The Bright Morning Star
Deuteronomy 33:1-2
This is the blessing with which Moses the man of God blessed the people of Israel before his death. He said, “The LORD came from Sinai and dawned from Seir upon us; he shone forth from Mount Paran; he came from the ten thousands of holy ones, with flaming fire at his right hand.”
What an analogy to leave with these pilgrims before heading home to glory! What greater, vaster, more central, more unconditional illustration of God’s love for His people could Moses have drawn their eyes to than the one thing that shines down from heaven day in and day out, giving warmth and light to all living things? Although physical, material objects can never serve as perfect like-for-like pictures of the infinite, spiritual realities they express, they do tell us something significant. Which is why God has effectively furnished the universe with signs and symbols of His likeness so that we never have an excuse for missing Him in our day to day lives (Romans 1). Surely, the biggest and brightest and boldest of these analogies is the solar fire-star around which our pale little earth revolves, and which serves as life’s spark.
“In your light do we see light,” wrote the Psalmist in Psalm 36:9. “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,” wrote Isaiah in Isaiah 9:2. “I am the root and the descendant of David, the bright Morning star,” said our Lord in Revelation 22:16. And again He proclaimed in John 8:12, “I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will not walk in darkness but will have the light of life.” Are we getting the picture yet? Sunlight is the central symbol of the Christian gospel, just as the sun is the central figure of human existence. In Genesis 1, Moses wrote that God’s first act in the cosmos was to speak light into the darkness, and His second was like it: to compress that light into a form, so that we’d always have a picture of His providence to guide our steps: above us, around us, beside us, beneath us.
Friend, hear the Spirit breath out across the chaos and darkness of your day today, “Let there be light!” And walk in those radiant sunbeams afresh.