And there was no need of the sun, neither of the moon, to shine in it (verse 23), for God was the light and Christ was the lamp of the New Jerusalem, which had emerged from the darkness of tribulation into the light of deliverance and redemption. Here the same figure was utilized that was used by the prophet in a similar description of Israel’ s return from the Babylonian exile: “ The sun shall no more be thy light by day; neither for brightness shall the moon give light unto thee: but the Lord shall be unto thee an everlasting light, and thy God thy glory. The sun shall no more go down; neither shall the moon withdraw itself; for the Lord shall be thine everlasting light, and the days of thy mourning shall be ended” -- Isaiah 60:19-20. Even the casual reader, if not biased by a continuous-history theory, can discern the similarity between these passages and the Revelation descriptions. The prophet Isaiah foretold the deliverance of Israel from exile nearly two hundred years before its occurrence, and he adapted the same figures to describe their restoration to their land that the Seer of Revelation applied to the emergence of the church from the tribulation period. As of restored Israel in their own land again, so of the New Jerusalem--the glory of God did lighten it, and the Lamb is the light thereof. These are the figures for the source of all spiritual knowledge and illumination in the City of the Lamb; there can be no alternation of light and darkness; no mixture of truth and error; for God is the source of the light of truth reflected through Christ in the church. The apostle of the Hebrew epistle (chapter 1:3) affirmed this vital truth in the reference to this Father and Son relation: “ Who being the brightness (effulgence) of his glory, and the express image of his person, and upholding all things by the word of his power, when he had by himself purged our sins, sat down on the right hand of the Majesty on high.” It was this presence of God and of Christ in the New Jerusalem that would be its sun, its moon and its light. In the order of both prophecy and apocalypse the old temple had been destroyed, and its furnishings were no longer recognized. The new temple, the church itself, had no such temporal structure and physical adornment as that which had featured the old; for the old rites were gone with the old city and its temple which had passed away-- and Holy City, the New Jerusalem, which represented the church of the Lamb, was spiritual only and was the new “ habitation of God through the Spirit” (Ephesians 2:22).