SUNRISE AND SUNSET, THE ETERNAL AND THE TEMPORAL
SUNRISE AND SUNSET, THE ETERNAL AND THE TEMPORAL
Another year opens on us. The past has been one of abundant mercy, as is proved by the one fact that the Lord is increasingly precious to us. He is the Sun of the one eternal day, and the more He is before the heart, the better and the more easily do we accept the falling shadows on man’s life here. He is before us as the Sun rising. On His side, every joy and every tie is abiding and perennial; on our side it is a sunset, everything is gradually yielding up its vigour and beauty, though as the rising sun engages our hearts, the ignis fatuus of our sunset is eclipsed.
It is an unequalled moment to our souls when the Lord Jesus, the Sun of the never-ending day, is the light of our hearts, and the set-off for the evening shades of our own life. The circle of His radiancy, in its diameter, reaches down to the utmost line of our fading life, and up to the excellent glory; so that, once within this circle, there is darkness nowhere; death is abolished. We are then Simeons (see Luke 2); the sun of nature going down, holding as it were in our feeble arms of failing strength the Lord Jesus; our eye fixed on Him, and connecting the great future with Him, we let the past, with all its chequered hopes and sorrows, glide away. “Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace ... for mine eyes have seen thy salvation” (Luke 2: 29,30). When the eye is diverted from the rising sun it is beset by either the hopes or the fears of the setting one. But when it is steadily and immovably fixed on Jesus, like Stephen, when he looked up into heaven, then the halo around Him embraces us - includes us in its blessed circle, and distances the darkness or the sparks of our own kindling, on our own side. We come up to Jordan to see the ark of the covenant where the waters of death were, and practically to find that there is nothing between us and the heavenly land. The eye must be turned to the east and not to the west. I mean that when the eye turns to what is sinking below the horizon, there is either fear, or an attempt to retain the retiring light; but when it is simply and continuously set on the Lord, the light of His presence is above the brightness of the sun (all created life and power); and we know that we have it because we are blind to things here because of the glory of that light.
[p. 111] Everything depends on the way the eye is turned. There are the two lights - the fading or closing one, and the opening or eternal one. When the eye turns to the former, the varied distortions which haunt the twilight are conjured up before the mind; but when it is fixed on the latter, the encircling wave of light encloses us, and we see in beautiful outline the eternal realities. The sunflower has but one sun, and to this it turns all day long, with an expanding heart: the sun has always a message for it, a ray to strengthen, to cheer, and to beautify; and thus as your eye is consciously set on Christ, so will you not only know that the efforts or the pretensions of man are eclipsed, but that every moment there is a message from Him to your heart by the Holy Spirit, conveying to you the love and thought of His heart about you. You are not only in the presence chamber, where all is light and perfection, but the greater than Joseph assures your heart that you are His Benjamin.
May each of us enter on the new year as real sunflowers and with the eye of the heart unfolded to Christ, and receiving from Him the gentle, exquisite, and invigorating influence of His own presence. There must be jealousy of heart that the eye turn not to any rival, for then we commit two evils; we forsake Him the fountain of living waters, and hew out to ourselves cisterns which hold no water. Let our motto for the year be “Seek those things which are above, where Christ sitteth on the right hand of God” (Colossians 3: 1).