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Not for secular purposes alone are the divisions of time marked out for us by the heavenly bodies; they have a still higher and more important purpose to serve in connection with our spiritual life.

I. The lights which God hath set in the firmament BREAK UP THE MONOTONY OF LIFE. Life is not a continuous drudgery, a going on wearily in a perpetual straight line; but a constant ending and beginning. We do not see all the road of life before us; the bends of its clays and months and years hide the future from our view, and allure us on with new hopes, until at last we come without fatigue to the end of the journey.

II. The lights which God hath set in the firmament DIVIDE OUR LIFE INTO SEPARATE AND MANAGEABLE PORTIONS. Each day brings its own work, and its own rest.

III. The lights which God hath set in the firmament ENABLE US TO REDEEM THE TIME; to retrieve the misspent past by the right improvement of the present. Each day is a miniature of the whole of life and of all the seasons of the year. Morning answers to spring; midday to summer; afternoon to autumn; evening to winter. We are children in the morning, with fresh feelings and hopes; grown-up men and women, with sober and sad experiences, at noon; aged persons, with whom the possibilities of life are over, in the afternoon and night.

IV. The lights which God hath set in the firmament ENABLE US TO SET OUT ON A NEW COURSE FROM SOME MARKED AND MEMORABLE POINT. God is giving to us, with every new horizon of life, a sense of recovered freedom, separating us from past painful experiences, and enabling us to begin a new course of life on a higher plane. And with this division of time by the orbs of heaven — this arrangement of days and months and years, with their perpetually recurring new opportunities of living no more unto ourselves but unto God, — coincide the nature and design of the blessed gospel, whose unique peculiarity is, that it is the cancelling of debts that could never be paid, the assurance that our relations to God are entirely changed, and that all old things are passed away, and all things become new. It is this association that gives such importance to anniversaries, birthdays, and new year's days-seasons considered peculiarly auspicious for commencing life afresh, and which are generally taken advantage of to form new resolutions.

(H. Macmillan, D. D.)

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KJV: And God said, Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years:

WEB: God said, "Let there be lights in the expanse of sky to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days and years;