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CHAPTER XXIII.

THE CHILDREN OF THE LIGHT.

The contrast between the Christian and heathen way of life is now, finally, to be set forth under St Paul’s familiar figure of the light and the darkness. He bids his Gentile readers not to be “joint-partakers with them”—with the sons of disobedience upon whom God’s wrath is coming (ver. 6)—for he has hailed them already, in chapter iii. 6, as “joint-partakers of the promise in Christ Jesus through the gospel.” “Once” indeed they shared in the lot of the disobedient; but for them the darkness has past, and the true light now shineth.

In wrath or promise, in hope of life eternal or in the fearful looking for of judgement they, and we, must partake. This future participation depends upon present 322 character. “Do not,” the apostle entreats, “cast in your lot again with the unclean and covetous. Their ways you have renounced, and their doom you have exchanged for the heritage of the saints. Let no vain words deceive you into supposing that you may keep your new inheritance, and yet return to your old sins. Show yourselves worthy of your calling. Walk as children of the light, and you will possess the eternal kingdom.” Each man carries with him into the next state of being the entail of his past life. That heritage depends on his own choice; yet not upon his individual will working by itself, but on the grace and will of God working with him, as that grace is accepted or rejected. He has light: he must walk in it; and he will reach the realm of light. Thus the apostle, in verses 7 and 8, concludes his warning against relapse into heathen sin.

Verses 9 and 10 delineate the character of the children of the light: verses 11–14 set forth their influence upon the surrounding darkness. Into these two divisions the exposition of this paragraph naturally falls.

I. “The fruit of the light” (not of the Spirit) is the true text of verse 9, as it stands in the older Greek copies, Versions, and Fathers. Calvin showed his judgement and independence in preferring this reading to that of the received Greek text. Similarly Bengel,¹³⁵¹³⁵   Mr. Wesley adopted this and other emendations from Bengel, “that great light of the Christian world,” in the translation accompanying his Explanatory Notes upon the New Testament. He there supplied the Methodist preachers with many of the most valuable improvements made in the Revised Version, a hundred years before the time. and most of the later critics. The sentence is parenthetical, and contains a singular and instructive figure. 323 It is one of those sparks from the anvil, in which great writers not unfrequently give us their finest utterances,—sentences that get a peculiar point from the eagerness with which they are struck off in the heat and clash of thought, as the mind reaches forward to some thought lying beyond. The clause is an epitome, in five words, of Christian virtue, whose qualities, origin and method are all defined. It sums up exquisitely the moral teaching of the epistle. Galatians v. 22, 23 (the fruit of the Spirit) and Philippians iv. 8 (Whatsoever things are true, etc.) are parallel to this passage, as Pauline definitions, equally perfect, of the virtues of a Christian man. This has the advantage of the others in brevity and epigrammatic point.

“You are light in the Lord,” the apostle said; “walk as children of the light.” But his readers might ask: “What does this mean? It is poetry: let us have it translated into plain prose. How shall we walk as children of the light? Show us the path.”—“I will tell you,” the apostle answers: “the fruit of the light is in all goodness and righteousness and truth. Walk in these ways; let your life bear this fruit; and you will be true children of the light of God. So living, you will find out what it is that pleases God, and how joyful a thing it is to please Him (ver. 10). Your life will then be free from all complicity with the works of darkness. It will shine with a brightness clear and penetrating, that will put to shame the works of darkness and transform the darkness itself. It will speak with a voice that all must hear, bidding them awake from the sleep of sin to see in Christ their light of life.” Such is the setting in which this delightful definition stands.

But it is more than a definition. While this sentence 324 declares what Christian virtue is, it signifies also whence it comes, how it is generated and maintained. It asserts the connexion that exists between Christian character and Christian faith. The fruit cannot be grown without the tree, any more than the tree can grow soundly without yielding its proper fruit. Right is the fruit of light.

The principle that religion is the basis of moral virtue, is one that many moralists disputed in St Paul’s time; and it has fallen into some discredit in our own. In philosophical theory, and to a large extent in popular maxim and belief, it is assumed that faith and morals, character and creed, are not only distinct but independent things and that there is no necessary connexion between the two. Christians are themselves to blame for this fallacy, through the discrepancy not seldom visible between their creed and life. Our narrowness of view and the harshness of our ethical judgements have helped to foster this grave error.

Great Christian teachers have spoken of the virtues of the heathen as “splendid sins.” But Christ and His apostles never said so. He said: “Other sheep I have, which are not of this fold.” And they said: “In every nation he that feareth God and worketh righteousness, is accepted of Him.” The Christian creed has no jealousy in regard to human excellence. “Whatsoever things are true and honourable and just and pure,” wherever and in whomsoever they are found, our faith honours and delights in them, and accepts them to the utmost of their worth. But then it claims them all for its own,—as the fruit of the one “true light which lighteth every man.” Wherever this fruit appears, we know that that light has been, though its ways are past finding out. Through secret 325 crevices, by subtle refractions and multiplied reflections, the true light reaches many a life lying far outside its visible course.

All goodness has one source; for, said Jesus, “there is none good but one, that is God.” The channels may be tortuous, obstructed and obscure: the stream is always one. There is nothing more touching, and nothing more encouraging to our faith in God’s universal love and His will that all men should be saved, than to see, as we do sometimes under conditions most adverse and in spots the most unlikely, features of moral beauty and Christlike goodness appearing like springs in the desert or flowers blooming in Alpine snows,—signs of the universal light,

The action of God’s grace in Christ is by no means limited to the sphere of its recognized working. All the more earnestly on this account do we vindicate this grace against those who deny its necessity or the permanence of its moral influence. The fruit, in the main, they approve. But they would cut down the plant from which it came; they seek to quench the light under which it grew. They are like men who should take you to some lofty tree that has flourished for ages rooted in the rock, and who should say: “See how wide its branches and how stout its 326 stem, how firmly it stands upon its native soil! Let us cut it loose from those dark and ugly roots—that mysterious theology, those superstitions of the past. The human mind has outgrown them. Virtue can support itself on its own proper basis. It is time to assert the dignity of man, and to proclaim the independence of morality.” If these men have their way, and if European society renounces the authority of God, how quickly will that tree of the Lord’s planting, the vast growth of Christian virtue and beneficence, wither to its topmost bough; and the next storm will bring it to the ground, with all its stately strength and summer beauty. Unbelief in God lays the axe at the root of human society. Our life—the life of individuals, of families and nations—is rooted in the unseen and hid with Christ in God. Thence it draws its vitality and virtue, through those spiritual fibres by which we are linked to God and lay hold on eternal life. Since Christ Jesus our forerunner entered the heavenly places, the anchor of human hopes has been cast within the veil; if that anchor drags, there is no other that will hold. The rocks are plain to see on which our richly freighted ship of life will founder. Without the religion of Jesus Christ, our civilization is not worth a hundred years’ purchase.

Moral effects do not follow upon their causes as rapidly as physical effects: they follow as certainly. We live largely upon the accumulated ethical capital of our forefathers. When that is spent, we are left to our intrinsic poverty of soul, to our faithlessness and feebleness. The scepticism of one generation bears fruit in the immorality of the next, or the next after that; the unbelief and cynicism of the teacher in the vice of his disciple. Such fruit of blasting and mildew the decay of faith has never failed to bear.

The corresponding truth will be at once acknowledged. There is no real religion without virtue. If the godly man is not a good man, if he is not a sincere and pure-hearted man, “that man’s religion is vain”: no matter 327 what his professions or his emotions, no matter what his services to the Church. He is one of those to whom Jesus Christ will say: “I know you not; depart from me, all ye that work iniquity.” There is a flaw in him somewhere, a rift within the lute that spoils all its music. “A good tree cannot bring forth corrupt fruit.”

In Christ’s garden there forms in clustered beauty and perfectness the ripe growth of virtue, which in the sunshine of His love and under the freshening breath of His Spirit sends forth its spices and “yieldeth its fruit every month.” In it there abide goodness, righteousness, truth—these three; and who shall say which of them is greatest?

I. Goodness stands first, as the most visible and obvious form of Christian excellence,—that which every one looks for in a religious man, and which every one admires when it is to be seen. Righteousness, regarded by itself, is not so readily appreciated. There is something austere and forbidding in it. “For a righteous man scarcely would one die”—you respect, even revere him; but you do not love him: “but for the good man peradventure, one would even dare to die.”

Christian goodness is the sanctification of the heart and its affections, renewed and governed by the love of God in Christ. It is, notwithstanding, but seldom inculcated in the New Testament;¹³⁶¹³⁶   The word belongs to Paul’s vocabulary; it is found besides in 2 Thess. i. 11; Rom. xv. 14; and Gal. v. 22. See the Commentary on this last epistle in the Expositor’s Bible, pp. 384, 385. because it is referred to its spring and principle in love. Goodness is love embodied. Now love, as the Christian knows it, is of God. “We love,” says the apostle John, “because He 328 first loved us.... He loved us, and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins.” This is the faith that makes good men,—the best the world has ever known, the best that it holds now. Vanity, selfishness, evil temper and desire are shamed and burnt out of the soul by the holy fire of the love of God in Jesus Christ our Lord. In the warm, tender light of the cross the heart is softened and cleansed, and expanded to the widest charity. It becomes the home of all generous instincts and pure affections. So “the fruit of the light is in all goodness.”

2. And righteousness.

This second and central definition applies a searching test to all spurious forms of goodness, superficial or sentimental,—to the goodness of mere good manners, or good nature. The principle of righteousness, fully understood, includes everything in moral worth, and is often used to denote in one word the entire fruit of God’s grace in man. For righteousness is the sanctification of the conscience. It is loyalty to God’s holy and perfect law. It is no mere outward keeping of formal rules, such as the legal righteousness of Judaism, no submission to necessity or calculation of advantages: it is a love of the law in a man’s inmost spirit; it is the quality of a heart one with that law, reconciled to it as it is reconciled to God Himself in Jesus Christ.

At the bottom, therefore, righteousness and goodness are one. Each is the counterface and complement of the other. Righteousness is to goodness as the strong backbone of principle, the firm hand and the vigorous grasp of duty, the steadfast foot that plants itself on the eternal ground of the right and true and stands against a world’s assault. Goodness without righteousness is a weak and fitful sentiment: righteousness without 329 goodness is a dead formality. He cannot love God or his neighbour truly, who does not love God’s law; and he knows nothing aright of that law, who does not know that it is the law of love.

This also, this above all is “the fruit of the light.” Two watchwords we have from the lips of Jesus, two mottoes of His own life and mission,—the one given at the end, the other at the beginning of His course: “Greater love hath none than this, that one lay down his life for his friends”; and, “Thus it becometh us to fulfil all righteousness.” By a double flame was He consumed a sacrifice upon the cross,—by the passion of His zeal for God’s righteousness, and by the passion of His pity for mankind. In that twofold light we see light, and become “light in the Lord.” Therefore the fruit of the light, the moral product of a true faith in the gospel, is in all goodness and righteousness.

There is a danger of merging the latter in the former of these attributes. Evangelical piety is credited with an excess of the sentimental and emotional disposition, cultivated at the expense of the more sterling elements of character. High principle, scrupulous honour, stern fidelity to duty are no less essential to the image of Christ in the soul than are warm feeling and zealous devotion to His service. Jesus Christ the righteous, as His apostles loved to call Him, is the pattern of a manly faith, up to which we must grow in all things. “He is the propitiation for our sins.” Never was there an act of such unswerving integrity and absolute loyalty to the law of right as the sacrifice of Calvary. God forbid that we should magnify love at the expense of law, or make good feeling a substitute for duty.

3. Truth comes last in this enumeration, for it signifies the inward reality and depth of the other two.

330 Truth does not mean veracity alone, the mere truth of the lips. Heathen honesty goes as far as this. Men of the world expect as much from each other, and brand the liar with their contempt. Truth of words requires a reality behind itself. The acted falsehood is excluded, the hinted and intended lie no less than that expressly uttered. Beyond all this, it is the truth of the man that God requires—speech, action, thought, all consistent, harmonious and transparent, with the light of God’s truth shining through them. Truth is the harmony of the inward and the outward, the correspondence of what the man is in himself with that which he appears and wishes to appear to be.

Now, it is only children of the light, only men thoroughly good and upright who can, in this strict sense, be men of truth. So long as any malice or iniquity is left in our nature, we have something to conceal. We cannot afford to be sincere. We are compelled to pay, by very shame, the degrading tribute which vice renders to virtue, the homage of hypocrisy. But find a man whose intellect, whose heart and will, tried at whatever point, ring sound and true, in whom there is no affectation, no make-believe, no pretence or exaggeration, no discrepancy, no discord in the music of his life and thought, “an Israelite indeed, in whom is no guile”—there is a saint for you, and a man of God; there is one whom you may “grapple to your soul with hoops of steel.”

Truth is the hall-mark of entire sanctification; it is the highest and rarest attainment of the Christian life. It is equally the charm of an innocent, unspoilt childhood, and of a ripe and purified old age. The apostle John, “the disciple whom Jesus loved,” is the most perfect embodiment, after his Master, of this consummating 331 grace. In him righteousness and love were blended in the translucence of an utter simplicity and truth.

We must beware of giving a subjective and merely personal aspect to this divine quality. While truth is the unity of the outward and inward, of heart and act and word in the man, it is at the same time the agreement of the man with the reality of things as they exist in God. The former kind of truth rests upon the latter; the subjective upon the objective order. The truth of God makes us true. We magnify our own sincerity, until it becomes vitiated and pretentious. In our eagerness to realize and express our own convictions, we give too little pains to form them upon a sound basis; we make a great virtue of speaking out what is in our hearts, but take small heed of what comes in to the heart, and speak out of a loose self-confidence and idolatry of our own opinions. So the Pharisees were true, who called Christ an impostor. So every careless slanderer, and scandalmonger credulous of evil, who believes the lies he propagates. 332 “Imagination has pictured to itself a domain in which every one who enters should be compelled to speak only what he thought, and pleased itself by calling such domain the Palace of Truth. A palace of veracity, if you will; but no temple of the truth. A place where each one would be at liberty to utter his own crude unrealities, to bring forth his delusions, mistakes, half-formed, hasty judgements; where the depraved ear would reckon discord harmony, and the depraved eye mistake colour; the depraved moral taste take Herod or Tiberius for a king, and shout beneath the Redeemer’s cross, ‘Himself He cannot save!’ A temple of the truth? Nay, only a palace echoing with veracious falsehoods, a Babel of confused sounds, in which egotism would rival egotism, and truth would be each man’s own lie.”¹³⁷¹³⁷   F. W. Robertson: Sermons (First Series), xix., on “The Kingdom of the Truth.” In the pride of our veracity, we miss the verity of things; we are true only to our blind self, false to the light of God. “Every one that is of the truth heareth my voice:” so said He who was Truth incarnate, making His word a law for all true men.

“In all goodness and righteousness and truth,” says the apostle. Let us seek them all. We are apt to become specialists in virtue, as in other departments of life. Men will endeavour even to compensate by extreme efforts in one direction for deficiencies in some other direction, which they scarcely desire to make good. So they grow out of shape, into oddities and moral malformations. There is a want of balance and of finish about a multitude of Christian lives, even of those who have long and steadily pursued the way of faith. We have sweetness without strength, and strength without gentleness, and truth spoken without love, and words of passionate zeal without accuracy and heedfulness.

All this is infinitely sad, and infinitely damaging to the cause of our religion.

Let us judge ourselves, that we be not judged by the Lord. Let us count no wrong a trifle. Let us never imagine that our defects in one kind will be atoned for by excellencies in another. Our friends may say this, 333 in charity, for us; it is a fatal thing when a man begins to say so to himself. “May the God of peace sanctify you fully. May your whole spirit, soul, and body in blameless integrity be preserved to the coming of the Lord Jesus Christ” (1 Thess. v. 23).

II. The effect upon surrounding darkness of the light of God in Christian lives is described in verses 11–14, in words which it remains for us briefly to examine.

Verse 12 distinguishes “the things secretly done” by the Gentiles, “of which it is a shame even to speak,” from the open and manifest forms of evil in which they invite their Christian neighbours to join (ver. 11). Instead of doing this and “having fellowship with the unfruitful works of darkness,” they must “rather reprove them.” Silent absence, or abstinence is not enough. Where sin is open to rebuke, it should at all hazards be rebuked. On the other hand, St Paul does not warrant Christians in prying into the hidden sins of the world around them and playing the moral detective. Publicity is not a remedy for all evils, but a great aggravation of some, and the surest means of disseminating them. “It is a shame”—a disgrace to our common nature, and a grievous peril to the young and innocent—to fill the public prints with the nauseous details of crime and to taint the air with its putridities.

“But all things,” the apostle says—whether it be those open works of darkness, profitless of good, which expose themselves to direct conviction, or the depths of Satan that hide their infamy from the light of day—“all things being reproved by the light, are made manifest” (ver. 13). The fruit of the light convicts the unfruitful works of darkness. The daily life of a Christian man amongst men of the world is a perpetual reproof, that tells against secret sins of which no word 334 is spoken, of which the reprover never guesses, as well as against open and unblushing vices.

“This is the condemnation,” said Jesus, “that light is come into the world.” And this condemnation every one who walks in Christ’s steps, and breathes His Spirit amid the corruptions of the world, is carrying on, more frequently in silence than by spoken argument. Our unconscious and spontaneous influence is the most real and effective part of it. Life is the light of men—words only as the index of the life from which they spring. Just so far as our lives touch the conscience of others and reveal the difference between darkness and light, so far do we hold forth the word of life and carry on the Holy Spirit’s work in convincing the world of sin. “Let your light so shine.”

This manifestation leads to a transformation: “For everything that is made manifest is light” (ver. 13). “You are light in the Lord,” St Paul says to his converted Gentile readers,—you who were “once darkness,” once wandering in the lusts and pleasures of the heathen around you, without hope and without God. The light of the gospel disclosed, and then dispelled the darkness of that former time; and so it may be with your still heathen kindred, through the light you bring to them. So it will be with the night of sin that is spread over the world. The light which shines upon sin-laden and sorrowful hearts, shines on them to change them into its own nature. The manifested is light: in other words, if men can be made to see the true nature of their sin, they will forsake it. If the light can but penetrate their conscience, it will save them. “Wherefore He saith:—

335 The speaker of this verse can be no other than God, or the Spirit of God in Scripture. The sentence is no mere quotation. It re-utters, in the style of Mary’s or Zechariah’s song, the promise of the Old Covenant from the lips of the New. It gathers up the import of the prophecies concerning the salvation of Christ, as they sounded in the apostle’s ears and as he conveyed them to the world. Isaiah lx. 1–3 supplies the basis of our passage, where the prophet awakens Zion from the sleep of the Exile and bids her shine once more in the glory of her God and show forth His light to the nations: “Arise,” he cries, “shine, for thy light is come!” There are echoes in the verse, besides, of Isaiah li. 17, xxvi. 19; perhaps even of Jonah i. 6: “What meanest thou, O sleeper? arise, and call upon thy God!” We seem to have here, as in chapter iv. 4–6, a snatch of the earliest Christian hymns. The lines are a free paraphrase from the Old Testament, formed by weaving together Messianic passages—belonging to such a hymn as might be sung at baptisms in the Pauline Churches. Certainly those Churches did not wait until the second century to compose their hymns and spiritual songs (comp. ver. 19). Our Lord’s sublime announcement (John v. 25), already verified, that “the hour had come when the dead should hear the voice of the Son of God, and they that heard should live,” gave the key to the prophetic sayings which promised through Israel the light of life to all nations.

With this song on her lips the Church went forth, clad in the armour of light, strong in the joy of salvation; and darkness and the works of darkness fled before her.