II. The awakening call.—1. This awakening must suppose and imply a conviction of your sin and a sense of your danger. 2. This awakening from sleep and arising from the dead imply a real repentance of sin and turning to God. 3. They who have awoke from their sleep and risen from the dead will experience the properties and maintain the exercises of a holy and spiritual life.
III. The encouragement to attend to the awakening call.—“Christ shall give thee light.” 1. This may be understood as a promise of pardon and eternal life on your repentance. 2. The words import God’s gracious attention to awakened souls when they frame their doings to turn to Him.—Lathrop.
Ver. 13. The Light of God.
I. Light comes from God.—God is light, and He wishes to give light to His children. “Whatsoever doth make manifest is light”—that which is made manifest is light. There has been a steady progress in the mind of the Christian race, and this progress has been in the direction of light. Has it not been so in our notions of God?—a gradual discovery that when God is manifested, behold, God is light, and in Him is no darkness at all—a gradual vindication of His character from those dark and horrid notions of the Deity which were borrowed from the pagans and the Jewish rabbis—a gradual return to the perfect good news of a good God which was preached by St. John and by St. Paul. The day shall come when all shall be light in the Lord—when all mankind shall know God from the least unto the greatest, and, lifting up free foreheads to Him who made them and redeemed them by His Son, shall in spirit and in truth worship the Father.
II. In the case of our fellow-men whatsoever is made manifest is light.—How easy it was to have dark thoughts about our fellow-men simply because we did not know them,—easy to condemn the Negro to perpetual slavery, when we knew nothing of him but his black face; or to hang by hundreds the ragged street boys, while we disdained to inquire into the circumstances which had degraded them; or to treat madmen as wild beasts, instead of taming them by wise and gentle sympathy. But with a closer knowledge of our fellow-creatures has come toleration, pity, sympathy. Man, in proportion as he becomes manifest to man, is seen, in spite of all defects and sins, to be hallowed with a light from God who made him.
III. It has been equally so in the case of the physical world.—Nature, being made manifest, is light. Science has taught men to admire where they used to dread, to rule where they used to obey, to employ for harmless uses what they were once afraid to touch, and where they once saw only fiends to see the orderly and beneficent laws of the All-good and Almighty God. Everywhere, as the work of nature is unfolded to our eyes, we see beauty, order, mutual use, the offspring of perfect love as well as perfect wisdom. Let us teach these things to our children. Tell them to go to the light and see their heavenly Father’s works manifested, and know that they are, as He is, light.—C. Kingsley.
Ver. 14. Moral Stupidity.—How many scarcely think of God from day to day! It cannot therefore be uncharitable to consider the mass of the people, compared with the wakefulness their infinite interests require, as sunk in a profound slumber. Unless this slumber is soon broken they must sleep the sleep of eternal death.
I. Search for the cause of this stupidity.—The proximate cause may be comprehended in these two words—ignorance and unbelief. The remote cause is opposition to God and truth. Were not the heart opposed, no man with the Bible in his hand could remain ignorant of truths which claim to have so important a bearing on his eternal destiny. Fortified by sevenfold ignorance, men can no more be awakened to contemplate their condition with alarm than the pagans of the wilderness. It is perfectly in character for them to slumber. But there are men who are respectable for their knowledge of Christian truth who yet are asleep. The cause with them is unbelief—the want of a realising sense. Their understanding assents to the awful verities of religion, but they do not realisingly believe them.
II. Apply some arguments to remove the evil.—Consider that these awful truths are as much realities as though you were now overwhelmed with a sense of their importance. Neither the ignorance nor the unbelief of man can change eternal truth. God is as holy, as awful in majesty, He is as much your Creator, Preserver, and Master, He as much holds your destinies in His hands, as though you were now lying at His feet beseeching Him not to cast you down to hell. What would it avail if all the people should disbelieve that the sun will ever rise again, or that spring-time and harvest will ever return? Can the soldier annihilate the enemy by marching up to the battery with his eyes and ears closed? You have the same means with others: why should you remain ignorant while they are informed? If your knowledge is competent and it is unbelief that excludes conviction, then call into action the powers of a rational soul and cast yourselves for help on God. If you ever mean to awake, awake now. The longer you sleep the sounder you sleep. The longer you live without religion the less likely that you will ever possess it. You are sleeping in the presence of an offended God. In His hands you lie, and if He but turn them you slide to rise no more.—E. D. Griffin.
The Call of the Gospel to Sinners.