The lighthouses along the Oregon coast are a treasure of past times. Though GPS and other forms of modern navigation have rendered them mostly obsolete, they stand as a reminder of how important a light shining in the dark can be. The nearest to us, the Heceta Head lighthouse by Florence, was commissioned in 1888, along with a lighthouse at the Umpqua River, to fill in a 90 mile gap of coastal darkness between existing lighthouses. With very few interruptions, the Heceta Head lighthouse has shone in the dark since it began operation in 1894.
In our text for this Sunday, II Peter 1:16-21, verse 19 speaks of the prophetic message about Jesus and tells us, “You will do well to be attentive to this as to a lamp shining in a dark place. . .” Peter has been arguing that the prophecies regarding Jesus were confirmed by his and James’ and John’s experience of the Transfiguration of Jesus and God’s own voice declaring “This is my beloved Son.” Then he goes on to talk about the divine source of prophecy, the work of the Holy Spirit rather than human will.
This seemed like a fitting text with which to begin our congregation’s reading of the prophecy books of the Old Testament. Much in the prophets is difficult and obscure, using images from a different time and culture and referring to events which even fairly solid students of Scripture have a hard time keeping in order. Another challenge for the modern reader is an often gloomy outlook. The prophets addressed crises, sins, and injustices of their own times and their messages are frequently about divine judgment. The Jewish writer Abraham Joshua Heschel says, “In a stricken hour comes the word of the prophet.”
Yet, while the prophets seem to be speaking in dark times and often in dark words, they do offer light in that darkness. As our guest speaker suggested last Sunday, they remind us that God sees. He sees both the evil that human beings do and those to whom it is done. Heschel names the first characteristic of the prophet as a “sensitivity to evil.” The naming of that evil might seem the bulk of the prophetic word, but the light arrives in the further word that God will respond, with judgment yes, but also with compassion, with hope, and ultimately with saving deliverance.
In our New Testament text, Peter is convinced that the Old Testament, the Hebrew prophets, spoke of the “the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ,” not just His first coming but the second coming in glory. He sees the Transfiguration of Jesus as confirmation of those prophecies, that just as He shown in glory on the mountaintop, He will shine in glory one day for all the world. It is that prophetic word which points through the darkness of human evil to Jesus Christ which shines like a lighthouse on the point of dark coastline.
So we turn to the prophets now for several months. They shed light on their own times, revealing what was evil and declaring God’s judgment. They also offered a light pointing to redemption and salvation, both the temporal deliverance of rescue from their enemies and the spiritual and eternal deliverance of salvation through the Messiah, whom we know as Jesus Christ. May those same prophets shed light on and into our dark times and point us in the same direction.