THE CHRISTIAN'S FRIEND: PAPERS FOR THE COMFORT AND EDIFICATION OF THE CHILDREN OF GOD. JUDE 20. LONDON: W. H. BROOM, 25, PATERNOSTER SQUARE. 1874. 141. j. 345. "GOD IS LIGHT." 1 JOHN i. 5. THE two passages which we meet in 1 John-"God is Light"- "God is Love," are, what I judge, we may call parent truths. Following the divine revelation from beginning to end, they will be found to form the whole of it-the two lines by which the texture of the divine counsels has been woven. To effect the results of combined "light" and "love," that is, of perfect purity and perfect goodness, is the secret that quickens and fills the scene throughout. All is light and love, for all is serving the display of God Himself, and "God is light," and "God is love"-perfect in purity and perfect in goodness. I would now, for a little, trace the expressions of the truth, "GOD IS LIGHT," as they shew themselves along the current of the divine revelations, desiring to have the soul humbled, and yet also raised and gladdened by such meditations. At the beginning we get the strongest expression of the holiness and righteousness of God-" In the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die." Here the Lord attaches to the first commission of evil nothing less than complete separation from Himself; for He is the living God. As such He had just shewn Himself, He had just become the source of all that in that moment was surrounding Him in earth, air, and seas; He was the living and life-giving God, and, therefore, a state of death was a state of separation from Him. And this state is announced to be the sure and immediate doom of the creature on the moment of his commission of evil. What a strong assertion, thus, at the very outset, of the purity of God, of the great truth that "God is light, and in Him is no darkness at all;" the creature that becomes a child of evil, a child of darkness, must at once be an exile from Him-"In the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die." Thus does the blessed One at once display Himself. And every thing afterwards is but a brightening of this; a sealing afresh of the first impression, that "God is light.' We may see also, and fully grant it, that "love" will have its way— B |