The Candles of Copenhagen

On the evening of May 4, 1945, a BBC announcer read a single sentence that changed everything for the people of Denmark: "The German forces in Holland, northwest Germany, and Denmark have surrendered."

Within minutes, Copenhagen erupted. Families who had endured five years of Nazi occupation pulled blackout curtains from their windows for the last time and set candles on their sills — thousands of them, block after block, until the darkened city blazed with light. Church bells that had been silenced pealed out across the harbor. Strangers wept in one another's arms along the Stroget. Resistance fighters who had whispered in cellars now shouted in the open streets. One sentence on the radio, and an entire nation remembered what joy felt like.

Isaiah saw something like this, but on an infinitely grander scale. He pictured a messenger sprinting over the mountains toward Jerusalem — a city that had known the long night of exile — crying out, "Your God reigns!" At those words, the watchmen on the broken walls lift their voices together in song. The very rubble of the city breaks into singing.

The good news of the Gospel is that kind of announcement. It is not advice to try harder or a program for self-improvement. It is a declaration: the Almighty has bared His holy arm. Redemption has come. Every blackout curtain can come down, because the light now shining will never be extinguished.