Marshall Cowan
Matthew 4: 12-17
John 12: 34-36 (‘light’); 44-47
2 Corinthians 4: 5, 6
You will see that all these scriptures refer to “light”. It is a wonderful thing to see that God intends that light should come into man’s heart. We have to do with a God who is interested in His creature. He is interested in the blessing of His creature. As sinners who are far from God, we are not in light; we are in darkness. It was not God’s intent that men should dwell in darkness, but it was His intent that they should dwell in light. In the beginning, you will remember, if you read in Genesis, it says, “And God said, Let there be light. And there was light”, chap 1: 3. Then it says, “And God saw the light that it was good”, v 4. He did not say the darkness was good. And it says, “God divided between the light and the darkness”.
That is the position today, beloved. We know that in actual fact physically, but morally too, and that is what we want to speak about. There is a vast difference between the light and the darkness. I suppose you could say that the darkness is Satan’s domain. It is the domain he works in and it is against the light. John says, “And the light appears in darkness, and the darkness apprehended it not”, chap 1: 5. There is such a difference; they are completely opposite.
God has made the great lights. We referred to the moon today. Genesis says, “And God made the two great lights, the great light to rule the day, and the small light to rule the night”, chap 1: 16. The celestial area of things in which God put these lights, and all the stars: the galaxies of stars are quite a study, beyond man’s ken, they are so great and so vast. And that is like God. God cannot be compassed by man. He is far beyond man. He dwells “in unapproachable light; whom no man has seen, nor is able to see”, 1 Tim 6: 16. That is God in His deity, something that we can never enter into, but what we can say at the present moment is that God has come out in light, a light that you and I can understand, that persons can understand. Why? Because He has manifested that light in His Son, in a Man, a glorious Man, a Man who came from heaven, came into this scene and walked amidst the darkness. And He was light; He said, “I am the light of the world”, John 8: 12.
What a Person He is, beloved friends! I wonder if you have come to know Him. It is God’s intent in the glad tidings that you should come to know Jesus, glorious Son of God, the One in whom God has centred the light, but to get advantage of the light, you have to let it sink in, sink into your heart. The light is shining and it has continued right down through this dispensation until this very moment, the outshining of God in His Son. We sang about it:
O this precious light is telling
God’s full favour now to man;
(Hymn 219).
How blessed that is! Many of us have come into the blessing as a result of accepting Christ, accepting what God has placed in Christ, and all the work He has accomplished to bring about our salvation and our forgiveness and to bring us into God’s presence and to set us free there, to be in liberty. God wants persons to be in liberty in His presence, but it says, “men have loved darkness rather than light; for their works were evil”, John 3: 19. They do not want to come to the light because they know that their works are evil. How sad that is, beloved friends, how sad! Persons go on without God. Ephesians says, “having no hope, and without God in the world”, chap 2: 12. Persons without Christ and without God have no hope. God will have to come in in judgment in the coming day because He is a holy, righteous God, and it is a requirement - you might find it difficult to understand - but it is actually a requirement of His love that that kind of judgment will have to take place for those who refuse the glad tidings that God has presented concerning His Son.
But we are here tonight in a time of grace, a time of great opportunity. That is what impressed me about this scripture I have read. It is a time of great opportunity. The light has come in, right where we are here in Edinburgh, in Loanhead. It is right here. It is in persons all around you because believers in Christ have that light. It says not only that Christ is the light of the world, but that believers in Christ are also the light of the world, Matt 5: 14. So that light is here. It is here in this land. It is very interesting, this land of “Capernaum, which is on the sea-side in the borders of Zabulon and Nepthalim”. It says “that that might be fulfilled which was spoken through Esaias the prophet”. It is very wonderful to see how God has operated. These things were spoken about hundreds of years before by the prophet, about this very moment, and here it is. It says as Jesus speaks at this moment in time, “Land of Zabulon and land of Nepthalim, way of the sea beyond the Jordan, Galilee of the nations:- the people sitting in darkness has seen a great light, and to those sitting in the country and shadow of death, to them has light sprung up”. The opportunity is still the same. It was at that moment in time when Jesus began to preach. What a service that was, beloved, as He began His service, entered into that service, as sent by the Father, in relation to the Father’s will: “From that time began Jesus to preach and to say, Repent, for the kingdom of the heavens has drawn nigh”. What a matter then that we can say that moment exists now right where we are here at the present time, and it is here for our blessing: “the people sitting in darkness has seen a great light”.
I have to ask you in the glad tidings, ‘Have you seen it? Have you seen this light, dear friend?’. It is shining all around. I know many have not seen it because they have not opened their eyes to see it, but through the glad tidings you can be alerted to the fact this light is shining tonight. The goodness and the grace and the mercy of God are shining out in His Son at this very moment, and it is amidst the darkness. We all know the darkness is very real. You do not have to look very far around to see it. What a world we live in! What evil exists! The powers of darkness are so distinct, but amidst that there is something here very precious and it is there for you, dear friend, for you and for me. God has made it available in His Son. It says, “has seen a great light, and to those sitting in the country and shadow of death, to them has light sprung up”. Such is the grace and mercy of God that God would make this opportunity available to all men at the present moment, this very moment,that they should believe on His Son.
Well, He says, “Repent, for the kingdom of the heavens has drawn nigh”. The only way to come into this is by way of repentance, come to the acknowledgment of what you are, of what I am, in my sins, away from God - because if I am in my sins, I am in the darkness, but God wants to dispel it and dispel it for ever. If you believe on the Son, you can have that light shining in your soul and it will never dim. That light will never dim. That light that is shining in Jesus, God’s exalted Man, will never dim, and we can be in the enjoyment of it through repentance. We must repent of our sins, repent before God, “for all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God”, Rom 3: 23. That is the truth, dear friend, and nothing else will suit God except what has been secured through the death and burial and resurrection and ascension of the Lord Jesus Christ. Everything God has planned for man is centred in that glorious Person.
Well, it is all there for you and me to lay hold of, but you must believe. You can only have it by believing. “Believe on the Lord Jesus and thou shalt be saved”, Acts 16: 31. The jailor came to that. That is what the apostle said to him: “Believe on the Lord Jesus and thou shalt be saved, thou and thy house”. He believed and he accepted it. What a change there was in that man, a cruel man, no doubt, who had had these two in the prison, Paul and Silas, and God released them through an earthquake and brought them out. Paul preached the glad tidings to the jailor, and that is what he said: “Believe on the Lord Jesus”. The jailor asked, “Sirs, what must I do that I may be saved?”. Oh what a cry! Have you made that cry, dear friend? “What must I do?” Well, it is not what you do, nor what I do, but what God has done and what He has done in and through the Lord Jesus. “Believe on the Lord Jesus and thou shalt be saved, thou and thy house.” What a wonderful message! It is open to everyone at the present moment that we might come into it!
So I go on to John. John speaks a lot about the life at the beginning of the gospel. He tells us about the Lord Jesus: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things received being through him, and without him not one thing received being which has received being. In him was life, and the life was the light of men. And the light appears in darkness, and the darkness apprehended it not”, chap 1: 1-5. What a wonderful Person Jesus is! He is a glorious Man, a real Man, but never forget that He is also God. As here, He was the Word. The Word is the full expression of God. Everything that God wanted to express He expressed in Jesus, in that wonderful Man! “The Word was with God, and the Word was God.” Some would dispute that; it has been disputed by many. Clever men think they can use their minds to arrive at the truth and they never can. It is arrived at by faith and believing in Christ, believing in the Lord Jesus, accepting God’s word, and Christ is the Word, and that is what we are speaking about tonight. He is the Word: God’s full expression of what He is in Himself is declared in Him.
I was thinking of the opportunity given in this wonderful setting when the Lord had already said, “I, if I be lifted up out of the earth, will draw all to me! But this he said signifying by what death he was about to die”, John 12: 32, 33. When the Lord Jesus came here, He came to die. He was here, as I have said, as the full expression of all that was in God’s heart, displaying the love of God, the mercy of God, the compassions of God. They were all seen in Him. Think of all the things He did, bringing in forgiveness, and raising the dead, and healing the sick and the poor and the lame and the blind. All these things indicate man’s lost moral state. The Lord Jesus met it all and He met it fully. He brought persons back even into life from the dead; such was His compassion and His power - wonderful! Light in the scripture here, and particularly in John, is related very much to life. If you want to come into life spiritually, you have to do it by accepting the light. The light is shining but it needs to be absorbed, taken into your soul, and if you allow that, you will come into life. So He says, “Yet a little while is the light amongst you. Walk while ye have the light, that darkness may not overtake you”.
It is a sobering matter that we are at the end of this dispensation. God is still speaking, He is speaking today, but it may end, dear friends, tonight. It could end at any moment, and that is a sobering matter; so it is an urgent matter that we take advantage of what God is presenting in Christ at the present moment. When the time is gone, it will be too late. That would be a terrible thought, would it not? If you did not believe on Christ and you had not accepted Him as your Saviour, and suddenly the day of grace is closed and there is no more hope; what a thing, what a matter! No-one would want to come under God’s judgment and be lost for eternity and be without Christ eternally. What an awful matter!
Well, what a time we are in! He says, “Yet a little while is the light amongst you”. That applies today, just the same, “a little while”. “Walk while ye have the light, that darkness may not overtake you. And he who walks in the darkness does not know where he goes”. Many persons think they know where they are going. They go in for ambition of all kinds in every sphere of life and they want to make things better, and make something of themselves, and have great riches too, and all that kind of thing, and they think that they are walking where they know where they are going; but the sad fact is, dear friend, that they do not know where they are going because all that we have in that sense is only going to end in death: “And forasmuch as it is the portion of men once to die, and after this judgment”, Heb 9: 27. Well, these are sobering matters. What a time we are in then, a time of acceptance, a time when you can believe on this blessed Man. I would love to commend Him to you. I am sure every believer in this room would commend Him to anyone who has not accepted the Lord Jesus Christ as their Saviour.
He says, “that ye may become sons of light”. Is that not a wonderful thought, “that ye may become sons of light”? You who were away from God, lost in your sins, at a great distance, and God wants to make you a son of light! That applies to women as well. He would make us all “sons of light”. Sonship is a wonderful thought in God’s purpose, and that is what He wants to bring every man and woman into, into sonship. That means we are in God’s favour, we are enjoying His presence and we are brought into a place of liberty in the enjoyment of the presence of God, the presence of Christ, and all because of the way God has shone in His Son. And in addition to that He gives the Holy Spirit to those who believe on His Son. It is a wonderful matter so that you can be sustained, come to the Lord Jesus, believe on Him, accept Him and know Him as your Saviour, but find then that you can live here as sustained by His blessed Holy Spirit, the Spirit of God, pleased to come and dwell in the believer, so that he might be sustained in life and joy and enjoy the blessings that God has in mind for him.
So the Lord’s own feelings enter into it in this section. How much He felt things! The real feelings of Jesus come out. It says, “Jesus cried, and said, He that believes on me, believes not on me, but on him that sent me; and he that beholds me, beholds him that sent me. I am come into the world as light, that every one that believes on me may not abide in darkness”. What a great matter, dear friend, that the Lord Jesus came from the Father. He said, “He that has seen me has seen the Father” (chap 14: 9), the Father originating things. The Lord Jesus came from the Father into this scene and exhibited these wonderful features that belong to the Father Himself. How very great that is! And so He says, “He that has seen me has seen the Father” and “I am come into the world as light, that every one that believes on me may not abide in darkness; and if any one hear my words and do not keep them, I judge him not”. God is not condemning the sinner. He is not condemning anyone at the present moment. The Lord Jesus is not now the Judge: He is the Saviour. I think it is a very sobering thing to realise that the time of judgment will come, but He says, “He that rejects me and does not receive my words, has him who judges him: the word which I have spoken, that shall judge him in the last day”. Well, it just emphasises, as I have said, the great moment that we live in, to take advantage of at the present time, a time of divine mercy and grace, a time of salvation - “now is the well-accepted time; behold, now the day of salvation”, 2 Cor 6: 2.
So when we come to Corinthians, we come into something that is very blessed. The apostle speaks about “the radiancy of the glad tidings of the glory of the Christ”. I think that is a wonderful expression. I can hardly say any more about it than what it conveys to me, “the radiancy of the glad tidings of the glory of the Christ”, shining out towards all men at the present moment. It says, “it is the God who spoke that out of darkness light should shine who has shone in our hearts for the shining forth of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ”. You see what a very great privilege God would have you to come into, to come into that knowledge in your soul and in your heart, “the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ”. That is what is going to occupy us eternally, what God has brought us into. We are going to see that Man and look upon Him and look upon His glories and we will be engaged with that eternally. Is that not a wonderful matter, “the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ”? Nothing more blessed than that! Well, that is what you come into through the glad tidings, through the gospel: you come into the knowledge of God’s great thoughts for man, not just that you should be saved from your sins, but that you should know the enjoyment of that and have peace in your soul, that you might come into the blessing of what God has provided for you in Christ because God has a whole system that He has set up in that glorious Man. It relates to the kingdom of the heavens, and it is fine to be in that kingdom and to know that you love Christ and you want to be here for Christ and you want to be subject to Christ. That is what God has brought us into. That is the kingdom of the heavens, “the kingdom of the Son of his love”, Col 1: 13. Wonderful matter that you can have part in that and enjoy it at the present time!
I just want to refer to Psalm 43 in closing. Here is a man who has come to know His God. You might say he is a man who is converted, and he has had experience with God. He has come to appreciate certain things in his heart and in his soul and he has problems like most of us, and he has learned to turn to God Himself. He has learned that he has not got the answers in himself but he has found that the answer is in God. If you have problems, dear friend, if you have difficulties in your soul, and they afflict us in many different ways, the answer is in God, the answer is in Christ, in turning to Him as this man did. He says, Judge me, O God, and plead my cause against an ungodly nation; deliver me from the deceitful and unrighteous man.
For thou art the God of my strength:
why hast thou cast me off?
Why go I about mourning because of the
oppression of the enemy?
Send out thy light and thy truth:
they shall lead me,
they shall bring me to thy holy mount,
and unto thy habitations,
verses1-3.
Is that not very blessed? That is a man who has learned his God, and that is open to every one of us, beloved friends. We have come to know Him through the Saviour and appreciate the way that God is concerned about us and cares for us in our links with Himself. “Send out thy light and thy truth”. They have all been expressed in Jesus, His light and His truth. The Lord Jesus said that: “I am the way, and the truth, and the life”, John 14: 6. It is all in Him. Send them out, and “they shall lead me”. The Lord Jesus is a wonderful example for us all. Peter says, “that ye should follow in his steps”, 1 Pet 2: 21. I find that very testing, I have to admit, and I find that I fail. I suppose most here would say that. But it is a very fine thing that we can fall back on divine support and find that His light and His truth “they shall lead me, they shall bring me to thy holy mount, and until thy habitations”. It is a great experience to come into the area where God dwells, where God is at rest. God is at rest in all He has secured in that blessed Man, and you can enter into the enjoyment of that wonderful privilege that is open to the believer in the Lord Jesus.
Then he says,
Then will I go unto the altar of God,
unto the God of the gladness of my joy:
yea, upon the harp will I praise thee,
O God, my God.
verse 4
What a fine resolve! I think that is what God is looking for, an answer like that, from you and from me, full enjoyment of our salvation, but, more than that, “I will go unto the altar”. This man has learned what God is looking for. He has learned what God wants from a soul. He wants a response from your heart and mine, beloved, in reality and in life. May we be encouraged then, as believing on the Lord Jesus, to come into these glorious things, for His Name’s sake!
Loanhead
16th March 2014