The Midnight Watch in Jamaica

On the evening of July 31, 1834, tens of thousands of enslaved men and women across Jamaica gathered in churches, chapels, and open hillsides. They had heard the news — the British Parliament had passed the Abolition Act — but freedom would not begin until midnight. So they waited.

At the Moravian mission in Fairfield, the congregation sat in silence as the hours crawled past. In the parish of St. James, where the rebellion of Samuel Sharpe had been crushed just two years earlier, families knelt on the red earth and prayed. At William Knibb's Baptist chapel in Falmouth, a coffin had been built and placed at the front of the church, filled with chains and whips and the iron collar of bondage.

When the clock struck twelve, Knibb stood and declared, "The monster is dead!" The congregation erupted. The coffin was lowered into a grave dug in the churchyard. Across the island, from Montego Bay to Kingston, shouts of joy rose into the Caribbean night. People who had known nothing but captivity embraced one another as free men and women.

Isaiah saw this kind of moment from centuries away — the watchmen lifting their voices together, shouting for joy, because the Lord Almighty had bared His holy arm before all nations. The deepest freedom is not merely political. It is the moment when the messenger arrives and declares what the captive heart has longed to hear: "Your God reigns."