Let Your Light Shine
Day 271 – 28 September
Your Light Has Come
“Arise, shine; For your light has come! And the glory of the LORD is risen upon you.” (Isaiah 60:1, NKJV)
A Rattle of Peas on the Glass
Long before alarm clocks were cheap or reliable, the working towns of Britain and Ireland paid someone to wake them. The knocker-up walked the streets before dawn carrying a long, light stick, often of bamboo, and rapped on bedroom windows so that workers would reach their shifts on time. Some would stay at a window until they were sure the sleeper inside was awake, while others tapped a few times and moved on to the next house.
The next house, if it stood in Limehouse in London’s East End, might have heard something odder than a stick. Mary Smith, who worked there from the 1900s until 1934, woke the dock workers of the district by blowing dried peas through a long tube at their windows, and she charged sixpence a week. John Topham photographed her at it in 1931, and that single photograph has come to stand for the whole trade.
The whole trade rested on one plain fact: the knocker made none of the morning. Every rattle on the glass announced a day already under way, and the sleeper’s only part was to get up and meet it.
Zion in the Dust
Getting up and meeting the day is the very first thing Isaiah 60 asks. The verse opens with two Hebrew commands, qumi ori (arise, shine), and both are spoken to a woman, because the prophet was addressing Zion, the city spoken of as a daughter. Qumi (arise, get up) comes from qum (to rise, to stand up), the everyday verb for someone rising from a bed, a seat or the floor (Brown, Driver and Briggs). Eight chapters earlier, the same word had reached the same city: “Shake yourself from the dust, arise; Sit down, O Jerusalem!” (Isaiah 52:2, NKJV).
Jerusalem, in those chapters, was a captive sitting in the dust, a city in mourning. The Pulpit Commentary describes Zion at this point as long prostrate in the dust and covered with thick darkness, and the chapter itself looks ahead to the hour when “the days of your mourning shall be ended” (Isaiah 60:20, NKJV). Keil and Delitzsch heard far more than advice in qumi (arise, get up): it was a word of power, spoken over someone whose own strength had run out.
The Light Arrived First
Run out of strength, and the second half of the verse becomes the half you need most. In the sentence, qumi ori (arise, shine) comes first, yet in time the reason comes first: ki va orekh (for your light has come). The Hebrew spelling of va (has come) could also be read “is coming”, but the verb that answers it in the next line, zarach (has risen), is plainly a finished action, and the major translations render both as done. The Cambridge Bible explains that the prophet used these perfect tenses from the standpoint of the future, describing what God would do as though it had already happened, the use grammarians label the prophetic perfect (Gesenius, §106n).
Already happened is how the prophet saw it, and that settles the order of everything that follows. The light arrived, and then Zion was told to rise. The morning came first, and the getting up was the answer to it.
Answering the light, in this verse, means turning into light. Ori (shine) is the verb formed from ‘or (light), and it means to become light or to be lit up (Brown, Driver and Briggs). Keil and Delitzsch followed the logic through: Zion was to become light because she could, and she could only because a light from beyond her would pass itself on to her. The Pulpit Commentary put the same truth more simply, saying that Zion had no light of her own to shine with and yet could reflect the radiance streaming from the LORD Himself.
The LORD Himself is the sunrise in the verse’s closing line: “the glory of the LORD is risen upon you.” That glory, kevod YHWH (the glory of the LORD, His weighty splendour), comes up over Zion with zarach (has risen), the word commonly used in Hebrew for the rising of the sun (Barnes; Keil and Delitzsch). Genesis used the same verb when the sun rose on Jacob as he passed Penuel, limping on his hip (Genesis 32:31).
Limping at Penuel and lying in the dust at Zion, the two of them received their sunrise in the same order: the light did the arriving. This month opened on that order too. Its first morning carried the words “Ye are the light of the world” (Matthew 5:14, KJV), and the truth beneath them was that every believer’s light is received before it is ever shown. Isaiah 60 brings the month round to that truth from the prophet’s side: the light has come, the glory has risen, and the shining follows.
Christ, the Knock and the Morning
The shining follows in Paul as well. “Awake, you who sleep, Arise from the dead, And Christ will give you light,” he wrote to the Ephesians (Ephesians 5:14, NKJV), in the very passage that has anchored this month alongside the Sermon on the Mount. Bengel, Ellicott and the Pulpit Commentary all pointed to Isaiah 60:1 as the passage lying closest behind it, and Jamieson, Fausset and Brown described Paul’s line as a paraphrase of it. His anasta (arise, stand up) answers Isaiah’s qumi (arise, get up), and his epiphausei (will shine upon, will dawn upon) carries the glory that rose over Zion onto the one still lying down.
Lying down is where both passages find their listener, and both deliver the news in the same order. The light has a name in Ephesians, and the name is Christ. A knocker-up could only rap on the glass and hope; Christ is both the knock and the morning. His dawning keeps coming to the window, and the one thing left for the sleeper is the getting up.
Monday at the Window
Getting up on a Monday can take more courage than the day’s work. Some of us begin this week lying where the last one left us, flattened by a disappointment or worn down by a failure replayed so often it has cut a groove. Isaiah’s word reaches that floor before anything else does. Before any shining is asked of you, your light has come, and rising is simply your answer to a morning you had no hand in making.
Making the morning was never your work; meeting it is. Rise in one plain act before noon: draw back the curtain on the problem you have been avoiding, or pray a single sentence before the phone comes out of your pocket. Then stand in the light that is already on you, and let it show.
Letting it show may mean becoming someone else’s knocker-up. Somewhere near you is a colleague, a grown son or daughter, or a friend from church who has been lying low for weeks, and a short message can rattle gently on their glass. Stay at the window a little longer than feels comfortable, the way the more careful knockers did, until you see a light come on. That is how value gets added on a Monday morning, one tap on the glass at a time.
Declaration
The morning came before I woke to it, and I am getting up to meet it. Whatever kept me on the floor last week has lost its hold, because the light arrived first and the rising is mine to give. I will stand today in a brightness I did nothing to make, and I will let it show on me in every room I enter. Where someone near me is still lying in the dark, I will tap on their glass and wait at the window until I see them stir. My light has come, and I am on my feet.
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