Ready for the Dawning

The night is far spent, and the day is at hand: let us therefore cast of the works of darkness, and let us put on the armour of light.—Romans 13:12.

1. There can hardly be any doubt that in the apostolic age the prevailing belief was that the Second Coming of the Lord was an event to be expected in any case shortly and probably in the lifetime of many of those then living; it is also probable that this belief was shared by the Apostles themselves. For example, so strongly did such views prevail among the Thessalonian converts that the death of some members of the community filled them with perplexity, and even when correcting these opinions St. Paul speaks of “we that are alive, that are left unto the coming of our Lord”; and in the Second Epistle, although he corrects the erroneous impression which still prevailed, that the coming was immediate, and shows that other events must precede it, he still contemplates it as at hand. Similar passages may be quoted from all or most of the Epistles, although there are others which suggest that it is by his own death, not by the coming of Christ, that St. Paul expects to attain the full life in Christ to which he looked forward.

2. Now, our Lord plainly did not mean His disciples to know when His judgment was to be made manifest, and St. Paul apparently recognized this (1 Thessalonians 5:2 : “The day of the Lord so cometh as a thief in the night”), so that his immediate anticipation of the end can never have been part of his faith—never more than the reflection of the eager desire which filled the heart of the Church. On the other hand, our Lord did mean His disciples to go on expecting Him. Thus St. Paul’s admonition is as applicable as ever. The future of the world and of each nation and institution is precarious: things which seem solid and strong may crumble and melt; how soon God is to make plain His judgments, in part or in whole, we do not know; when each one of us is to pass by death to the great account we do not know. There is no reasonable attitude towards the unknown coming of judgment except to be ready, and, though the darkness of the alienated and godless world is all around us, to live as children of the light eagerly expecting the dawning of the day.

The Apostles lived in anticipation of an immediate end of the world, no doubt; but I cannot see that this, on the whole, was anything but good. It was this which drew the Christians so closely together—made their union so remarkable, and startled the world, to which, otherwise, the new religion would have appeared merely a Philosophy, and not a Life. Besides, are we sure that aught less strong than this hope could have detached men so instantly and entirely from the habits of long sin; or that, on natural principles and without a miracle, even the Apostles could have been induced to crowd so much superhuman energy into so small a compass?1 [Note: F. W. Robertson, Life and Letters, 398.]

3. But to meet Christ we must be like Christ. And to be like Christ we must be in Christ, clothed with His righteousness, invested with His new nature, fighting with the weapons of His victorious manhood. The “evil” which is in ourselves, the unregulated flesh, we can only “overcome with good”—the good which is Jesus Himself: for it is no longer we that live in our bare selves, but Christ that liveth in us. We are baptized into Him—Christ is “put on” in baptism by all (Galatians 3:27)—we possess His spirit, we eat His flesh and drink His blood. What remains is practically to clothe ourselves in Him, appropriating and drawing out into ourselves by acts of our will His very present help in trouble. So can we become like Him, and be fitted to see Him as He is.

This passage of which the text is a part had an important influence on St. Augustine’s life; for when the child’s voice had bidden him “open and read,” these were the words upon which he opened, and which sealed his conversion to the faith he served so nobly—“not in revelling and drunkenness, … but put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ.” “I had no wish,” he tells us, “to read any further, nor was there any need. For immediately at the end of this sentence, as if a light of certainty had been poured into my heart, all the shadows of doubt were scattered.”1 [Note: Confessions, viii. 2.]

The text falls into two main divisions—

I.  The Approach of the Day.

  II.  The Preparation for it.

I

The Approach of the Day

“The night is far spent, and the day is at hand.”

St. Paul here uses a material illustration to set forth a spiritual fact. It is a picture of the morning with which he presents us; and, if we draw the idea out, we find that it consists of three stages. First, there is the night; that portion of the twenty-four hours during which the sun is below the horizon; that ever-recurring period, when the only light available comes from the faint shining of the stars, or at best from the pale, reflected beams of the moon; that succession of hours, which we ordinarily describe as the time of darkness. Next, there is the dawn. In this, the night is far spent; the obscurity begins to pass off. The sun, indeed, is not yet above the horizon, but the stars fade and disappear, and the moon loses her lustre; there is an increasing brightness in the eastern sky; clear rays shoot up towards the zenith, and at length the shining disc of the great light-bearer becomes visible over the dark shoulder of the earth. The day is at hand! And, lastly, after the dawn comes the day itself. There is no longer a contest between light and darkness; the sun is risen in his power; the shadows have been dispelled and light prevails triumphantly throughout the whole hemisphere. The Night, the Dawn, the Day. St. Paul would be sensible of the poetic fascination of these, but he presents them with a definite object in view—to commend to his readers’ attention the spiritual analogies bodied forth by them.

i. The Night

1. In the night St. Paul sees a picture of the original spiritual state of those to whom he is writing. From such passages in the Epistle as, “Nevertheless, brethren, I have written the more boldly unto you in some sort, as putting you in mind, because of the grace that is given me of God, that I should be the minister of Jesus Christ to the Gentiles” (Romans 15:15), we learn that a great proportion of them must have been born and brought up in heathenism; but other and important parts of the letter are evidently addressed to those who were originally Jews. Now, when the Apostle used the word “night” to describe the early religious condition of his correspondents, he must, of course, have been thinking first and foremost of the Gentile section of the Roman Church. Notwithstanding the glitter of their civilization, the inhabitants of the imperial city had been lost in a state of religious darkness. As much as to the Athenians God was to them “Unknown.” The Sun of their souls was deep below the horizon. The official religion was believed in by few or none, and, if it had been believed in, it would have taught its deluded votaries to acknowledge “lords many and gods many.”

Even the philosophers, who tried to think out something better than the popular religion, illuminated the spiritual darkness only as the stars light up the gloom of natural night. The Stoics knew of nothing better than a mechanical fate overruling all things; and the Epicureans, despairing of finding the truth, taught only some variation or another of the precept, “Gather ye rosebuds while ye may!” Thus in the past, God had been a God who had hidden Himself from those Gentiles to whom St. Paul was now writing.

2. But, having thus used the term “night” in connection with the converts from heathenism, the Apostle was willing to let it stand as a description of the original condition of the Jewish Christians in the imperial city also. He habitually thought of his own unconverted days as a season of gloom, and therefore it came natural to him to regard that of his brethren after the flesh in the same light. Thus had those to whom he was writing in the world’s capital, both Jews and Gentiles, each in their own particular way, been till recently in a condition of spiritual darkness.

The comparison of night is used of Christ’s absence from His Church, and of the brooding darkness which overcasts the world. The night is the emblem of indolence and lethargy. And are not the majority of men sluggish towards God, however keen and alert they may be towards the concerns of this world? Night is also the time of illusion. Ugliness and beauty, gold and stone, friend and foe, are all one when night has drawn her curtains. Are not most men mistaking the counterfeit for the real, the false for the true? Again, night is pregnant with danger. Whether to the traveller across the morass, or to the ship feeling her way along a rock-bound coast, darkness is danger. “He that walketh in darkness knoweth not whither he goeth, because that the darkness hath blinded his eyes.” For vast tracks of time “darkness hath covered the earth, and gross darkness the people”—the night of Satan’s reign, of the power of darkness, of creation’s travail and anguish, of the absence of Jesus from His Church.1 [Note: F. B. Meyer.]

All moveless stand the ancient cedar-trees

Along the drifted sandhills where they grow;

And from the dark west comes a wandering breeze,

And waves them to and fro.

A murky darkness lies along the sand,

Where bright the sunbeams of the morning shone,

And the eye vainly seeks by sea and land

Some light to rest upon.

No large pale star its glimmering vigil keeps;

An inky sea reflects an inky sky,

And the dark river, like a serpent, creeps

To where its black piers lie.

Strange salty odours through the darkness steal,

And, through the dark, the ocean-thunders roll;

Thick darkness gathers, stifling, till I feel

Its weight upon my soul.

I stretch my hands out in the empty air;

I strain my eyes into the heavy night;

Blackness of darkness!—Father, hear my prayer!

Grant me to see the light!2 [Note: George Arnold, In the Dark.]

ii. The Dawn

1. As St. Paul thinks of his correspondents while he is writing, he describes them as living in the dawn. “The night,” he says, “has advanced towards the dawn” (so the word may be translated). When the sun begins to rise towards the eastern ridges from below, the darkness takes flight and shining rays show themselves increasingly along the horizon. Even so, the Apostle says, through their late conversion to Christ, the gloom of heathenism is effectually lifting from these Roman disciples, and the true spiritual light is shining ever more and more upon them unto the perfect day.

2. But why only “unto the perfect day”? Why speak of them as only in the dawn and not declare them to be already in the perfect day, seeing that they are in Christ? In the general current of New Testament teaching two states, and only two, are broadly defined and distinguished: there are “children of the night” and “children of the day.” Nor is any interval generally assumed between the “darkness” of sin and the “marvellous light” of holiness. But the peculiarity of the present passage is that it gives special prominence to the spiritual phenomena of a certain interval of transition, which reality requires and Scripture never denies. The Apostle means that the Christian state is, at the best, in many respects no better than “the dawn.”

The Church upon earth is only in the dawn of the day of its full redemption. That day will be perfect when Christ shall appear “without sin unto salvation”; when He shall come no longer bearing the burden of His cross, but bearing the burden of His glory and of His exceeding great rewards. Then will He consummate the sanctification of His saints, rendering the warfare between flesh and spirit for ever impossible; releasing them from the last vestige of infirmity, and uttering the final decree, “Be holy still.” Now, in the dawn, we are dependent on the ceaseless ministry of that grace which still retains the basin and the towel to wash the disciples’ feet; we are encompassed about with such infirmities as make the full glory of Christian perfection a state too high for time.

3. It is true that in comparison with their former heathenism and Judaism the Roman Christians were in the full day. The light which their Christianity was now affording them was indeed that of final truth, just as the beams of the natural dawn are truly incipient daylight. All the same, however, there is a point of view in which the Christianity of the Church militant here on earth is only the dawn of a fuller and brighter revelation to follow. For Christ never professed to explain to the world all the perplexing mysteries of life. He professed to reveal and did reveal all that was necessary for our salvation, but He left many an important speculative question unsolved. For example, how we long to know more of the state of the departed and to understand the mystery of evil and of suffering; but, as it is not necessary for our salvation that we should know these things, Christ did not reveal them. He gave us as much light as was required, and such light as is destined to grow more and more unto the perfect day, but for the time being He withheld the noonday splendour and left us to trust in Him for the due supply of such light as should be convenient for us. And thus those Christians who had just been described by the Apostle as involved in darkness were now rightly declared by him to be, by their incorporation into Christ, not yet indeed surrounded by the full effulgence of day, but still enjoying the beams of a dawn, which would ere long increase into the noontide splendour.

Feeling the way,—and all the way uphill;

But on the open summit, calm and still,

The feet of Christ are planted; and they stand

In view of all the quiet land.

Feeling the way,—and though the way is dark,

The eyelids of the morning yet shall mark

Against the East the shining of His face,

At peace upon the lighted place.

Feeling the way,—and if the way is cold,

What matter?—since upon the fields of gold

His breath is melting; and the warm winds sing

While rocking summer days for Him.1 [Note: Elizabeth Stuart Phelps.]

iii. The Day

1. The First Advent answers to the “dawn,” the Second answers to the “day.” Here we must remember the vivid expectation of the Second Advent which prevailed in the primitive Church. After the rising from the dead, the Lord had not merely resumed His interrupted earthly existence, but had taken upon Him the spiritual body of the Resurrection, and had disappeared and re-appeared according to the mysterious laws which governed that new life. And thus, just as He had re-appeared after disappearing at Emmaus, so they expected Him to return after He vanished at the Ascension. Concerning the date of the final return no revelation had been given. The Son of Man was as one who had taken His journey into a far country! But the duration of His absence does not concern us here. St. Paul believed that He would return sooner or later. And then, with His advent, the glorious noon of revelation would be reached. Then we should know as we are known. Then we should no longer see through a glass darkly, but face to face. Then would “the day break, and the shadows flee away!” And so that was the glorious noon which the Apostle declared to be in store for those Roman disciples who had so recently passed from the night of heathenism into the wondrous dawn of Christianity.

Nothing in nature is more beautiful or more symbolical of eager expectation than the dawn that proclaims, “The day is at hand”: the day itself that fulfils its promise cannot surpass its beauty. Here the figure is, in a certain sense, insufficient: the day that we expect will be so glorious as to cause its early splendours to be forgotten. But the brightness is a great reality: the estate of Christ’s watchers is one in which an enthusiastic hope may well predominate. To the company as such there is nothing but joy in the future: its present inheritance is a hope full of immortality that knows no night; and “in the pathway thereof there is no death.” The individual Christian also is taught to enter into the common hope. To every believer in Christ the present life is the dawn of a perfect day.1 [Note: W. B. Pope.]

Elsewhere this day is more specifically described as “That Day,” as “the Last Day,” as “the Day of God,” and “the Day of the Lord,” as “the Day of Christ,” the “Day of Redemption,” and “the Day of Judgment.” All these expressions are significant, and carry with them meaning of great moment and solemn instruction.

2. The Christian Church is appealed to as exercising a firm faith in the gradual consummation of the present dawn into perfect day. These words are a remembrancer; reminding those early travellers of the great secret which they know,—the most precious secret time has to disclose,—that the Lord is at hand, bringing with Him all, and more than all, their hope can conceive. The return of our Saviour,—or, rather, His coming; for that is the Scriptural word, as if His first appearance was but a transient visit—fills the entire New Testament with a glow that leaves no part dark, brightens into all but glory the dimness of the Church’s present vexation, and already almost swallows up death in victory.

To “know the time” is to know this its greatest secret. But the Apostle uses here an expression which occurs nowhere else; one which, without overstraining it, yields a very important truth. The coming of Christ will be to His Church—to His mystical, spiritual people—the regular and peaceful consummation of a day already begun; the same light and no other, but raised into meridian glory. To the ungodly world a catastrophe, and to slumbering Christians a sore amazement, it will be to those who wait for His appearing what day is to the earthly traveller who waits for the morning. The elements of heaven are here; the dawn is the earnest as well as the pledge of the day; and all that will be needful for the redeeming of every pledge the Scriptures contain is the withdrawal of the veil, the appearing of the Sun in the heavens, the showing Himself once more to His people. One of the most impressive, and also the most common, notes of the Christian community is this, that they “wait for his Son from heaven.”

Through love to light! Oh, wonderful the way

That leads from darkness to the perfect day!

From darkness and from sorrow of the night

To morning that comes singing o’er the sea.

Through love to light! through light, O God, to Thee,

Who art the love of love, the eternal light of light!1 [Note: Richard Watson Gilder.]

II

Preparation for the Day

“Let us therefore cast off the works of darkness, and let us put on the armour of light.”

1. The Apostle uses the expectation of Christ’s coming as an argument for wakefulness and watchfulness. “It is high time to awake out of sleep.” “They that sleep, sleep in the night,” but “the night is far spent, the day is at hand.” Awake then ye slumbering and torpid souls; up and be doing! It is not the sinner only that needs thus to be aroused, but the saint also. The Christian ought to be characterized by liveliness, but he is very apt to let torpor get the better of him. He ought not to sleep as do others, but to watch and be sober, giving all diligence to make his calling and election sure.

It is marvellous to consider the unanimity of mankind, outside Christianity altogether, in believing that they are, within limits, responsible beings, and that the results of life will follow them beyond the grave. Even many backward and savage races believe that the Being they worship is also a Moral Governor, and will, at the last, be their Judge. The ancient Egyptian thought that, after death, the soul was weighed in the balance, in the presence of the gods, against the image of the goddess of truth. Therefore, the religious texts were full of such sentences as, “Mind thee of the day when thou, too, shalt start for the land where one goeth to return not thence. Good for thee will have been a good life. Therefore, be just, and hate iniquity; for he who loves what is right shall triumph.”1 [Note: J. A. MacCulloch.]

2. Because the night is far spent and the day is at hand, we are bidden to cast off the works of darkness and to put on the armour of light. The exhortation, though in two parts, is one and the same. The Apostle gives both its negative and its positive side. The two acts are simultaneous, the one cannot effectually take place without the other; there is no casting off the works of darkness without putting on the armour of light, or putting on the armour of light without casting off the works of darkness. Satan is effectually cast out, and kept out, only by Christ entering in and occupying the heart. Sanctification is a positive as well as a negative process. It is at once the mortification of sin and the cultivation of holiness.

i. The Works of Darkness

1. What are the “works of darkness”? Evidently such works as men commonly choose to do in darkness, i.e. wicked works. For as our Lord says in another place, “Every one that doeth evil hateth the light, neither cometh to the light, lest his deeds should be reproved.”

St. Paul enumerates these works in three classes. First, indulgence in sensual acts; secondly, indulgence in unholy thoughts and desires; lastly, indulgence in anything that is not perfectly loving and lovely.

Now among Christians there are presumably few who would be guilty of indulging in sins of the first and second classes, but many are prone to anger and jealousy, pride and selfishness, malice and uncharitableness, strife and hypocrisy in the sight of God, equally with drunkenness, gluttony, and lust.

The sins of darkness are followed by a retribution in kind, if the works of darkness are not cast off. Dante represents those who on earth were guilty of the sin of envy as losing their eyesight in Purgatory and condemned to pass their time in darkness.

In vilest haircloth were they dressed,

Each ’gainst his neighbour’s shoulder pressed,

And all alike reclined

Against the bank behind.

So, where the sightless beggars stand

At the church doors and alms demand,

And one his head has dropped,

Against his fellow propped;

Then others feel compassion there,

Not only for the words they hear

But for the yearning face

That pleads no less for grace.

There of the sunlight none partake:

So, in the place whereof I spake,

The precious light of Heaven

Ne’er to those shades is given.

A thread of steel their eyelids all

Were pierced and stitched about withal,

Like to the merlin wild,

That may not else be stilled.

Me seemed to do them wrong, as I

Unseen, yet seeing, passed them by.1 [Note: Dante, Purg. xiii. 58–74, tr. by Dr. Shadwell.]

2. Such works as befit the kingdom of darkness are represented as being “cast off,” like the uncomely garments of the night, for the bright armour which befits the Christian soldier as a member of the kingdom of light. The conception of the passage is classical and Roman, borrowed from the camp. Through the night the soldiery, divested of their armour, have abandoned themselves to revelry and carouse, and, as the small hours have reigned, have sunk into a deep sleep; but, lo, the ringing bugle note is announcing the herald streaks of dawn, and summoning the troops hastily to put off the dress and works of darkness, and to assume their armour free from rust and stain.

What would you wish to be found doing when Christ comes in? Drinking, and rioting, and making merry? Practising unclean ways, and gazing and longing after evil things? Striving and quarrelling and grudging against one another? Surely not: you would not wish to be so found of Him; nor yet that, coming suddenly, He should find you sleeping. Rather you would desire that He may find you kneeling on your knees, in fervent prayer, confessing your many sins; or waiting on some of those whom He calls His brethren, busy about some work of mercy; or patiently enduring His chastisements; or, at least, honestly and religiously going on with the task which His Providence orders for you. This is how we would wish to be found. Let us not only wish, but pray and strive, and by His grace we shall be found so doing indeed.1 [Note: J. Keble.]

The longing for ignoble things;

The strife for triumph more than truth;

The hardening of the heart, that brings

Irreverence for the dreams of youth;

All thoughts of ill; all evil deeds,

That have their root in thoughts of ill;

Whatever hinders or impedes

The action of the nobler will;—

All these must first be trampled down

Beneath our feet, if we would gain

In the bright fields of fair renown

The right of eminent domain.

Standing on what too long we bore

With shoulders bent and downcast eyes,

We may discern—unseen before—

A path to higher destinies.

Nor deem the irrevocable Past,

As wholly wasted, wholly vain,

If, rising on its wrecks, at last

To something nobler we attain.1 [Note: Longfellow, Ladder of St. Augustine.]

ii. The Armour of Light

1. “Put on the armour of light.” What a fine battle-cry this is! It comes, too, from the lips of the finest fighter the world has ever seen, the man who could stand up and say to God and all ages, “I have fought the good fight.” Life was a battle to him, a fight for his very soul, a stern unceasing conflict. And so it is with most of us. But let us remember how all the grand heroes of war have borne the brunt without murmuring. Do not complain of the conditions. They are not always fair; we fight an unseen foe who will not come out into the open. “We wrestle not against flesh and blood”; it would be a comparatively simple thing if that were all. But we wrestle against “the wiles of the devil, against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.” To such a battle are we called.

A young officer, for the first time under fire, felt that strange demand that is made upon a man’s courage when the bullets fly around him, and he sees men fall and die at his side. He was on the point of breaking down. It seemed impossible for him to go on, and for a moment he faltered, visibly irresolute. An older officer saw what was happening, and he just put his hand upon the lad’s shoulder. “Oh, no!” he said, pointing onward, “there’s your way, you know”; and the young fellow’s career was saved. So what we all want, and what we want most, is that the Master should come over and again lay His hands upon us and tell us to be as men that wait for their Lord, whom when He cometh He shall find watching. What a splendid figure that is! The sentinel at his post, watching in the dim morning, peering through the haze for the rising of the sun.2 [Note: W. A. L. Taylor.]

2. In his Epistle to the Ephesians, St. Paul explains more fully what he means by the armour of the soldiers of Christ. There he speaks of it as being the armour of truth, of righteousness, of faith. But here, when he speaks of the armour of light, he goes a step further; he means that men should wear this armour openly, so that others may see that they are Christ’s soldiers; that they should not wear it, as in olden days men sometimes wore a coat of mail, hidden away under their tunics.

You know the story narrated in the Old Testament about Ahab. On going out to battle, he disguised himself, and induced Jehoshaphat to wear his armour, because he was afraid that if he wore it himself he would be a marked man. In his case, you know, the disguise was of no avail. Ahab, disguised though he was, was killed. The other king, the nobler man, escaped. Well, just in the same way I think some of us try to live as Christians “in disguise.” Faith, hope, love—these are the three great words which Christianity has given to the world; and yet there are some who try to hide away, as much as ever they can, their deepest faiths, their highest hopes, their purest loves. When St. Paul tells us that we should put on the “armour of light,” he means that we should so live that others shall see at once that we mean to live the strong true life of a soldier of Christ.1 [Note: F. de W. Lushington.]

If life is always a warfare

Between the right and the wrong,

And good is fighting with evil

For ages and æons long—

Fighting with eager cohorts,

With banners pierced and torn,

Shining with sudden splendour,

Wet with the dew of morn;

If all the forces of heaven,

And all the forces of sin,

Are met in the infinite struggle

The souls of the world to win;

If God’s is the awful battle

Where the darkling legions ride—

Hasten to sword and to saddle!

Lord, let me fight on Thy side!

Ready for the Dawning

Literature

Blunt (J. J.), University Sermons, 22.

Brooke (S. A.), The Gospel of Joy, 319.

Cox (S.), Expositions, iv. 336.

Gibson (J. G.), Along the Shadowed Way, 1.

Gore (C.), The Epistle to the Romans, ii. 134.

Greenhough (J. G.), The Mind of Christ in St. Paul, 230.

Holland (W. L.), The Beauty of Holiness, 81.

Horton (R. F.), The Conquered World, 24.

Keble (J.), Sermons for the Christian Year (Advent to Christmas Eve), 249.

Lushington (F. de W.), Sermons to Young Boys, 1.

Maclaren (A.), Expositions: Romans, 317.

Meyer (F. B.), Statutes and Songs, 12.

Pope (W. B.), Discourses on the Lordship of the Incarnate Redeemer, 376.

Prothero (G.), The Armour of Light, 1.

Purchase (E. J.), The Pathway of the Tempted, 140.

Sauter (B.), The Sunday Epistles, 1.

Stanley (A. P.), Canterbury Sermons, 149.

Symonds (A. R.), Sermons, 1.

Talmage (T. de W.), Sermons, iv. 393.

Watson (F.), The Christian Life Here and Hereafter, 262.

Christian World Pulpit, xiii. 25 (Hammond).

Churchman’s Pulpit, i. 299 (Hodges), 301 (Farquhar), 305 (Taylor), 307 (MacCulloch), 309 (Butler).

Contemporary Pulpit, 2nd Ser., vii. 321 (Creighton).