Dennis Tuuri

# Sermon Transcript: Epiphany and Work
## Pastor Dennis Tuuri, Reformation Covenant Church

The subject of the sermon is Epiphany and work. I’m going to try to relate this to our ongoing sermon series on work. The sermon text is Isaiah 59. We’ll start with verse 21 through 60:13. So please stand for the reading of God’s word.

Isaiah 59:21, the very end of Isaiah 59 and then the first half of Isaiah 60 through verse 13.

As for me, says the Lord, this is my covenant with them: my Spirit who is upon you and my words which I have put in your mouth shall not depart from your mouth nor from the mouth of your descendants nor from the mouth of your descendants, says the Lord, from this time and forevermore.

Arise, shine, for your light has come and the glory of the Lord is risen upon you. For behold, the darkness shall cover the earth and in deep darkness the people. But the Lord will arise over you and his glory will be seen upon you. The Gentiles shall come to your light and kings to the brightness of your rising. Lift up your eyes all around and see. They all gather together. They come to you. Your sons shall come from afar, and your daughters shall be nursed at your side.

Then you shall see and become radiant, and your heart shall swell with joy because the abundance of the sea shall be turned to you. The wealth of the Gentiles shall come to you. The multitude of camels shall cover your land. The dromedaries of Midian and Ephah, all those from Sheba shall come. They shall bring gold and incense, and they shall proclaim the praises of the Lord. All the flocks of Kedar shall be gathered together to you.

The rams of Nebaioth shall minister to you. They shall ascend with acceptance on my altar, and I will glorify the house of my glory. Who are those who fly like a cloud and like doves to their roots? Surely the coastland shall wait for me, and the ships of Tarshish will come first to bring your sons from afar, their silver and their gold with them, to the name of the Lord your God, and to the Holy One of Israel.

Because he has glorified you. The sons of foreigners shall build up your walls and their kings shall minister to you. For in my wrath I struck you, but in my favor I have had mercy on you. Therefore, your gates shall be opened continually. They shall not be shut day or night, that men may bring to you the wealth of the Gentiles and their kings in procession. For the nation and kingdom which will not serve you shall perish and those nations shall be utterly ruined.

The glory of Lebanon shall come to you, the cypress, the pine and the box tree together to beautify the place of my sanctuary and I will make the place of my feet glorious.

Let’s pray. Lord God, we thank you for the tremendous overwhelming good news that we find in this text from Isaiah. And we thank you, Father, for keeping your word and bringing this prefigurement of all that history will unfold to the rest of time and space and nations in the coming of the Magi to our Savior.

We thank you, Lord God, for today’s text. We pray your blessing upon us. Help us, Lord God, to hear in this the command to rise and shine. And may we, Lord God, remember that this week in Jesus name we pray. Amen.

Please be seated.

—

So that is sort of it: Arise, shine. Two specific commandments given in a particular context. And we will turn to that text and make several comments or points from the text we just read in a couple of minutes.

I wanted, however, to talk a little bit first about Epiphany because that’s sort of the setting for this. In Western churches, Epiphany is the celebration of the coming of the Magi to Jesus after his birth. Made probably very traditional and famous in the song we sing every year—we three kings. In the East, however, the season of Epiphany, the feast of Epiphany, actually is a celebration of the baptism of our Savior.

So I think next year, if it’s all right with the session, I probably will preach on the baptism of Jesus in Epiphany next year. But today, I wanted to once more return to the Western tradition, which is the celebration of the coming of the Magi. It is always with sort of mixed feelings that I at least sing “We Three Kings” because, as we’ve talked about before from this pulpit, you know, there are some things in there that really are not necessarily scripturally tied. A number of them, actually.

It’s a wonderful song. Kids tend to like it. But you know it’s interesting how I can preach here and I can explain these things week to week, or other people can, and you in your studies can, but songs sort of form us in some very powerful ways. And to sing “We Three Kings” you know five or ten times a Christmas season over the course of one’s lifetime, sort of cements in place that narrative of Epiphany. And of course, it’s an inaccurate narrative.

“We three kings”—well, they weren’t kings. They were magi. They were actually king makers, more significant than kings. We say three only because there are three specific things mentioned as gifts: gold, frankincense, and myrrh. But it doesn’t say there were three kings. So there were a multitude, a number of magi, wise men, kingmakers from the east. That part’s right.

And then the interpretation that the song that we sing every year, whether here or in our homes, of the symbols of gold, frankincense, and myrrh are sort of set in place. And you know, it’s a fine thing to remind ourselves of the three offices of Christ—prophet, priest, and king. And we can sort of see some of that in these texts. And there is some relationship, you know, that’s made in the song that we wouldn’t want to argue with, but is that necessarily the proper interpretation of those three gifts?

I have argued for a number of years here that it’s better to look at where those three gifts came together in the Old Testament. You know, again, we want to interpret the new by thinking of its connection to the Old. And so we do that here, right? We just read Isaiah 60 on your Christmas cards. The three kings are on camels. Or there’s no mention of camels in the text from Matthew chapter 2, but there is in the Isaiah 60 text that’s being, that certainly informs the visit of the wise men to Jesus after his birth. So that’s why you have camels on those cards, really—primarily the association with Isaiah 60, which has all kinds of pointers, including the mention of gold and incense.

So we look at the Old Testament to sort of inform us about this event, and we do find two specific places in the Old Testament where gold, frankincense, and myrrh come together. And you know, if you know this, make sure your children know it as they grow up. You’ve probably heard me say it before, but the overwhelming instance of these three things coming together is in the temple. You know, you have the golden altar of incense, plus you’ve got all kinds of gold. You’ve got the myrrh that’s used as part of the anointing oil both for the priests and the items of furniture in the temple. So it’s all myrrhed up that way. And you’ve got frankincense that’s actually burned on that golden altar of incense.

So, you know, it seems like if we are people primarily of biblical theology, we could say we’re kind of informed by our understanding of the Bible—when we read these three things coming together at the birth of our Savior, well, actually it was probably might have been as long as two years after his birth, but in any event, at some point after his birth, then we would probably make this association to the temple. And in the text in Isaiah that points us to dromedaries or camels and people coming—the Gentiles coming—you know, it also talks about the altar that they will ascend with acceptance on my altar. And so it has this temple imagery: the house of God, beautify my house, etc., etc.

And so what I think the overwhelming picture of those gifts is not necessarily the three offices of Christ, but rather it is: the new temple has now been in place. These associations help us to realize that the temple is the body of Christ. It is Jesus who is both the sacrifice and the priest and the house in which we live. So the new temple has been constituted with the coming of Jesus in his incarnation.

So “We Three Kings” is okay, but you know, it has these associations that if we’re going to sing it a lot, we’ve got to kind of make sure that we’re thinking a little bit—you know, taking with some caveats as we think about it, right?

But it’s okay. Epiphany is a wonderful season. Epiphany means, you know, to have a manifestation of something. It’s kind of like a Eureka moment, right? “I had an epiphany.” So the Epiphany season is this prefigurement of what history portrays after the coming of Jesus—the inclusion of the Gentiles and the Jews together as one people. It shows that with the manifestation, the epiphany of Jesus to the Gentiles in the person of the kingmakers from Persia.

So that’s the idea of the season of Epiphany. You know, the Eastern Orthodox, as I said, Epiphany is the manifestation of Christ at his baptism. So we’ll talk about that next year. But the manifestation of Christ to the Gentiles—and of course the Gentiles are coming to his light. And so the overall message of Epiphany for us is, as I’ve said a number of years, for us to be intentional lightbearers to the world, right?

There was an old tradition in Europe that, actually, I just found out about. But in Europe—and I’m not sure at which period in time—but people would, you know, there were these three names for the three kings which were actually, who knows how many priests, but kingmakers. You know, there were three names assigned to the three kings of Orient. And what people would do in Europe would be that they would put the initials of the three kings on the door of their house and then they would also put on symbols representing the year of that Epiphany season, right?

So it’d be, you know, 2015 and you’d have the three letters representing the three kings on the door of your house. The idea is that wise men today, you know, who are drawn to Christ, when they come to this house, they will find Christ residing there in the person of the inhabitants of the house. So Jesus’s light is found in your house. And so, you know, wise men would find Jesus in your dwelling place.

A very nice thought. And certainly as we leave here today and move into the season of Epiphany, which goes on several weeks, we would certainly want at least that thought to be in our heads: that we would want our neighbors or other people to know that if they come to your house they would find the light of Jesus shining—a flawed light, admittedly, you know, this darkness—but overall your house is an intentional lightbearing attempt to manifest the light that’s shone on you: the light of the gospel, the light of Jesus himself, who is the meaning of all light.

So this was a common practice, and so the season of Epiphany is a good one to do that. And what I want to do a little bit today is also talk, in a few minutes, about the implications. So there’s great implications for our homes, but I want to talk about the implications for work just a little bit today as well.

So we’re going to now turn to Isaiah 60. So if you have that text open. And as I said, I’m beginning with 59.

For some reason, those initials and year would be written on the house with white chalk. I’m not sure what the symbolism of that is, but that’s what they would do. So we can think about that this year as we try to have light—intentional lightbearing in our homes.

So let’s look at Isaiah 60, the specific text, and we’ll note several aspects of the text of what Epiphany is found in these texts that are kind of fulfilled in Matthew 2.

Okay. So I began in verse 21 of chapter 59 because we’re going to turn to 59 in a couple of minutes. But at the end, most of 59 is about the sinfulness of the people. And in response to the sinfulness of the people, God declares that he and he alone will establish his covenant. And so the story line that’s really encapsulated here—the whole story line of the world, you know—is that we’ve fallen. We need to be redeemed through the covenant made by God, and then we need to live our lives in a particular way.

So Isaiah 59 starts with a lot of verses about sin, and in the light of finding no one who can get us out of this difficulty, God then saves us all by himself by establishing the covenant. And that’s what he ultimately fulfills in the coming of Christ, of course. And that covenant is a covenant of grace, of course.

So we’re sinners. Isaiah 59 says we’ve been redeemed. We’ve been saved. The transition from wrath to grace has happened through the covenant. And then 60 will go on to talk about what things look like this side of the realization of all of that.

Now let me say at the beginning too that, of course, Isaiah is in its first application talking about the exile of the people, right, and then the return of the people to the land. So at the first level of meaning in these texts from Isaiah, he’ll talk in Isaiah 59 about why they went into exile, and it’s sin. And then, you know, God will—he’s done with the wrath and now he’s going to save them in his mercy. And so we have redemption. But that is essentially first and foremost talking about the return from exile to the land. So that’s the first meaning. But obviously all of this points to the greater redemption that happens—the great reversal, the great turning point in history—the coming of Christ.

Remember that the exile is an exodus, right? Or the coming back is equated to an exodus. So they’re kicked out of the land in exile because of sin. And this, of course, should remind us of Adam and Eve being kicked out of the garden because of the fall. And then the whole process of history is God promising to bring a Savior who will return us to right relationship to him and the garden, so to speak, which we then will develop.

So ultimately the narrative is about exile and return in Isaiah. It pictures for us expulsion from the garden and then salvation accomplished through the coming of Messiah. And so it ultimately is fulfilled in the coming of Jesus Christ and the covenant that we will celebrate here at this table.

All right. So look at verse 21, if you have your scriptures open. “As for me,” says the Lord, “this is my covenant with them.”

So he has just said that he’s going to graciously save them apart from their sin. And this is his covenant, all right? And he’s going to give us a command in just a verse here to arise and shine. But the basis for that command is his description of his covenant of grace and mercy. So we arise and shine because we’ve been made alive in the Savior, in the covenant keeper. Okay.

“So this is my covenant which I make with them: My Spirit who is upon you and my words which I put in your mouth.” So the covenant is—and then he’s going to say these things won’t depart from your children or your children’s children. And we sit here today, at least some of us, with children’s children being here and mouthing the praises of the Lord Jesus Christ and committed to him. So we see this prophecy fulfilled. Praise God. Hallelujah.

But what I want you to see here is that when he gets around to telling us, commanding us to arise and shine—two separate commandments, right?—the basis for this is what he has just instructed us about the covenant, and that covenant is his Spirit and words.

How do we shine in our homes? How do we shine in our vocations and workplace? How do we shine in the various tasks that we have been given by God to do? And the answer is: those things are informed by the Spirit of God ministering the word of God. That’s the covenant to us. So if you don’t pay attention to God’s word and aren’t sensitive to the convictions of the Holy Spirit and don’t desire, ask for, and pray for the manifestation of the fruit of the Spirit in your life, you’re probably not going to know exactly how to shine. And then you’re going to say, “Well, I don’t know what to do.” But the Bible tells us that part of knowing how to shine in your particular callings this week is the Spirit and word. That’s what he tells us here.

This is the introduction to the commandment. This is my covenant. This is the covenant that will have effect multigenerationally into the future. His covenant is his Spirit and words. Now those two things together are quite important.

We can try to keep the word of God without a reliance upon the Holy Spirit or the indwelling Spirit given to us on the basis of Jesus’s righteousness, and we become moralists or legalists. We try just to do a lot of good works. Or we can embrace the Spirit supposedly and not really see the Spirit talking to us primarily through the word or to bring us into conformity to that word, and we can be enthusiasts—is the way the Reformers, the way the Reformers used it—you know, people who are just always emotional about things and the Spirit’s doing this or that, not grounded in the word of God that brings the new life that’s described here.

So Spirit and word go together, and they inform us about shining—how we’re to shine. Okay. So that’s the first point I want to make.

Secondly, notice here that there are these two commandments, right? So two and three, if you’re keeping track: one is Spirit and word, two is arise, and three is shine. And you say, “Well, they kind of go together.” Well, yes, they do, but they are two separate commandments.

“Arise”—if we look at Ephesians 2, where this text is at least alluded to, right? Paul says, “Awake you sleepers, for the light of Christ is shone on you,” right? So in Ephesians chapter 5, that seems to be an allusion back to these verses. And whether or not we make that association, I think the connection is correct. To arise is to come out of death. It is to get up from a state of death.

And Isaiah 59, as I said, you know, goes into great description of the sinfulness of the people. Okay. By the way, the text from Ephesians chapter 5 is verse 14. “Therefore, he says, well, actually, I’ll start at verse 13. But all things that are exposed are made manifest by the light. For whatever makes manifest is light. Therefore, he says, ‘Awake you who sleep, arise from the dead, and Christ will give you light.’”

Now, I think—and I can’t, this isn’t a quotation from Isaiah 60 verse one—but I think that’s what the reference is. It’s the same thing. “Arise, Jesus will give you light. Arise, shine.” Ephesians—arise, meaning awake from the dead. And Christ will give you the light in terms of how you live in your new life in Jesus. Okay.

So the movement from death to life, I think, is pictured here in “Arise.”

Now, death is the state that we find ourselves in Isaiah 59. Let me read Isaiah 59. At least portions of it. And, you know, if you take the time to read the entire chapter leading up to the covenant, what you see is: sin, sin, sin, rebellion. This is what’s going on. You guys have been awful.

“Behold, the Lord’s hand is not shortened, that it cannot save, nor his ear heavy that it cannot hear. But your iniquities have separated you from your God. Your sins have hidden his face from you so that he will not hear. For your hands are defiled with blood and your fingers with iniquity. Your lips have spoken lies. Your tongue has muttered perversity. No one calls for justice, nor does any plead for truth. They trust in empty words and speak lies. They conceive evil and bring forth iniquity.”

By the way, notice again this point I’ve made for the last couple of months: the centrality of lies here to all of this sinfulness that he’s describing to them as the basis for their being taken into captivity and their city being destroyed, their nation being destroyed. Why? Because it all goes back to the fall when we believe the lie and we begin to speak lies, and the end result of these lies is iniquity, perversity, injustice, all the sinful results that happen in our lives.

So this is all described here. So Isaiah 59 is this categorization of the wickedness of the people.

“Verse 7: their feet run to evil. They make haste to shed innocent blood. Their thoughts are thoughts of iniquity. Wasting and destruction are in their paths.”

The opposite of successful work is the fallen nature to which we’ve been given. Wickedness and destruction in the path.

“The way of peace they have not known and there is no justice in their ways. They have made themselves crooked paths. Whoever takes that way shall not know peace. Therefore, justice is far from us, nor does righteousness overtake us. We look for light, but there is darkness, for brightness, but we walk in blackness. We grope for the wall like the blind, and we grope as if we had no eyes. We stumble at noonday, as at twilight. We are as dead men in desolate places.”

And there’s the key. We are the walking dead. We are the vampires, or the zombies, rather. Forget the vampires. We’re the zombies. We’re the walking dead. And this is a description of Israel and its sins prior to its being taken into exile. But you’ll notice that as we read this description, it talks about all of them.

Now, you know, in one sense that really isn’t accurate. We know that there are people like Daniel taken into captivity who were not—their lives weren’t characterized by this. So what is the text telling us? Well, it’s telling us a couple of things. One, it’s telling us that the nation was characterized by this. But I think secondly, the deeper truth that’s being revealed is this: that accurate, true description of who we are in our fallen nature.

Our hands are bloody. We don’t seek justice. We don’t know the way of peace. We speak lies. That’s who we are apart from the grace of God. That is the state of fallen mankind. In Adam’s fall, we sinned all, and this is what we’ve become.

Now, you know, it’s very important to understand that because otherwise we don’t get to a proper understanding of how we’re to shine. We all growl like bears and we moan sadly like doves.

“We look for justice, but there is none. For salvation, but it is far from us. For our transgressions are multiplied before you and our sins testify against us.”

I hope you feel that way. You know, the old man never gets sanctified. You know that, right? There is a sanctification process of who we are. But when the Bible talks about putting off the old man and putting on the new, and that we have this Adamic fallen nature, that fallen nature doesn’t get any better. It’s right there. And it’s characterized by these kind of things. You surprise yourself—as I surprise myself—when sin flares up in my life just like it did fifty years ago. Well, don’t be surprised because that part is going away, but it will never be saved. It’s not being made better. This is who we are apart from the grace of Jesus Christ. Okay? This is the old man. This is humanity in Adam. Apart from the grace of God, that’s who we are.

“In transgressing and lying against the Lord and departing from our God, speaking oppression and revolt, conceiving and uttering forth the heart of falsehood.” Again, you know, lie, lie, lie, lie, lie. “Justice is turned back. Righteousness stands afar off. For truth is fallen in the street and equity cannot enter.”

Now, you know, we can read this stuff and talk about these terms in kind of religious ways. But remember that I want us to make some degree of application from this to the workplace. Unrighteousness doesn’t just refer to our moral state before God. It means justice. It means the justice of our relationship with others. And the fallen workplace is a place that’s described here as places of injustice.

So this fallenness enters into the collective works of mankind as well—in the business world as a particular place. So understand this isn’t just describing your blackened heart. It’s describing your blackened actions and my blackened actions apart from the redemption of our souls by the Lord Jesus Christ.

“So truth fails. He who departs from evil makes himself a prey. Then the Lord saw it and it displeased him that there was no justice. He saw that there was no man and wondered that there was no intercessor. Therefore his own arm brought salvation for him and his own righteousness it sustained him. For he put on righteousness as a breastplate and a helmet of salvation on his head. He put on the garments of vengeance for clothing and was clad with zeal as a cloak. According to their deeds, accordingly he will repay, fury to his adversaries, recompense to his enemies, the coastlands he will fully repay. So shall they fear the name of the Lord from the west, and his glory from the rising of the sun. When the enemy comes in like a flood, the Spirit of the Lord will lift up a standard against him. The Redeemer will come to Zion and to those who turn from transgression in Jacob, says the Lord.”

And then we have the verse we began with: “As for me, this is my covenant.”

What’s happening? He’s describing Israel’s exile, but he’s describing each and every one of us, isn’t he? No man, no intercessor. The Lord’s hand had to accomplish the salvation of his people. The only thing that would turn the path of history—whether it’s the history of Israel, America, or whatever—the only thing that would turn that path and turn you and me was not our work, right? It was the Spirit of God and the word of God.

And God himself saw that there was no man who could remedy the situation of fallen man. No intercessor. But the Lord put on the helmet of salvation, right? He began to accomplish things. And when the Lord Jesus Christ comes, this is the answer to the sin and fallenness of mankind and the iniquity and the injustice and the deceit and the hatred that our lives spew forth apart from the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ.

So what we have in this text when it calls us to arise is to move from that death state in our sinfulness and arise, awake into the new life that we have in the Lord Jesus Christ. It calls us to agree with the description of who we are in Isaiah 59 and that we are walking dead men and that only through the grace of God does he call us forth the way Jesus calls forth Lazarus. Then we come up from the death of our sinful rebellion against him. He has to unstop our ears so that we’ll hear him. The whole thing is of grace.

And God says “Arise.” And he says it again and again. We have this picture for us: Every morning we arise, we wake up, right? And it’s a reminder to us that our life in response to the covenant ministered to us by Spirit and word—the response that God calls us to—is first and foremost arise. Take up your cross daily, right? Move away from death. Move into life. And when you find yourself slipping back to being a zombie in any way, shape, or form, repent of it. Arise into new life in Christ.

Now, I think that’s the first command. And if we just jump to number two—shine—and we start doing a bunch of things that we can be better lightbearers for Jesus without a recognition that the beginning of that is a movement from death to life, we will become moralists. We will become those who just think we can fix the world and fix the flow of humanity by just learning some truths. Ideas have consequences. Certainly true to some extent. But you know the gospel is not an idea. It is a historical reality that Jesus died for us and was raised for our vindication, our righteousness, and he gives us new life on the basis of the grace of that gospel.

Now that’s where it begins. If you want to know how to shine in the workplace tomorrow, if you want to put that sign—not just on your house with the three kings, the first Christmas card you get, but if you want to put that on your office door, you know, metaphorically—maybe you want to do it literally—but if you want to do it as a reminder to yourself and others that the light of Christ shines forth from your office and from what you do in the workplace or from what you do in your home or whatever other work you put your hand to do, then you have to do it on the basis of a recognition that God’s covenant of grace has been accomplished in the coming of Jesus.

The great Epiphany is that this little baby is laying there. How can that do anything? But this child is the incarnate second person of the Trinity who has been wrapped in swaddling clothes at the beginning so that he’ll be wrapped in swaddling clothes at the end as he dies for our sins—for our Isaiah 59s—and raised up to give us new life so that we can arise, we can move from death to life by the Spirit and word, by the grace of God to us.

So you know, so number one: the covenant that underpins our shining is related to the Spirit and word. We have to have those things held together. And number two: the call is to arise, to move from death to life definitively in your life if you haven’t done that, and then day by day, taking up your cross daily.

And then we get to three: shine. So it’s not enough just to arise. The text doesn’t end there. It tells us not just to arise, to move from death to life, but to shine, right?

“Shine as lights without grumbling or disputing,” remember that tomorrow in your workplace when the first thing goes wrong. You know, these sound guys wonderfully and sacrificially gave them their Saturdays up yesterday and tried to get this new sound system in place, and it sounds like it’s doing pretty good from up here. But if it doesn’t, let’s shine and not be grumbling and complaining about the thing.

I tell you myself, and I tell you, but it’s an example, right? Interesting. Yesterday when we were here practicing this very important business of sound, it is. I don’t mean to say it isn’t. And I wasn’t sure I was going to tell you this or not, but I am going to tell you. So let me check my time. I think it’s a pretty good illustration. So I use the facilities in my office—the restroom up there—and the toilet overflows. So now I have a flood in my bathroom.

And you know what did I do? Well, I went down and found the mop bucket and the mop, and I got to doing cleaning that up. And I thought to myself, “You know, Dennis, nobody sees what you’re doing. And if I hadn’t said anything, nobody here would have known.” But you know, that work unseen to anybody else was just as much a shining if I did it correctly and without grumbling. And by the grace of God, I did yesterday. I normally probably wouldn’t, but by his grace and his grace alone—maybe because I was thinking about this sermon—I was able to shine in my own little closet, so to speak, by taking care of that without grumbling or complaining or kicking the toilet or whatever it was, right?

And then these guys are working in here to perfect the sound, which is significant, getting it out to people who are sick at home, etc. And so that you can hear the sermon. And they’re shining right now.

My point in that is that when we arise and shine, the shine is comprehensive. The shine isn’t just in sort of your big work functions. It’s not just in your family. It’s not just you and your wife. It’s not the important task that you might be called to do—like the sound system sort of stuff. It refers to every area of your life. When the toilet overflows, are you going to shine or not? Are you going to let the light of Christ—the knowledge of his grace, his providence—see you through that task without grumbling and disputing? Because that’s what Philippians tells us, right? That we’re to shine as lights by not grumbling or disputing.

All right? So the commandment is: first, arise. Secondly, it is shine.

And third—or the next point here—is that it involves new creation.

“Arise, shine, for your light has come. The glory of the Lord is risen upon you.”

So this is the apprehension of Jesus Christ and his incredible blessing of his incarnation and his salvation. The glory of God has arisen upon us. The glory is that light of God, right? So “Arise, shine, awake from the dead, for Christ has shone upon you.”

This is how you shine. The light is not original to you. You’re a moon to his sun. For behold, the darkness shall cover the earth and in deep darkness the people. But the Lord will arise over you. Language very similar to Ephesians again, Ephesians 5. And his glory will be seen upon you. Okay?

So this is God’s glory upon us. But what I want you to see here is it says darkness will cover the people, deep darkness, right? Deep darkness, death-like darkness, decreation, in darkness. What do we have here?

Again, if we’re thinking God’s story of the world, what happened? Darkness was over the face of the earth. And God’s word and Spirit, through the operative power of the Lord Jesus Christ, spoke, “Let there be light.” It’s the beginning of creation. So what we have in the celebration of Epiphany is also a celebration of the beginning of the new creation both in us and in the world.

“Arise.” We’ve moved from old creation to new creation. The world has turned definitively. This is not an idea. First and foremost, it is a historical action that Jesus came and initiated the second creation. He, as light, shone over a world that had become dark, dark, dark. Even the prophetic word had ceased prior to his coming. For hundreds of years we were left alone without Spirit and word. Well, not totally alone. The world still had the Scriptures that God stopped speaking because he was getting us ready for the ultimate word, which is the Lord Jesus Christ in the New Testament. But the point is great darkness covered the earth.

The return from exile ended up with all kinds of sinfulness. Well, the deep darkness can be seen just in the fact that the king of the Jews murdered babies trying to kill Jesus. Things were that dark.

And the light of Jesus Christ—the Spirit of God and the word of God incarnate there, and then in his words and in his text—comes into that darkness and brings forth order and beauty. So this arise and shine commandment is a call to enter into the new creation that has definitively arrived in the person and work of Jesus’s manifestation to us. This is an aha moment, right?

There’s a new creation. If you arise and shine in that new creation, great. And if you pull back, you’re pulling back to decreation, death, deep darkness. And it is going away. It’s going away. The new creation is being worked out now. It has been for 2,000 years. And that’s all that will stand as history progresses. And this text goes on to talk about that.

So arise and shine is to live in the context of the new creation. That means the story of work has to change somehow because of that new creation. Correct? What is work in the new creation? There’s still work. We’re still doing that work. The Bible tells us about it.

Next week we’ll look at the gospel of John and some of the implications for work. You know, Jesus—you’ve heard me talk about that verse where Jesus said his will is to do the work of his Father in heaven, to complete it, complete his work. Jesus is a worker in John’s gospel. We’ll turn there next week and we’ll look at some of the implications of the new creation for work, and we’ll do it by looking at the model that is the Lord Jesus Christ, who is the ultimate worker.

But the point here is that when you get up tomorrow morning and those of you that go off to a workplace either in your home or in an office someplace, and you go remembering these two words from me, from God’s text today—arise and shine—you’ve arisen. Make sure you’ve arisen in your head. You’ve put off the old man. Take up your cross daily. Live in the new life of Christ, and in that creation. And then shine as that new creation.

And when you do that, you are the lightbearers, right? You’re the light. God’s light has come upon you so that you can be light to others. And this text goes on to tell us of the wonderful effects that light will have. Nations will come. All these people come—all the different nations named, the produce, the business, right? The commerce of the nations. The gold and all the neat stuff. They’ll be brought to him.

You know, you can read these texts as churchmen. Okay, well, where’s vocation in any of this? Well, I don’t know. There might be some vocation involved in making frankincense, myrrh, and refining gold, maybe. Oh, yeah. Definitely is.

And as we read this text, as we read it, then it described to us the produce of the Gentiles, the productive efforts being brought into the worship of God. Does this have anything to do with our vocation and the offerings we bring each week? Oh, you know, it couldn’t have more to do with it, could it?

So the text, you know, let’s think of it, you know, that our arising and our shining is holistic to all of our life. And the text points us over and over again to the product of our work and our labor and how that’s acceptable in the context of bringing it into and beautifying the house of God.

So that’s what this call is for. Arise, shine. You’re rising and shining in new creation. And then the text goes on to tell us what the effects of the shining will be. I mean, we don’t need this, right? We know that if we’re in new creation now, we can arise and shine. And that’s all you really need is the command from God. And it’s cool to know the basis of it and what, how it’s linked up to new creation. But then what does it tell us?

“The Gentiles shall come to your light and kings to the brightness of your rising. Lift up your eyes all around and see. They all gather together. They come to you. Your son shall come from afar.”

Now later in this text, you heard me read further, that the nations that rebel against Jesus will be destroyed. So this is talking historically, in a process, where the nations generally, covenantally, what will they do as a result of our arising and shining in the power of word and Spirit, manifesting the new creation? What they will do is be converted. They will stream into the church of Jesus Christ, into the temple that is his church, into your homes, into your workplaces. We will find that the world will respond to the new creation light as moths to a flame.

Now, that’s wonderful news. And if it isn’t motivation enough to live out who you are in Jesus—to arise and shine—and if it isn’t motivation enough to recognize the tremendous grace that’s been given to you, and if it isn’t motivation enough to understand that you can either embrace old, darkened creation or new creation in Jesus, this motivation should be right there as well: in terms of motivation for you and me to arise and shine tomorrow because that is the way the world will be converted.

It’s not our light. It’s the light of Christ reflected through us and in our lives. And the promise here—and this is the predominant message of Isaiah 60, right?—the predominant message is that when Jesus comes and makes himself manifest to the Gentiles, they will come. The world will be converted. And the ones that aren’t converted in time and history, Jesus destroys and moves out of the way because the new creation is what he has come to establish, and our place in it.

So the basis for this is the covenant of word and Spirit. The command is first to arise, to move from death to life on a daily basis. And the command secondly is to shine forth with a new understanding of who we are, what the story of the world is, and how we’re to take that story into our workplace and manifest our vocations differently. To shine not just in our personal moral conduct, not just when we come here and sing songs, not just in our homes with raising our children and being submissive to our parents, but we’re to shine in our workplaces. We’re to be intentional lightbringers to the world through shining.

And then the message is that this is new creation and that in this new creation it will be effectual in the long haul for the conversion of the world. Optimism is to bring us to a renewed sense of commitment to this—to rise and to shine. The promise is that nations will come to our rising.

And then this goes on and on. And one last point from Isaiah 60—in terms of this—and that is the end result of this, that God says in the concluding verse that we read: “He has come to beautify the place of my sanctuary and I will make the place of my feet glorious.”

The end result of this is a beautification of the whole world, which is now the sanctuary of God. And our role in all of that, after arising and shining, is that we enter into the great joy of knowing these great truths—that Christ is accomplishing in his world, of knowing that his work is efficacious, that our work in the new creation is somehow linked to the lightbearing aspect of who we are in our Savior. And the end result of that is joy and life in him that then beautifies the world, brings beauty and glory to the world.

Epiphany is a season of the manifestation of Jesus to the world. Tomorrow is your Epiphany. It’s the time in which you will go from your home into workplaces or into schools—children, you into schools—wherever we’re going tomorrow. Let us go as light beams, right? Jesus’s sunbeams, as lightbearers for him, knowing that’s the purpose of being moved from death to life through the gracious covenant, the word and Spirit of God.

The purpose is not just to rise. It’s to shine. And that shining isn’t some sort of privatized thing. It’s knowing how we’re to shine in the context of our workplace.

Next week we’ll, as I said, look at the gospel of John and look at all the references to work. We won’t look at all of them, but there’s many references to the work of Christ and his work as the model for our work as well.

So, as I said, the sign shouldn’t just be in our homes—the three wise men. It should be, at least in terms of thinking about it, in our workplaces as well.

Let me conclude by reading a Christmas song that I’ve never heard of before. And it has this wonderful line toward the end of it. But I’m going to read the lyrics of this. This was written by J.M. Neale in the early or mid-nineteenth century. The Christmas carol that maybe some of you have heard of. I hadn’t really heard of it till I read it in Rushdoony’s systematic theology.

Here’s the lyrics:

“Earth today rejoices. Alleluia! Alleluia! Alleluia! Death can hurt no more, and celestial voices. Alleluia! Alleluia! Alleluia! Tell that sin is over. David’s sling destroys the foe. Samson lays the temple low. War and strife are done. God and man are one. Reconciliation. Alleluia! Alleluia! Alleluia! Peace that lasts forever, gladness and salvation. Alleluia! Alleluia! Alleluia! Came on Christmas day.

Gideon’s fleece is wet with dew. Solomon is crowned anew. War and strife are done. God and man are one. Though the cold grows stronger. Alleluia! Alleluia! Alleluia! Though the world loves night because its deeds, its work, are evil, yet the days grow longer. Alleluia! Alleluia! Alleluia! Christ is born our light. Now the dials type is learned. Burns the bush, the bush that is not burned. War and strife are done. God and man are one.”

So a song of great triumph and the fulfillment of biblical types with this line: “Now the dials type is learned.”

What does that mean? It means that in the coming of Jesus, and today in the consideration of his Epiphany, that the dial is learned. The dial’s type—dial refers to time. The type of time, the meaning of time, the meaning of life, the meaning of our work—is what is manifested, is what the Epiphany brings to us in a correct understanding of the Lord Jesus Christ coming in time and history to forever change the world. And the result of that is that the dials type is learned—is that we take that into our calendar. Then Jesus is the meaning of time, of life, and of work, and that goes with us as well. That’s the type of the dial that we’re to learn as we approach our work this week and always. This is the Epiphany of Jesus to us.

May he grant, by his Spirit and word, that we would be intentional lightbearers in our vocation and work this week.

Let’s pray.

Father, we thank you for the wonderful news of Isaiah 60 and particularly in light of our sinfulness described in Isaiah 59. Bless us, Lord God, as we attempt to remember this week to arise, to take up our cross daily, and to shine. Help us, Lord God, to apply this message—the story of the world, its fall, its redemption in Jesus Christ, and now the new creation growing and making itself manifest in the world.

Help us, Lord God, to remember that story, assuing the stories of others with other views of why things are wrong. We know, Lord God, that our sin is the basis for what is wrong in the world and that we’ve been saved from that sin. Help us then this week, Father, to arise and shine. In Jesus name we pray. Amen.