Their faces are put into sharp relief as they look down, and you can see that the light is coming from the babe himself. That is Rembrandt's very remarkable way of saying that the story of Christmas is the story of light in darkness. The prophet Isaiah had said that a light would break out upon those who sit in darkness. And, through the centuries since, this has been at the heart of the Christmas message. There is a light in the darkness of men's experience.
All hope shines and gleams from the manger.
All that makes up the suffering of men today he understood, he entered into. The world into which he was born was a gloomy, dark, hopeless world, where men lived in misery, by and large, a condition to which the world of our day is again rapidly declining. You see, a kinsman-redeemer undertakes to work out the solution to the problems all on his own. He comes into the picture only when the person who is suffering has reached the end of his own resources. As long as a person in Israel had resources of his own, he was expected to use them to help solve his problems.