Isaiah 60:20, ‘Your sun shall no more go down, nor your moon withdraw itself; for YHWH will be your everlasting light, and your days of mourning shall be ended.’ (also v.4)
Today is Pregnancy and Infant Loss Awareness Day, and I was asked by my Sister-in-Law to create an image based on Isaiah 60:20 that might encourage the hearts of those who have faced the trauma and tragedy of losing a little one during their earliest months of life.
In this passage, Isaiah looks forward to the eschatological homecoming of God’s people, to that longed-for day in which Jerusalem, arrayed as a Bride for her Bridegroom, is gathered into the everlasting arms of her Covenant Lord.
On that day, Isaiah tells us, ‘[her] sun shall no more go down, nor [her] moon withdraw itself.’ The daily descent of the sun into the earth, the monthly waning of the moon, these are reminders to us of a pervasive reality, namely, that we live in a broken world. Good and beautiful things fade away, small and precious things are lost, sweet and treasured things slip from our hands…we live in a world shot through with the anguish of mortality, a world where the sun goes down.
And yet, Isaiah envisions the day when this will be no more, when the sun that was buried in the hills will rise up again in joy, never to go down again. And on that day, the Bride’s light will not come from any created heavenly body, but from YHWH Himself, from the truly Risen Son, from the face of Jesus Christ.
And with His rising, the days of Her mourning will be at an end…Not because She forgets them, or because they have ceased to be wounds in Her soul, but because—just as Her Lord’s wounds are transfigured to witnesses of divine beauty and heralds of conquering love—so too the wounds of her mourning will—in the light of His morning—be turned to emblems of Her Lord’s faithfulness and radiant jewels in Her nuptial crown.
This Day has dawned: The rays of its rising pierced the heart of darkness when the heart pierced on Calvary began beating beneath the hills, and its noon-day brilliance is nearer than we can imagine. Take heart, Christian, all of our losses in this night are a sowing, and the Day of harvest is close at hand.
