Vaughan (J.), Sermons (Brighton Pulpit), viii. (1871), No. 742 ; xxii.
(1883), No. 1232 ; xxiii. (1883), No. 1259. Cambridge Review, ix. Supplement No. 232 (R. Machray). Christian Commonwealth, xxxii. (1912) 437 (R. J. Campbell). Christian World Pulp%t, xxi. 106 (J. B. Heard) ; xx. 392 (J. B. Tinling). Church of England Pulpit, Ixiii. 76 (M. P. Maturin). Churchman's Pulpit : The Epipjhany, iii. 286 (G. F. Terry). Preacher's Magazine, v. (1894) 97 (C. New). Sunday Magazine, 1881, p. 702 (J. Robertson).
i3b
Life and Light.
For with thee is the fountain of life:
In thy light shall we see light.— Ps. xxxvi. 9.
St. Augustine asks, " What is the fountain of life, unless Christ ? " and he adds, " He who is the Fountain is the Light." Our Lord said, " Whensoever I am in the world, I am the light of the world"; and again, "I am the light of the world; he that followeth me shall have the light of life." This is further explained by St. John, with reference to our Lord as the Word : " That which hath been made in him is life, and the life was the light of men." Thus we have continually associated together as in the text the two ideas of life and light, both finding their fullest meaning in our Lord Jesus Christ. As gifts or possessions from Him and through Him, we cannot separate them. The presence of the one bespeaks the presence of the other, and each the recreating presence of the Spirit of God. Light necessarily comes to us if there is life, and life necessarily issues when light enters.
^ On some of the Alpine passes there are rude shelters for dis- tressed travellers, but they are only shelters ; they hold no food, no water, no light, no warmth ; the man they have saved may perish within their walls. The Eedeemer is sometimes thought of as a mere refuge to flee to from condemnation. How imperfect that is ; for though we are saved from condemnation we have as many wants as heart-beats ; but when the eyes of the refugee are opened he sees a home there, and everything he needs for all time, for all events, for all perfection. We flee to Him for safety, but He puts this song into our mouth :
Thou, 0 Christ, art all I want,
More than all in Thee I find.^
^ Charles New.
«39
I40 LIFE AND LIGHT
I.
The Source of Life.
"With thee is the fountain of life."
1. God is the fouutain of life in the merely physical sense. He has life in Himself, and He communicates His life in multi- tudinous forms. He does not derive His life: it rises eternally in Himself. The life we need is ever flowing from God. All the life in the universe, visible and invisible, is from Him. Vegetable life with its myriad forms, in hedgerow, garden, forest, and field ; animal life from the tiniest animalculaj to the mammoths of Eastern lands ; human lives — which die, we are told, at the rate of nearly 4000 every hour, their places being taken by as many more ; lives in the unseen world, the innumerable inhabitants of the unseen state. Space throbs and palpitates with life. What a conception it gives of the almightiness of our He'avenly Father ! Of all this life He is the source.
2. But life is more than physical existence; it is fellowship with the Unseen. When God passed from the formation of His other creatures to the creation of man. He added something over and above what they had, something direct from Himself to make life ; He " breathed into his nostrils the breath of life ; and man became a living soul." Sin changed the base of life; it made another base necessary. God put all life into His Son. And that life which is in Christ is the real spring and essence of all that constitutes true human life. There must be generation from Him ; there must be contact with Him ; there must be union with Him to make life — life properly so called — the life which is the being of a man — the life that fulfils the end of life — the life that is for ever and for ever. The beginning of life, then, man's real life, is oneness with the Lord Jesus.
^ Life in the Old Testament is primarily the physical, earthly life, the sum of energies which make up man's actual existence. The soul separated from the body does not cease to be, but it forfeits its portion in the true life. Two factors, however, were latent in the Old Testament conception from the beginning, and became more and more prominent in the course of the later
PSALM XXXVI. 9 141
development. In the first place, the radical element in life is activity. Mere physical existence is distinguished from that essential life which consists in the unrestricted play of all the energies, especially of the lii,;!ier and more characteristic. In the loftier passages of the Psahns, more particularly, the idea of " life " has nearly always a pregnant sense. It is associated with joy, prosperity, peace, wisdom, righteousness; man "lives" according as he has free scope for the activities which are most distinctive of his spiritual nature. God Himself is emphatically the "living one." He is the creative, ever-active God — sufficient to Himself, the source of all reality and power. Life is His supreme attribute, distinguishing Him from men with their thousand weaknesses and limitations. The other factor in the Old Testament conception is even more important in its bearing on later thought. Since God alone possesses life in the highest sense, fellowship with Him is the one condition on which men can obtain it. "With thee is the fountain of life." In the higher regions of Old Testament thought, life and communion with God are interchangeable ideas. The belief in immortality is never expressly stated, but, as Jesus Himself indicates, it was implicit in this knowledge of a God " who was not the God of the dead, but of the living." ^