The prophet Isaiah tells us:

“The people who were sitting in darkness saw a great light, and those who were sitting in the land and shadow of death, upon them a light dawned.”

There is something very special about the dawn. The sun seems to climb over the horizon with open arms, inviting us to share in the wonderful opportunities of a new day. Every dawn puts the things of yesterday in the past and allows us to begin afresh. The Bible uses this imagery of the dawn to communicate the reality of new beginnings. The psalmist teaches us that each new day should be a source of rejoicing, for it is a “day that the Lord has made; and we should rejoice and be glad in it” (Psalms 118:24). And Jeremiah tells us that the mercies of the Lord, “are new every morning” (Lamentations 3:23).

Each new day is the perpetual promise of new beginnings. It is a new opportunity to turn the disappointments of our lives in a new direction. We can all identify with the failures of life—bad decisions, broken relationships, unfortunate circumstances. But God gives us a continual opportunity to start life fresh every day and put the past in our past. He is the God of new beginnings, the God of new life, the God of forgiveness. He is the God who covers our yesterdays with His grace. And, He is the God who graciously covers our tomorrows with every new dawn He gives us. Every sunrise beckons us: “Turn your life away from yourself and to your Maker who loves you.”

We see this imagery of dawning throughout the Bible. The first recorded words spoken by God are “Let there be light” (Genesis 1:3), and with those words, our world dawned into existence. As we walk through Scripture, God brings new redemptive purposes into His world, and the revelations of those purposes are depicted as the coming of a new day.

Arise, shine, for your light has come, and the glory of the Lord has risen upon you (Isaiah 60:1).

This imagery of the dawn not only symbolizes new beginnings for us personally, it symbolizes a new beginning for the brokenness of God’s creation. The bliss of the Garden of Eden crumbled in the hands of Adam. Creation now groans under a curse. But we are given the promise that at the dawning of the age to come creation itself will be made new. Peter says we await the arrival of “a new heavens and a new earth in which righteousness dwells” (2 Peter 3:13).

Such promises of new beginning are given to us every morning in the rising sun. Scripture speaks of how, “The sunrise shall visit us from on high to give light to those who sit in darkness” (Luke 1:78). It also speaks of a day coming when the “sun of righteousness shall rise with healing in its wings” (Malachi 4:2) These are “new creation” pictures. God speaks of a rising sun because it is His way of telling us He is bringing a wonderful newness into this fallen world—a newness that will make everything perfect.

That day will be the most beautiful dawn in all creation. It will be a day that will never be overtaken by night again. It will be the day when God lifts the curse from this earth. And as the hymn writer says:

No more will sin and sorrow grow, Nor thorns infest the ground; He’ll come and make the blessings flow. Far as the curse was found

There is a dawn coming that will usher perfect beauty into this creation again. But currently, this world is less than beautiful. And like this world, we are less than beautiful. We live in the same darkness as creation, and we struggle in that darkness. Our sin is a reality to us. Spiritually, we have lost our way. But the God of new beginnings begins a work of grace in the midst of our darkness. The Apostle Paul tells us that the same God who said “let light shine out of darkness” has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ” (2 Corinthians 4:6). God opens a new day to us as He brings us into a new life in Jesus. “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come” (2 Corinthians 5:17). God has dawned a new life in our darkness. And along with all creation, when the dawn of the “age to come” arrives, we will come into the fullness of what we were always meant to be. On that day, God will make us, and this world, beautiful again, with a beauty we cannot now even imagine.

We look forward to that day in great anticipation! For on that day we will see the fullness of God’s light as the noonday sun. And though we anxiously wait for what we cannot now fully see, our current lives are not to be wasted in idleness waiting for a better life. We are to live our lives, even now, in the light of that future day, for it is already alive in us if the grace of God has dawned in our hearts and we have become new creations in Christ.

Therefore, we are to now see our lives as a journey in which God is remaking us in His image. Or, as Paul puts it, “conforming us to the image of Christ” (Romans 8:29). We are to see ourselves as new creations that God is truly in the process of making new. And we are to understand that God uses the remainder of our lives in that molding process, which can sometimes be painful.

This reality of new creation should cause us to see others in this world as valuable humans, created for the same purpose that we were created for, to live for the glory of our Creator and Redeemer. We are not to be judgmental toward any, but rather display the grace of Christ for all to see—the grace that is found in His death and resurrection, as He took our death upon Himself and provided for us His life in return. It also means we should see this precious world through the redeeming light of God’s love, as a world which He is making new again. And we are to participate in bringing the life and light of that newness into the darkness of this world.

There is another dawn mentioned in Scripture. It was early in the morning on the first day of the week that the women went to the empty tomb. This morning was, in a very real sense, the first dawn of new creation. Jesus had died. The fullness of God’s redeeming forgiveness was poured out into the darkness of this earth. And when Jesus rose from the dead on that morning, the first glimmering rays of the light of the “life to come” pierced the canvas of this world. That light was the beginning of all things being made new: “For behold, I make all things new” (Revelations 21:5).