The guiding cloud severed the camp of Egypt from the camp of Israel. It marched between them. To the one it was God's presence, cheering despondency, comforting weakness, guaranteeing victory; to the other it was a perplexing, baffling, vexing apparition, betokening they knew not what, yet this at all events, that Israel had a friend, a guide, a comforter, and they must drive after him their chariots of earth, with such hope and such might as earth fighting against Heaven can muster.
I. Every word of God is at once a cloud and darkness to Egypt and a light by night to Israel. So far as revelation goes, it is to the believing what it calls itself a light and a lamp. The real mysteries of our being were there before revelation: the mystery of life, the mystery of death, the mystery of an omnipotent God resisted, and the mystery of a holy God co-existent with evil. Whatever revelation does in reference to these aboriginal mysteries is in the directionof explanation.
II. Trinity Sunday is, in an especial sense, the Festival of Revelation. Trinity and unity are not contraries. The word Trinity was invented to preserve the unity. Trinity is tri-unity. The doctrine of the Trinity is this, that Holy Scripture, while tenaciously clinging to the unity, does present to us our Lord Jesus Christ as very God, and does present to us the Holy Spirit of God, not as a thing, but as a Person. Leave out of sight for one hour the Divinity of Jesus, and darkness settles again upon the soul which He died, which He lives, to redeem. Leave out of sight for one hour the personality of the Spirit, and darkness settles again upon the soul of which He is the Light, because the Life. We may listlessly dream or purposelessly loiter; but when a work is proposed to us, and we must do it or die, then we want that help, and must have it, which only a Trinity in unity can supply.
C. J. Vaughan, Half Hours in the Temple Church,p. 143; also Good Words,1870, p. 747.
Reference: T. Arnold, Sermons,vol. v., p. 114.