The Word as Light
‘That was the trae Light, which lighteth every man that cometh into the world,” — John i. 9.
IT is not for us to attempt to celebrate the Praise of Light. What a wonderful conception it was of the mind of God! How delicate the loom of that creative skill on which it is constructed day by day! And how complete an argument for the divine workmanship is afforded by the adaptation between the element of Light and the crystalline gate of the eye by which it enters man’s soul! (Luke xi. 34-36-)
Themes like these rather become such as our great epic bard, whose blindness made him more sensible to the value of that which he had lost, and whose lofty genius could alone find terms to describe its worth. Or, better still, Light might well be the subject of a sonnet by that angel minstrel who composed the majestic Psalm of Creation which is perpetually sung before the throne (Rev. iv. 11). But neither could proceed long with his task without rising from the material substance — for ethereal as light seems to be to our dull sense, it is still material — to that glorious Being who made it as a parable and emblem of his Divine nature. “God is Light, and in Him is no darkness at all” (i John i. 5).
But the glory of the Father’s nature is of such insupportable splendour that it would be impossible for any creature that He has made to behold and enjoy it; and it is very consolatory to be told in the opening verses of the Epistle to the Hebrews that our Lord Jesus is “the effulgence of his glory” (Heb. i. 3, R.V.). The human eye could not bear the full splendour of the sun’s heart or surface of golden cloud, but it can bear the far-travelled and diluted ray; so, though we could not behold the nature of God in its direct and original manifestation, we can behold his glory in the face of Jesus Christ (2 Cor. iv. 6). And for this reason we hail thankfully and adoringly the announcement that the Word is the Light.
I. The Characteristics of the Light. — Light is pure. — It is so pure that evil cannot stain or impurity defile it. It will pass through a foetid and poisonous atmosphere without contracting taint, or carrying a germ of poison with it, as it issues forth to pursue its ministries of mercy beyond. So pure was our blessed Lord. Evil fled abashed before Him. He gauged the power of temptation, not by yielding in a hair’s breadth, but by resisting and overcoming it. When He died, after thirty-three years’ close contact with men, his spirit was as absolutely stainless as when He was born of a pure virgin. And the instant effect of his life within our hearts will be to kindle a purity as sweet and chaste and unearthly as his own.
Light is gentle. — With each dawn its tides revisit us after having traversed the abyss with inconceivable speed; but its wavelets break so gently that they fail to shake the dewdrop from its blade of grass or the trembling petal from the over-blown rose. Even the gossamer of the spider’s web does not quiver as the sunbeams strike it. And how apt a symbol is here of that gentle goodness which made the shepherd-boy great, which leads the flock into pastures of tender grass, and fans with anxious care the dull sparkle of smoking flax! And when His love is shed abroad in our hearts, it begets a corresponding gentleness in judgment, speech, and behaviour. All true Christians are gentle folk. “The wisdom that is from above is first pure, then peaceabk, gentle, easy to be entreated, full of mercy” (James iii. 17).
Light is all-pervasive. — It kindles a line of watch-fires on the pinnacles of an Alpine range; but it does not neglect the hill-slopes up which the plovers follow its last retreating beams. It gilds the golden roofs of the palace; but it glides through prison-bars to sparkle in the tear-drops of the repentant prodigal. It lights the good man to his work, and the bad man to his home after the unholy revels of the night. Nor is it otherwise with the loving-kindness of Christ, which misses none in its daily ministry, however poor, and sad, and lonely; which includes the evil and the good, the just and the unjust; which “lighteth every man that cometh into the world.” And it is thus with those in whom his life repeats itself. They, too, are said to be “without partiality.” Their lives resemble the sun and the rain (Matt. v. 45).
Light reveals. — It revealed to Jacob the deception practised on him by Laban under the cover of darkness. It revealed to the host of Midian the meagre force before which it had fled panic-stricken, misled by the noise of the crashing pitchers and the flashing of three hundred lights. In darkness the traveller lies down to spend the night beneath the open sky, in terror lest he may stray to the brink of the ravine; but the morning, with rosy finger, reveals that he has been sleeping within a stone’s cast of his home. So does Christ reveal. He is the light of all our seeing. He not only lights up our inner sight, but He casts a light on God, and providence, and truth, and the mysteries of redemption, which, apart from Him, notwithstanding all our intelligence, had been obscure and unknown. In his light we see light. Light is whatsoever doth make manifest. Let us lift up our souls unto Him who is light, so that we may be filled and saturated with his nature and being, and made to glow with it in this dark world; as I have seen a certain kind of diamond, which, after having been held up for some short period in sunlight, has continued to sparkle like a star when carried thence into a darkened chamber. “We all, with unveiled face beholding as in a mirror the glory of the Lord, are transformed {i.e., transfigured, it is the same Greek word as in Matt. xvii. 2) into the same image from glory to glory, even as from the Lord the Spirit” (2 Cor. iii. 18).
I. The Ministry of the Light. — 77/.? Word was the Light ofunfaHen man in Paradise. — In the glades of Eden two trees were planted; the one the tree of life, the other of the knowledge of good and evil. It is impossible not to see in these a lively representation of Him who is Life and Light, and who, from the first, must have been the organ and channel of Divine communication to mankind.
It was in the person of the Son that the ever-blessed God walked with our first parents in the cool of the day; conversed with them; uttered the memorable prohibition; sought them in their fall; and, with sad prevision of all that it must cost, foretold the ultimate triumph of the woman’s Seed. Even then He rejoiced in the habitable part of the earth, and his delights were with the sons of men. Even then He was the Light of man’s moral nature, teaching him all he knew, and prepared to lead him on to know the deep things which lay concealed as a landscape under a morning haze. Even then the Son had commenced his favourite ministry of manifesting the Name of his Father (Matt. xi. 27; John xvii. 26).
The Word was Light in the World arnid the long dark ages which preceded the Incarnatiofi. — “The Light shineth in darkness, and the darkness comprehended it not.” There are two methods by which darkness is produced. The one by absence of light; the other by loss of sight. It is dark when the sun sets, and primaeval darkness resumes for a brief parenthesis its ancient sway; but it is also dark when the eye is blind. And the darkness mentioned here is not the first, but the second.
There has never been an age in which the Divine Light has not shone over our world. Not Gospel light, not the light of revelation, not light as we have it; but still. Light. And whatever light existed was due to the presence and working of the Lord Jesus. He shone in the good He did; giving rain from heaven, and fruitful seasons, and in the food and gladness with which He filled men’s hearts, so that He left not Himself without witness (Acts xiv. 17). He sho7ie in the clear testnnony given since the creation, through the works of nature, to the everlasting power and divinity of God (Rom. i. 20). He shone in the intuitions of truth, which we call conscience, and which are his voice in the human breast, and are so evidently referred to here as the true light, lightening every man coming into the world (Rom. ii. 14, 1 5). He shone also in those great movements
H Jaitttl5 §0nt glintt. ^3
‘towards righteousness, which seem to have swept from time to time over the heathen world. Whatever of truth there was in any of these must have been due to Him. It was of the Tieathen that the Apostle spoke when he said: “That which may be known of God is manifest in them; for God manifested it unto them” (Rom. i. 19, R.v.).
But the light shone amid blind and darkened hearts, which could not comprehend it. Though men knew God, they glorified Him not as God, neither were thankful; and, as the result,” they became vain in their reasonings, and their senseless heart was darkened’’ (Rom. i. 21). Since they would not believe, the god of this world was permitted to blind their eyes.
It is characteristic of this Gospel, and it well befits its theme, that so much space is given to the story of the man born blind (ix.), for such is really the condition of the race; and it is significant that that story is prefaced by the announcement so constantly reiterated by the Lord, “I am the Light of the world” (ix. 5; see also viii. 12; xii. 35, 46). A family born blind; a race stricken with blindness, as Saul was, and groping for some one to lead it by the hand; a vault, like that in which the dead are buried, around which the sunlight plays, whilst not one beam can enter — such is a picture of our race. “The Light shineth in darkness.”
The Word was the Light of the chosen /^^/Z?. — Throughout their history God sent them prophets, rising up early and sending them, that they might bear witness to the coming Light. They were not that Light, but they came to bear witness to it (John i. 8); just as the moon and planets bear witness to the sun while he is absent, though every moment is bringing him nearer to close their reign. Of these John the Baptist is here cited as the greatest and last.
We need not recapitulate their names — the evangelical Isaiah; the plaintive Jeremiah; the seraphic Ezekiel; the abrupt Habakkuk; Amos the herdman; and Haggai the priest. They are not all mentioned here; but are summed up in the greatest of all, John the Baptist, of whom Christ Himself said: “Verily I say unto you, among them that are born of women there hath not risen a greater.” All these were lights;
24 tire Movh aa f igljt.
John was “a burning and shining lamp”: but their light was not their own, it was derived from Him to whom they all bore witness. They spake of Him. The testimony of Jesus was the spirit of prophecy. Overtopping other men in the grandeur of their personal character, and by the gift of the Spirit of Inspiration, they saw the day of Jesus, as mountain-peaks first catch sight of the rising sun; and they declared to the world of men below what glory was on the way.
What a new interest would come into our reading of the Old Testament Scriptures, if we always remembered that they testify of Jesus, and glisten with light caught by anticipation from his life; and if we sought to discover what the Master meant when, beginning at Moses and all the prophets, “He expounded unto them in all the Scriptures the things concerning Himself.”
As every dewdrop on the morning meadow glistens with the sunlight, each of them reflecting the whole sun, so do the paragraphs of the prophets flash with the presence of Jesus. They are beautiful in his beauty; strong in his strength; true in his truth. The lips may be those of man, the voice that of a prophet; but through all, the Word of God speaks, and the true Light shines. In the pages of the prophets the quick ear of love detects the accents of Him who spake as never man spake. Indeed, we are told expressly that the Spirit of Christ was in the prophets announcing that Gospel which is now preached throughout the world (i Pet. i. ii, 12).
Finally the Light became incarnate. — Too bright to be beheld, the Light of God curtained Himself in human flesh, as the face of Moses beneath his veil, or the Shekinah beneath the folds of the tabernacle. Such is the direct force of the word translated dwelt in ver. 14. It might be better rendered tabernacled. But of this more afterwards.
And it is not possible to do more than take one brief glance at that bright world which awaits us, when, in the ages of eternity, our blessed Lord will be still the Everlasting Light. For it is written that the heavenly city will not need sun nor moon to shine in it, because the Lamb is the light thereof (Rev. xxi. 23). And so, from the first creation of man till the new creation; from the garden of innocence to the city of matured and tested holiness; from the origin of the race in its lonely and single representative to the untold myriads of his progeny who shall stand in the unsullied purity of robes washed white — always and everywhere, the Word of God is the Light of men, the true light, that is the archetypal light, of which all other lights are types and illustrations.
III. The Reception of the Light. — (i) Before his Incarnation “He was in the world.” In every spring, in every sunbeam, in every God-breathed thought, in every providence; walking up and down the aisles of his own temple; brooding over the teeming myriads of mankind. In Him they lived and moved and had their being. He was not an absentee from his own creation. In Him all things consisted and were maintained (Acts xvii. 28; Col. i. 17).
“And the world was made by Him.” Mark this touching repetition of the world; we shall often meet with it again. It is used repeatedly, as when a bereaved parent, brooding over the sin or misfortune of some beloved child, repeats his name again and again. “O my son Absalom! my son, my son Absalom! O Absalom, my son, my son!” And see how the Holy Spirit emphasizes the fact that our Lord was the organ through whom creation was wrought.
“And the world knew Him not.” As though a man might build a splendid mansion — with frescoes on its walls, fountains splashing in marble wells, luxuriant furniture, exquisitely -planned grounds — put it in trust for the sick or destitute, go away for years, and on returning be denied admittance, or watched as an intruder; until, touching some secret spring, he showed such knowledge and power as to compel recognition of his claims.
It was a sorrowful confession, extorted from our Lord, by all his experiences, both before and after his Incarnation — “the world hath not known Thee.” And it is confirmed by the Holy Ghost when He says, in the wisdom of God, “the world by wisdom knew not God.” Alas for the poor world, vaunting its science and its pride, but not knowing that glorious Being who was in it from the first!
C2) At his Incarnation. — “■ Ho. came unto his own, and his own received Him not.” Throughout the Old Testament the Jews are spoken of as God’s peculiar treasure; but here they are described as Christ’s, because Christ is God. They were his by the calling of Abram; by the covenant of circumcision; by the passage of the Red Sea; by the desert discipline; by the education of history: but when He came to them, they cried, “We will not have this Man to reign over us.”
“They received Him not.” This is a note which we shall hear again; but in the meanwhile, the word seems carefully chosen to suggest that it was not a case of ignorance, but of wilfulness. They knew, or might have known, who He was; but they deliberately refused to enquire into his credentials, and they shut the door resolutely in his face. This is why they area nation of weary-footed wanderers, bronzed by the sun of every clime, having everywhere a recognition, but nowhere a home.
(3) Since the Incarnation. — There has been no langer a dealing with nations, but with individuals. Many have received Him, rising above the general indifference around. Mary in the highlands of Nazareth; Elisabeth in the hill-country of Judsea; Simeon in the temple; Hannah the prophetess; and Zachariah the priest, are representatives of untold multitudes beside. And to as many as have thus received Him He has given the right to become the sons of God.
Stepping across the humble threshold of their hearts. He has suddenly thrown aside the garments of his great humility, which He had worn as a disguise and test. Then, rising in the full stature of his Divine Manhood, He has taken from out his skirts a parchment patent of sonship and heirship, and, handing it to the recipient and astonished spirit, has declared that from henceforth it may dare to reckon itself, without presumption, a child of God, and an inheritor of the Kingdom of Heaven.
And for lineage, it is revealed that all such may trace their descent past earthly parentage — “not of blood”; past natural instinct or desire — “not of the will of the flesh”; past human volition — “not of the will of man “: to the thought, and purpose, and grace of the Eternal Father, to whom be glory for ever and ever.