy-five miles away, down in New Mexico.
Layer, after layer, after layer.
That is how prophecy works in Scripture. God gives a word, and there is a fulfillment for the people who first heard it — or a generation or two later. But God, being God, embeds a further layer inside it. Something farther out. Something deeper.
The Second Layer
Because when Jesus arrives on the scene, Israel is in a strikingly similar place to the generation who first heard Isaiah.
They are not in exile this time, but a foreign power controls them — Rome. And their faith is a mess again, though for different reasons.
You have the Pharisees, leading people into a soul-crushing legalism. You have the Sadducees, blending the faith with the surrounding culture and watering everything down. You have the Zealots, focused on overthrowing Rome. And each faction came to the Scriptures to mine them for their own purposes and make their own point, rather than submitting to God’s word and asking how to bring their lives into alignment with the teaching and the testimony.
It was another dark time. And they were waiting for the light to shine. They wanted the Messiah — but in their minds, they needed one who would come in, overthrow Rome, and establish a government with no end.
What they did not grasp was that earthly kingdoms fade. Babylon faded. Assyria faded. Egypt faded. Rome faded. They did not merely need an occupying government thrown off. They needed something deeper.
Because ever since Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit, sin had been reigning in the spiritual realm. Everyone lived under the kingdom of sin. It was oppressive. They were slaves to it.
And that is why God says a son will be given — the Mighty God, the Everlasting Father, the Wonderful Counselor, the Prince of Peace — who would overthrow the bonds of sin so that people could find real freedom. The warriors of sin defeated. And us stepping out of spiritual darkness into spiritual light.
That is why Jesus came. To give life. To give light. To bring us out of our darkness.
Suffering With Hope
So if you are entering this Advent season genuinely struggling — if this feels like a dark time — take hope. God is not being silent. He has not abandoned you. He is fully aware of what is happening. He knows your suffering. And He still brings His light into your life.
I heard a line this week that I have not been able to shake: our choice in life is not between suffering and not suffering. It is between suffering with hope and suffering without hope.
Life involves suffering. This year has made that unavoidable. But if you follow Jesus, you do not suffer without hope — because Jesus proves that God knows our situation, and that He entered into it Himself.
Think about it. God the Son — perfect, sinless — comes into a sin-filled world and takes on human flesh. That alone would be suffering enough. But He also chooses to be born to a desperately poor family, without any of the wealth that might have made existence more comfortable. His first bed is a feeding trough, among animals.
Then Herod comes hunting for the child, and God warns Joseph in a dream, and they flee — so Jesus spends His first two years as a refugee in Egypt. They eventually return to Israel, but because Herod’s son now rules, they settle in Joseph’s hometown of Nazareth: an unknown village with a poor reputation. That is where He grows up.
And when He begins His ministry and starts making waves, the Romans dislike it and the religious leaders feel threatened by it — until His own people hand Him over to Rome to be crucified.
Jesus knows suffering as well as any of us, and better than most.
And in the middle of that suffering, He rose from the dead — showing He has power over all of it. Which means whatever dark stretch you are in right now will end. A light will shine. In His mercy God will either bring you out of the circumstance, or this life will end and you will be in His full presence for eternity.
So we should always have hope. The gospel gives it to us. We do not have to sit here with our eyes down, convinced this is the end. We can lift our eyes and know that God knows us, loves us, and that Jesus will come again for us.
Whatever darkness you find yourself in, my prayer is that in this Advent season Isaiah’s song gives you hope, and that a light shines into your heart.
Father, for anyone in a dark, dark season right now — let the cynicism that so easily creeps into the heart and mind be washed away by Your goodness, Your love, and Your grace. For those who know You but feel You have been distant, draw them close in prayer right now; let them sense Your presence, know how much You love them, and see that You can shine light into dark times.
And for the person who has never put their faith in You — let today be their spiritual birthday. Let the light of the gospel shine into their heart and shatter the darkness they are in, so they see that You are good, You are here, You are real, and that Jesus died on a cross for their sin and their sin can be washed away. Hear their confession. Hear them surrender their life to You. And begin changing them from the inside out, so they slowly start to love like Jesus loved and live like Jesus lived.
Give us hope. Remind us of Jesus, of who You are and what You have done. Help us never to despair, but to live on that hope, to feast on it, and to share it — because Your hope changes everything. Amen.
