Job 18:6

There is a fourfold light in our nature, placed there by our Creator, the Father of our spirits. There is the light of the understanding, the light of the judgment, the light of the conscience, including the whole moral sense, and the light of the religious sensibility. These lights are as branches of one candlestick, and they constitute the natural light in man.

I. This light may be diminished—nay, even extinguished—by wickedness. Never let us forget that sin reduces the natural light within us, and continuous sinning involves constant decrease in that light. By continuing in sin there is a hardening process carried on, so that sin is at length committed without fear, or remorse, or regret.

II. All sin tends to destroy faith in God and to stop intercourse with God. It withers all sense of His presence and of personal relation with Him, so that the whole tendency of sin is to reduce the light within a man. A lessening of the light is necessary before we can sin at all, but following sin is a still further reduction of the light as the expression of a retributive Providence.

III. There is a Deliverer from this position of darkness. Unto us has been born a Saviour. Just as there is a sun in the heavens to give us light by day, so there has been born to us a Saviour; and if our sins ruin us, we shall have destroyed ourselves.

S. Martin, Christian World Pulpit, vol. vii., p. 145.

References: Job 18:10.—Sermons for Boys and Girls, p. 257. Job 18:12.—Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xxv., No. 1510. Job 18—S. Cox, Expositor, 1st series, vol. vii., p. 410, and vol. viii., p. 127; Ibid., Commentary on Job, p. 216. 18-21—A. W. Momerie, Defects of Modern Christianity, p. 116. Job 19:17.—Expositor, 3rd series, vol. iv., p. 429. Job 19:20.—J. Robertson, Ibid., 2nd series, vol. vi., p. 255.