The Night the Codes Fell Silent

For four years, the French Resistance survived on fragments. Coded messages crackled through BBC radio broadcasts — instructions hidden inside poetry readings, weather reports laced with secret meanings, Morse transmissions tapped out in candlelit attics across occupied France. Each message was precious and true, but desperately incomplete. Operators pressed their ears to illegal radio sets, straining to decode what London was really trying to say.

On the evening of June 5, 1944, the BBC aired the second stanza of Paul Verlaine's Chanson d'automne. Resistance fighters across Normandy recognized the signal immediately: invasion within forty-eight hours.

Then, on the morning of June 6, over 150,000 Allied soldiers stormed the beaches. No more codes. No more static. No more straining after fragments. Liberation itself had arrived in person — not as another message about freedom, but as freedom walking up the sand in flesh and blood.

The writer of Hebrews saw this same pattern in God's story. "At many times and in various ways, God spoke to our ancestors through the prophets." Each prophetic word was genuine and vital — but partial, like a coded broadcast from a distant command. Then the Son arrived. Not another messenger. The exact imprint of God's nature, the radiance of His glory, stepping into human history in person. Every fragmentary word the prophets had spoken found its full and final meaning in Him.