The Day Breaking
OH Until the day break, and the shadows flee away, I will get me to the mountain of myrrh, and to the hill of frankincense.” — Song Sol. iv. 6.
It is proper that we should now conduct our ’ night thoughts’ to a close. And with what topic more soothing and appropriate can we terminate our present reflections than the one suggested by the portion of the sweet song just quoted — the arrival of that blessed period when the shadows of our present pilgrimage will all have fled, succeeded by a “morning without clouds,” and a day without a night? That we dwell so much in the region of present clouds, and so little in the meridian of the future glory, entails upon us a serious loss. “We look too faintly beyond the midnight of time into the daylight of eternity. We are slow of heart to believe all that is revealed of the bliss that awaits us, and do not sufficiently realize that, in a little while, — 0 how soon ! — the day will break. — the shadows will flee away, — and we shall bathe our souls in heaven’s full, unclouded, endless light. i Absent from the body.’ we shall be ’ present with the Lord.’ To the consideration of this deeply interesting subject let us for a few moments, in conclusion, bend our thoughts.
“We have already considered the night-season of travel as constituting a great portion of the celestial pilgrimage of the saints. Solomon, in the sacred Idyl from which we have selected the sublime stanza at the head of this chapter, again recalls our thoughts to this point. He refers to the “shadows” which gather round the pathway of the believer on his way to the eternal city. Nor is this an exaggerated description of the reality. The portrait of the Christian’s life has its lights, bright and glorious: but it also has its shadows, deep and long; and both the light and the shade are essential to the perfection of the picture.
“We have emerged, beloved, in our conversion, from the scene of shadows. Divine and sovereign grace has chosen and called us out of a world over which the funeral pall of the ’ darkness of the shadow of death’ spreads its broad mantle. “Darkness covers the earth, and gross darkness the people.” The natural sun illumines, — its beams of light and splendor streaming alike through the windows of the palace and the lowly cot; but until Jesus, the Sun of Righteousness, is revealed and known, neither i those who dwell in kings’ houses,’ nor those who occupy the humblest cottage on the hillside, are guided to eternity by a single ray from heaven. Now, seeing that the path of the “child of the light” lies through this dark world, it is no marvel if shadows, often varied and thick, should brood around his steps. Let us for a moment glance at some of them.
There are the shadows of spiritual ignorance thrown upon our path. With all our attainments, how little have we really attained! With all our knowledge, how little do we actually know! How superficially and im« perfectly are we acquainted with truth, with Jesus, who is emphatically “The truth.” with God, whom the truth reveals. “WTe know but in party “We see through a glass darkly” — all is yet but as a riddle, compared with what we shall know when the shadows of ignorance have fled. There are, too, the enshrouding shadows of God’s dark and painful dispensations. Our dealings are with a Grod of whom it is said, “Clouds and darkness are round about him.” Who often “covers himself as with a cloud,” and to whom the midnight traveller to the world of light has often occasion to address himself in the language of the church, “Thou art a God that hidest thyself.” Ah! beloved, what clouds of dark providences may be gathering and thickening around thy present path! Through what a gloomy, stormy night of affliction faith may be steering thy tempest-tossed bark. That faith eying the promise and not the providence — the “bright light that is in the cloud,” and not the lowering cloud itself, will steer that trembling vessel safely through the surge.
Remember that in the providences of Grod, the believer is passive — but with regard to the promises of G od, he is active. In the one case, he is to ’ be still’ and know that Grod reigns, and that the “Judge of all earth must do right.” In the other, his faith, child-like, unquestioning and unwavering, is to take hold of what God says, and of what Grod is, believing that what he has promised he is also able and willing to perform. This is to be “strong in faith, giving glory to Grod.”
The divine withdrawment is another shadow, often imparting an aspect of dreariness to the path we are treading to the Zion of Grod. “Wherefore hidest thou thyself?” says Job. “For a small moment,” says Grod to the church, “have I forsaken thee, ... In a little wrath i” hid my face from thee for a moment.” Ah! there are many who have the quenchless light of life in their souls, who yet, like Job, are constrained to take up the lamentation, “I went mourning without the sun.” There are no shadows darker to some of God’s saints than this. Many professing i^E DAY BREAKING. 229
Christians dwell so perpetually in the region of shadows, they so seldom feel the sunshine of God’s presence in their souls, that they scarcely can discern when the light is withdrawn. But there are others, wont to walk so near with God in the rich, personal enjoyment of their pardon, acceptance and adoption, that if but a vapor floats between their soul and the sun, in an instant they are sensible of it. 0 blessed are they whose walk is so close, so filial with God, whose home is so hard by the cross, who, like the Apocalyptic angel, dwell so entirely in the sun, as to feel the barometer of their soul affected by the slightest change in their spiritual atmosphere. In other words — who walk so much beneath the light of God’s reconciled countenance as to be sensible of his hidings even “for a small moment.” And then there comes the- last of our shadows, “the valley of the shadow of death.” There they terminate. This may be the focus where they all shall meet; but it is to meet only to be entirely and forever scattered. The sentiment is as true as the figure is poetic, — “the shadow of death.” It is but a ’ shadow’ to the believer; the body of that shadow, Jesus, the “Captain of our salvation,” met on the cross, fought, and overcame. By dying he so completely destroyed death, and him that had the power of death, that the substance of death in the experience of the dying Christian dwindles into a mere shadoio, and that shadow melts into eternal glory. 0 death! how great was thy triumph, and how overwhelming was thy defeat when Jesus died. Never was thy gloomy domain so dark as when Essential Life bowed his head and gave up the ghost. Yet never was it illumined with .an effulgence so great, as when the Divine Conqueror passed through its gloomy chambers, and with a power and a victory mightier and more glorious far than Samson’s, tore away its iron gates, and demolished its strongholds; throwing a brightness and a fragrance around the bed of death, in which, “until the day dawn and the shadows flee away,” those who sleep in Jesus lie down and rest. “If a man keep my sayings he shall never see death.”” Whoso believeth in me shall never dieT
“Death’s terror is the mountain faith removes; Tis faith disarms destruction, — Believe, and look with triumph on the tomb.”
{i 0 ye timorous souls! that are terrified at the sound of the passing bell; that tremble at the sight of an opened grave; and can scarce behold a coffin without a shuddering horror; ye that are in bondage to the grisly tyrant, and tremble at the shaking of his iron rod, cry mightily to the Father of your spirits for faith in his dear son! Faith will free you from your slavery. Faith will embolden you to tread on this the fiercest of serpents. Old Simeon, clasping the child Jesus in the arms of his flesh, and the glorious Mediator in the arms of his faith, departs with tranquillity and peace. That bitter persecutor Saul, having won Christ, being found in Christ, longs to be dismissed from cumbrous clay, and kindles with rapture at the prospect of dissolution. Methinks I see another of Emmanuel’s followers trusting in his Saviour; leaning on his beloved, go down to the silent shade with composure and alacrity. ‘Knowing,’ says Peter, ’ that shortly I must put off this tabernacle, even as our Lord Jesus Christ hath showed me.’ In this powerful name, an innumerable company of sinful creatures have set up their banners and overcome through the blood of the Lamb. Authorized by the Captain of thy salvation, thou also may est set thy feet upon the neck of this ’ king of terrors.’ Enriched with this antidote thou mayest play around the hole of the asp, and put thy undaunted hand on the cockatrice den. Thou mayest feel the viper fastening to thy mortal part, and fear no evil; thou shalt one day shake it off by a joyful resurrection, and suffer no harm.”
But let us turn from the shadows of night to the day-dawn, by which those shades will presently be succeeded. “Until the day break and the shadow flee away.” It will not always be night with the expectants of glory. As the “children of the day and of the light,” their present time-state would seem to be but an accident of their being, a temporary obscuration only, through which they are passing to the world of which it is said, “there shall be no night there; and they need no candle, neither light of the sun, for the Lord God giveth them light: and they shall reign forever and ever.” xlnd yet we would be far from penning a sentence tending to foster in the Christian mind a spirit of discontent with his present night-season of humiliation and sorrow. We have already remarked, in a former part of this work, that there are glories revealed by the natural night, which the sun in all its splendor, so far from revealing, only hides from our view by its very brightness. We are as much indebted to the darkness of night for its magnificent unveilings of God’s wonderful works, as to the noon-tide splendor which lights up the wonders and glories of earth. How limited had been our knowledge of the universe, and how partial our view of the divine affluence and greatness, had there been no natural night. A world of perpetual sunshine, would have been a world of gross mental darkness! The earth beneath and the sun above us would have been the limits of our knowledge. The beauties spread out upon the dissolving landscapes around us, we might have surveyed with admiration and delight, but the mighty expanse above us, the overspreading firmament, the remote depths stretching far into space, all studded and crowded with suns and systems and constellations, would never have burst in grandeur and wonder upon our view. Of astronomy, that most delightful and fascinating of all sciences, we should have known nothing. But when the last lingering ray of the sun retires, and evening, glittering with heaven’s rich jewellery, approaches; and night, wearing her diadem of star and planet, takes her allotted place in the earth’s revolution, — then it is we go forth on our wondrous travel, and as we “consider the heavens, the moon, and the stars, which he has ordained,” we exclaim with that devout astronomer, the Psalmist “The heavens declare the glory of Grod; and the firmament showeth his handiwork.” Thus is it with the dark dispensation of God with his people. Would you pass through a spiritual course of perpetual sunshine? Would you be exempt from the night-season of sorrow and of trial? 0 how little would you then know of God, and of Christ, and of truth! We hesitate not to affirm, that as in the natural world we are more deeply indebted to the instructions of the night than to those of the day, so in the spiritual world we experimentally learn infinitely more in the night-season of deep and sanctified affliction than in the bright, sunny day of gladness and prosperity. It may be a dark and tedious night of weeping and of trial, yet is it often a night in which Christ visits us, as he visits us at no other season. But from this digression let us turn our thoughts to the day-dawn, when the shadows shall all flee away.
We have alluded to the moral darkness of man, — the spiritual unregeneracy in which he is found by nature. The first light, then, that dawns upon the soul is the day-break of grace. When that blessed period arrives, when the Sun of Righteousness has risen upon the long-benighted mind, how do the shadows of ignorance and of guilt instantly disappear! What a breaking away of, perhaps, a long night of alienation from God, of direct hostility to God, and of ignorance of the Lord Jesus, then takes place. Not, however, strongly marked is this state always at the first. The beginning of grace in the soul is frequently analogous to the beginning of day in the natural world. The dawn of grace is at first so faint, the day-break so gentle, that a skilful eye only can descry its earliest tints. The individual himself is, perhaps, ignorant of the extraordinary transition through which his soul is passing. The discovery of darkness which that day-dawn has made, the revelation it has brought to view of the desperate depravity of his heart, the utter corruption of his fallen nature, the number and the turpitude of his sins, it may be, well nigh overwhelms the individual with despair! But what has led to this discovery? What has revealed all this darkness and sin? 0! it is the day-break of grace in the soul! One faint ray, what a change has it produced!
And is it real? Ah! just as real as that the first beam, faintly painted on the eastern sky, is a real and an essential part of light. The day-break — -faint and glimmering though it be — is as really day as the meridian is day. And so is it with the day-dawn of grace in the soul. The first serious thought — the first real misgiving — the first conviction of sin — the first downfall of the eye — the first bending of the knee — the first tear — the first prayer — the first touch of faith, is as really and as essentially the day-break of God’s converting grace in the soul as is the utmost perfection to which that grace can arrive. 0 glorious dawn is this, my reader, if now for the first time in your life, the day-break of grace has come, and the shadows of ignorance and guilt are fleeing away before the advancing light of Jesus in your soul. If now you are seeing how depraved your nature is; if now you are learning the utter worthlessness of your own right* eousness; if now you are fleeing as a poor lost sinner to Christ, relinquishing your hold of -everything else, and clinging only to him; and though this be but in weakness and tremalousness, and hesitancy, yet sing for joy, for the day is breaking, — the prelude to the day of eternal glory, — and the shadows of uaregeneracy are forever fleeing away. And as this day of grace has begun, so it will advance. Nothing shall impede its course, nothing shall arrest its progress. “He which hath begun a good work in you will perform it until the day of Jesus Christ.” The Sun now risen upon you with healing in his beams shall never stand still — shall never go back. “He hath set a tabernacle for the sun” in the renewed soul of man, and onward that sun will roll in its glorious orbit, penetrating with its beams every dark recess, until all mental shadows are merged and lost in its unclouded and eternal splendor. “The path of the just is as the shining light, that shineth more and more unto the perfect day.”
But there awaits the believer a day brighter far than this; such a day as earth never saw, but as earth will surely see, — the day-break of glory. & Until the daybreak, and the shadows flee away.” 0 what a day is this! It will be “as the light of the morning, when the sun riseth, even a morning without clouds.*’ Grace, which was the day-dawn of glory, now yields its long-held empire; and glory, which is the perfect day of grace, begins its brilliant and endless reign. The wayworn “child of the day” has emerged from the shadows of his pilgrimage, and has entered that world of which it is said, u there shall be no night there.” Contemplate for a moment, some of the attributes of this day of glory. It will be a day of perfect knowledge. “When it is said that there will be no night in heaven, it is equivalent to the assertion, that there will be no intellectual darkness in heaven; consequently there will be perfect intellectual light. It is said that we shall then ’ know even as also we are known.’ The entire history of (rod’s government will then be unread out before the glorified saint, luminous in its own unveiled and yet undazziing brightness. The mysteries of providence, and the yet profounder mysteries of grace, which obscured much of the glory of that government, will then be unfolded to the wonder and admiration of the adoring mind. The misconceptions we had formed, the mistakes we had made, the discrepancies we had imagined, the difficulties that impeded us, the prophecies that bewildered us, the parables that baffled us, the controversies that agitated us, all, all will now be cleared up; the day has broken, and the shadows have fled forever. 0 blessed day of perfected knowledge, which will then give me reason to see, that the way along which my God is now leading me through a world of shadows, is a right way; and that where I most trembled, there I had most reason to stand firm; and that where I most yielded to fear, there I had the greatest ground for confidence; and that where my heart was the most collapsed with grief, there it had the greatest reason to awaken its strings to the most joyous melody.