Albert Barnes Commentary Isaiah 60:20

"Thy sun shall no more go down, neither shall thy moon withdraw itself; for Jehovah will be thine everlasting light, and the days of thy mourning shall be ended." — Isaiah 60:20 (ASV)

Thy sun shall no more go down—There will be no total and long night of calamity, error, and sin. This is designed to describe the flourishing and glorious state of the church. It, of course, does not mean that there should be no times of calamity, no period of ignorance, no scenes of persecution; but it means that there should not be total night. Truth will reign on the earth, and there never will be a time when the light of salvation would be extinct. There never will be a time like that when Jerusalem was wholly destroyed, and a long total night came over the land.

There never will be a time when the Sun of righteousness would not shine, or when the world would be wholly deprived of the illumination of His beams. The church will be perpetual. It will live through all changes, and survive all revolutions, and to the end of time the light of salvation will shine upon a darkened world. Since the Messiah came, the light of revelation has never been wholly withdrawn from the world, nor has there been a period in which total and absolute night has come over all the church of God. But the prophet, probably, referred to far more glorious times than have yet occurred.

The period is coming when the light of salvation will shine upon the earth with unclouded and universal splendor, as if the sun, having ascended to the meridian, should stand there in a blaze of glory age after age. It will be a time when there will be no alternation of day and night, when the light will not be obscured by clouds, and when there will be no eclipse of His glory.

Neither shall thy moon—This language is poetic, and means that there would be no such obscurity in the church as there would be in the world should the sun and moon be withdrawn. Light and beauty unobscured would fill the whole heavens, and the darkness of night would be from then on unknown.

Withdraw itself—Hebrew, יאסף yē'âsēp – ‘Be collected,’ that is, will not be withdrawn, or will not wane. The Septuagint, Οὐκ ἐκλείψει Ouk ekleipsei – ‘Shall not be eclipsed,’ or will not fail.

The days of thy mourning—(See the notes at Isaiah 25:8). The description here, therefore, is one of great glory and happiness in the church. That period will yet arrive; and no friend of God and of the happiness of man can think of that time without praying most sincerely that it may soon come, when the Sun of righteousness, in the fullness of His glory, will ascend to the meridian, and stand there without one obscuring cloud, and pour the splendor of the noontide beams all over a darkened world. Some of the ideas in this chapter, descriptive of the glorious times of the gospel, have been beautifully versified by Pope in his Messiah:

Rise, crowned with light, imperial Salem, rise!
Exalt your towering head, and lift your eyes!
See a long race your spacious courts adorn;
See future sons and daughters yet unborn,
In crowding ranks on every side arise,
Demanding life, impatient for the skies!
See barbarous nations at your gates attend,
Walk in your light, and in your temple bend:
See your bright altars thronged with prostrate kings,
And heaped with products of Sabaean springs!
For you Idumea’s spicy forests blow,
And seeds of gold in Ophir’s mountains glow;
See heaven its sparkling portals wide display,
And break upon them in a flood of day!
No more the rising sun will gild the morn,
Nor evening Cynthia fill her silver horn;
But lost, dissolved in your superior rays,
One tide of glory, one unclouded blaze,
Overflow your courts; the Light Himself will shine
Revealed, and God’s eternal day be yours!
The seas will waste, the skies in smoke decay,
Rocks fall to dust, and mountains melt away;
But fixed His word, His saving power remains;
Your realm forever lasts, your own Messiah reigns!