(2) To this work nothing whatever is contributed by the man himself. "The earth was waste and void," so it could not do anything to help the Spirit. "Darkness was upon the face of the deep." The Spirit found no light there ; it had to be created. The heart of man promises help, but "the heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked." The will has great influence over the man, but the will is itself depraved, so it tries to play the tyrant over all the other powers of the man, and it refuses to become the servant of the eternal Spirit of truth.
(3) Not only was there nothing whatever that could help the Holy Spirit, but there seemed nothing at all congruous to the Spirit. The Spirit of God is the Spirit of order, but there was disorder. He is the Spirit of light, but there was darkness. Does it not seem a strange thing that the Spirit of God should have come there at all? Adored in His excellent glory in the heaven where all is order and all is light, why should He come to brood over that watery deep, and to begin the great work of bringing order out of chaos ? Why should the Spirit of God ever have come into our hearts ? What was there in us to induce the Spirit of God to begin a work of grace in us ?
GENESIS I. 2, 3 35
We admire the condescension of Jesus in leaving Heaven to dwell upon earth ; but do we equally admire the condescension of the Holy Spirit in coming to dwell in such poor hearts as ours ? Jesus dwelt with sinners, but the Holy Ghost dwells in us.
(4) Where the Spirit came, the work was carried on to com- pletion. The work of creation did not end with the first day, but went on till it was finished on the sixth day. God did not say, " I have made the light, and now I will leave the earth as it is " ; and when He had begim to divide the waters, and to separate the land from the sea. He did not say, " Now I will have no more to do with the world." He did not take the newly fashioned earth in His hands, and fling it back into chaos ; but He went on with His work until, on the seventh day, when it was completed. He rested from all His work. He will not leave unfinished the work which He has commenced in our souls. Where the Spirit of God has begun to move, He continues to move imtil the work is done ; and He will not fail or turn aside until all is accomplished.^
Burning our hearts out with longing
The daylight passed : Millions and millions together,
The stars at last!
Purple the woods where the dewdrops,
Pearly and grey. Wash in the cool from our faces
The flame of day.
Glory and shadow grow one in
The hazel wood : Laughter and peace in the stillness
Together brood.
Hopes all unearthly are thronging
In hearts of earth: Tongues of the starlight are calling
Our souls to birth.
Down from the heaven its secrets
Drop one by one; Where time is for ever beginning
And time is done.
'C. H. Spurgeon,
36 LET THERE BE LIGHT
There light eternal is over
Chaos and night: Singing with dawn lips for ever,
"Let there be light!"
There too for ever in twilight
Time slips away, Closing in darkness and rapture
Its awful day.^
II.
Light out of Darkness.
i. Darkness.
" Darkness was upon the face of the deep." The deep (Heb. tehom) is not here what the deep would denote to us, i.e. the sea, but the primitive undivided waters, the huge watery mass which the writer conceived as enveloping the chaotic earth. Milton {Paradise Lost, vii. 276 ff.) gives an excellent paraphrase —
The Earth was formed, but, in the womb as yet Of waters, embryon, immature, involved, Appeared not; over all the face of Earth Main ocean flowed.
The darkness which was upon the face of the deep is a type of the natural darkness of the fallen intellect that is ignorant of God, and has not the light of faith. " Behold, the darkness shall cover the earth, and gross darkness the people." Very often in Holy Scripture darkness is the symbol of sin, and the state of those who are separated from God. Satan is the prince of " the power of darkness," while in God there " is no darkness at alL"
IT The intermixture in our life of the material and the spiritual has no more striking illustration than in the influence upon us of darkness. The " power of darkness " is a real power, and that apart from any theological considerations. The revolu- tion of this planet on its axis, which for a certain number of hours out of the twenty-four shuts from us the light of day, has had in every age the profoundest effect on man's inner states. It has told enormously on his religion. It has created a vocabulary — a ^ A. E., 2%« Diwim Vision, 20.
GENESIS I. 2, 3 37
very sinister one. It lies at the origin of fear. It binds the reason and sets loose the imagination. We are not the same at midnight as at midday. The child mind, and the savage mind, which is 80 closely akin to it, are reawakened in us. " I do not believe in ghosts," said Fontenelle, "but I am afraid of them." We can all feel with him there.^