Spurgeon: July PM
* 07/09/PM
"And God divided the light from the darkness."
--Genesis 1:4
A believer has two principles at work within him. In his
natural estate he was subject to one principle only, which was
darkness; now light has entered, and the two principles
disagree. Mark the apostle Paul's words in the seventh chapter
of Romans: "I find then a law, that, when I would do good, evil
is present with me. For I delight in the law of God after the
inward man: but I see another law in my members, warring against
the law of my mind, and bringing me into captivity to the law of
sin, which is in my members." How is this state of things
occasioned? "The Lord divided the light from the darkness."
Darkness, by itself, is quiet and undisturbed, but when the Lord
sends in light, there is a conflict, for the one is in
opposition to the other: a conflict which will never cease till
the believer is altogether light in the Lord. If there be a
division within the individual Christian, there is certain to
be a division without . So soon as the Lord gives to any man
light, he proceeds to separate himself from the darkness around;
he secedes from a merely worldly religion of outward ceremonial,
for nothing short of the gospel of Christ will now satisfy him,
and he withdraws himself from worldly society and frivolous
amusements, and seeks the company of the saints, for "We know we
have passed from death unto life, because we love the brethren."
The light gathers to itself, and the darkness to itself. What
God has divided, let us never try to unite, but as Christ went
without the camp, bearing His reproach, so let us come out from
the ungodly, and be a peculiar people. He was holy, harmless,
undefiled, separate from sinners; and, as He was, so we are to
be nonconformists to the world, dissenting from all sin, and
distinguished from the rest of mankind by our likeness to our
Master.