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,[135] and most of the later critics. The sentence is parenthetical, and contains a singular and instructive figure. 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 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 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,
“Which yet in the absolutest drench of dark
Ne’er wants its witness, some stray beauty-beam
To the despair of hell!”
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 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.