Eternal Light and Reign

There is an objection worth making to this verse, and it is rarely the one people expect. No night there can sound like a loss. Some of us do our best thinking in the dark, and the idea of a place with the dark taken out of it reads, on first hearing, like a place with something missing.

So follow the light through the book, because John is finishing a line that runs the whole way back. It starts with God saying let there be light before there is a sun to carry it, which should already tell you the sun was never the source. Isaiah picks it up and says it plainly to a ruined city: the sun shall be no more thy light by day, neither for brightness shall the moon give light unto thee: but the LORD shall be unto thee an everlasting light, and thy God thy glory. John says in his letter that God is light, and in him is no darkness at all. Jesus says I am the light of the world. Then in the chapter before this one, the city has no need of the sun, neither of the moon, to shine in it: for the glory of God did lighten it.

So nothing is being removed. What goes is the arrangement where light is something delivered to you from a distance, on a schedule, with gaps in it. Every lamp you have ever lit was a workaround.

And then the clause nobody expects at the end, written for people who spent their lives being pushed around by other people's power: they shall reign for ever and ever. Not rest. Not finally be left alone. Reign.

So the promise is not a better lamp. It is the end of needing one, and it is made to people whose whole lives were arranged by somebody else's power. Whatever is frightening you at three in the morning is already being measured against that, whether or not you are awake to do the measuring.

Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 331 is Iron Sharpeneth Iron (Proverbs 27:17).

All 365 readings in Daily Manna