Isaiah 60: Feeling lost, alone, forgotten? Grab Heaven’s Lifeline

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“O how I love Your law! It is my meditation all the day.
Your commandments make me wiser than my enemies, For they are ever mine.
I have more insight than all my teachers, For Your testimonies are my meditation.
I understand more than the aged, Because I have observed Your precepts.” (Psalm 119:97–100 NASB)

As Rosh Hashanah (aka Yom Teruah and Day of Blowing Trumpets) and Yom Kippur (Day of Atonment) approach, it’s a good reminder to be more forgiving of the small things that others do to annoy us. And what we do to annoy them.

We need to forgive those as we want to be forgiving. The Messiah forgives a massive amount of trespasses. The LORD covers over those egregious sins, so we can at least let go of the much smaller trespasses others do to us.

We may think we’re far removed from the horror show described in the Torah reading כי תבוא Ki Tavo (“when you come in,” Deut. 26:1-29:8), but each of us encounters stress that pushes off any mask from our true characters.

A key point in this passage is entering and living in the “rest” God gives us, fully realized through the Messiah and the Spirit. Like Israel’s move from Mitsraim (Egypt) to the Land, our entering God’s “rest” (Hebrews 3–4) is all about a change of identity, purpose and character.

From darkness to light

The haftarah (parallel reading) for Ki Tavo (Isaiah 60) is the sixth of seven haftarot following the Fast of Av (fifth month) and the anniversary of the destruction of the first and second temples in Jerusalem. These readings, called the Seven Consolations, are all drawn from Isaiah 40-66, which reveal the future return of God’s people from exile, Zion’s restoration and the Messianic Kingdom of Heaven on earth.

We can look forward to the coming of the LORD with either despair or joy — or both. It will be a dark time, but at the other side, there will be no more death and suffering.

Things that matter will take effort, discomfort and pain. They also take a lot of time but if you stick with it and you are loyal to your goal, you will see its completion.

““Arise, shine; for your light has come, And the glory of the LORD has risen upon you. “For behold, darkness will cover the earth And deep darkness the peoples; But the LORD will rise upon you.” (Isaiah 60:1-2 NASB)

We will know the redemption is coming when Zion lies in desolate darkness. Only those who “hope against hope” will be fully prepared to see it.

Isaiah’s words are a source of consolation to those who were sent into exile in Babylon that in the future, Zion’s fortunes will be restored. They scattered the knowledge of the LORD far and wide, so when the Apostles and their spiritual heirs went out from Jerusalem with the message of Messiah, already had fertile ground to spread the message of the Kingdom of Heaven.

The Exile, both literal and spiritual, is a time of darkness and desolation. When the darkness is great, the light is even easier to spot. Unfortunately, we tend to focus on the darkness. Most of our entertainment focuses on the darkness. Horror, action, drama are common themes in Hollywood.

Darkness is alluring because it has the illusion of power, which our culture worships. Our culture considers the light as “saccharine,” unrealistic or a sign of weakness. People consider walking in the light a waste of time and prefer to follow the one with the biggest stick. People also like the darkness because they can hide their true selves from everyone else (Isa. 29:15; John 3:19; Rom. 13:12; Eph. 5:11).

In Eden, there was nothing to hide, only light. But once Adam and Khavah sinned, they had something to hide and darkness came in and interfered in the relationship between God and His creation. (Genesis 3)

Longing for belonging

The sinner is in a state of exile away from God, spiritually blind and lost in materialism and nihilism. We have an epidemic of loneliness and purposelessness in our culture. We wonder if anyone will care about our absence when we are gone, so many grasp for fleeting bits of attention or sensation.

It is not without reason that those of us who believe that Yeshua of Nazareth is the Messiah see Him as the only one who can put an end to both the physical and spiritual exile of God’s people, both Jewish and Gentile.

God calls us to come to His Son “as we are,” but we are not to leave as we are. A lesson of the Tabernacle in Vayiqra (Leviticus) is we are to allow Messiah Yeshua to change us from the inside out. We can be different from who we were before and now, and our lives can have a purpose. We are a part of the family of the Creator of Heaven and Earth.

The book of Revelation tells us that God hands over judgement of the nations to the Son, who was worthy to open the scroll — the details of the judgment (John 5:22; 9:39; Acts 10:42; 17:31; Rev. 5:1–5). This is the start of the Messianic Age.

Yeshua’s apostle Matthew quotes from this prophesy in Isaiah 60, and explicitly links it to Himself as the Messiah (Matthew 4:12–17).

The Sages say that when King Messiah inaugurates the Messianic Age, He brings both light and darkness with Him. He will make a clear distinction between good and evil, between holiness and wickedness. He gives His people a choice. He lays them out and tells us where the path of light and the path of evil lead so we can make an educated choice.

The ancient commentary Exodus Rabbah 14:3 says that God will bring darkness on the ungodly and the wicked of the nations but His people will walk in the light. This is what happened in Egypt, during the plague of darkness, the Egyptians were in complete darkness but the darkness did not touch the children of Israel, as they had the light wherever they went.

We also see that distinction later when God, in the pillar of cloud, blocked the Pharaoh’s view of the children of Israel as they were blocked by the sea (Ex. 14:3). Egypt was the superpower of the day and no one would have thought that a nation of slaves could have brought them low, but they had the real superpower on their side. Egypt had the illusion of power, but God is the only real power.

The Sages say that the light the Messiah will bring with Him is the original light of creation. It was reserved at the time of Creation for the righteous in the age to come. When we want the truth, we have to dig for it to move forward.

““It is He who reveals the profound and hidden things; He knows what is in the darkness, And the light dwells with Him.” (Daniel 2:22 NASB)

The only one who can reveal the meaning of the dream is the One who gave it to you. We all need wisdom to understand what is going on in our lives. Are we like Job with our loyalty to God being tested or are we suffering because God is testing us to see what is in our hearts? Once the truth is revealed, do we want to deny it and hide it or accept the fact that there’s something in our hearts that needs repair. This kind of repair takes effort. All relationships worth having take work whether its with family, friends, coworkers, etc.

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through Him, and apart from Him nothing came into being that has come into being. In Him was life, and the life was the Light of men. The Light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not comprehend it.” (John 1:1-5 NASB)

Light and darkness are not opposites. There’s light and no light. There’s really no such thing as true darkness. God had to shroud His light in a dark cloud.

Good vs. evil is not like Zoroastrianism. They are not equal. Light swallows up the dark.

“Then Jesus again spoke to them, saying, ‘I am the Light of the world; he who follows Me will not walk in the darkness, but will have the Light of life.’” (John 8:12 NASB)

Messiah Yeshua’s presence will spiritually illumine every person who lives in Messianic Jerusalem. Those who don’t want to live in light and love darkness will try to run away from His light. When God dwelled in the camp of Israel, He had to hide His light in a cloud but in the Messianic Kingdom, that light will not be hidden at all.

We can run away from God but no one can take us away from Him. In this world, it’s easier to follow the darkness and we have to consciously choose the light. The darkness is extremely attractive if we ignore where it leads. We can deliver ourselves into chains but when we do that, we can call out to the One who can break those chains.

Jerusalem will be spiritual and physical capital of the entire earth in the Messianic Age, not New York City, the Hague, Brussels, or Beijing.

If you have a destination or a goal in mind, it makes the trip easier to travel.

The earliest leaders of Zionism were secular atheists and they considered setting up a Jewish homeland somewhere in Africa, but that came to nothing because that is not where God put His name.

The LORD had given us a lifeline to give to the world in the Messiah Yeshua. There is a purpose to our lives. The Torah is not bondage but liberty.

As a matter of fact, we read in other prophetic writings that God will punish the wicked, disobedient nations who refuse to acknowledge Messiah as the King and the Torah as the only law with devastating judgements and those nations are plunged into utter darkness until they accept the Messiah and walk in Torah.

Is God being mean by punishing the wicked to make them submit to the Messiah? No, perseverance helps develop good character (James 1:2–8).

If you’re old enough to recall that right after 9/11, the churches were full of people looking for guidance and answers to the terrible suffering they saw and experienced. Discipline give us an opportunity to reconsider the wrong path we are traveling and to change course.

In the Messianic Age, Zion, will be a beacon of light, a lantern to the nations to walk by.

“At that time, the Holy One, blessed is He, will make the light of King Messiah and of Israel gleam, and everyone will walk by the light of King Messiah and of Israel as it is said, ‘Nations will walk by your light and kings by your shining brilliance.'” (Yalkut Shimoni, Isaiah 499)

We have a challenge today in the body of Messiah. The light that the Messiah brought in the Sermon of the Mount (especially, Matthew 5) and other teachings is seen as casting darkness on the salvation of God by a number of theologians, because they are confused by what the apostle Paul wrote and use his writings to interpret Messiah’s message, rather than the other way around. That has caused great confusion and will be the subject of the second part of the study on the Sermons of the Mount and Plain.

Is the Body of Messiah just a clique or is it to be a gathering of all God’s people? It is to be like an olive tree, with a mix of native born branches and wild branches.

How do we call people to Messiah? When we speak about the LORD’s lovingkindness and loyalty and do so consistently and walk in consistently, people respond to that.

The words of the Messiah and the Apostles should sound just like the Torah and the Prophets. There should be no contradiction or inconsistency. (Matthew 5:17–19)

As we peak at the end of the book about sin, death and misery on Earth, we see echoes of what the prophet Yeshiyahu foresaw (Isa. 60:19–20).

“And the city has no need of the sun or of the moon to shine on it, for the glory of God has illumined it, and its lamp is the Lamb. The nations will walk by its light, and the kings of the earth will bring their glory into it. In the daytime (for there will be no night there) its gates will never be closed; and they will bring the glory and the honor of the nations into it; and nothing unclean, and no one who practices abomination and lying, shall ever come into it, but only those whose names are written in the Lamb’s book of life.” (Revelation 21:23–27 NASB)

The Messiah’s Kingdom is always open. There’s a way in through the veil. As we prepare for the fall feasts, keep in mind that this is what the Lord wants to do. He wants to welcome all into His gates and He wants us to extend a warm welcome to those He is gathering to Himself.