The infatuation of knowledge is the curse of life; the desire to know unsettles life. We honour the knower, the man who has eaten most of the sad fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. Yet what is most of our knowledge? Think of a man in a churchyard, spelling out the inscriptions on the stones a clever archaeologist; you would not say this added much to his worth of attainment because he was able cleverly to decipher the inscriptions. Yet the world is a vast, wide churchyard, and what we call knowledge is much such a reading of inscriptions. This is not the knowledge that is power. Christian knowledge, true knowledge, ispower. Now Christ promises knowledge. You are to estimate a measure yourself by what you know; you are to fall back upon first principles. But you are to follow on and follow after; and as you advance, the light, the gracious light, shall shine upon your way.
I. If religion is progression, it is surely, before it can be this, a beginning; but as a beginning it is a consciousness consciousness which being translated is knowledge. This knowledge is great because God is the substance of the soul. When God is the substance of the soul, and of all its knowledge, then the blessed life and the blessed knowledge give light within. The old superstitious theosophists used to say, that all things had their star, and each star had its angel above itself, and each angel its idea, or essence, or truth, in God. Is thy. flower withered? thou hast it in thy star. Is thy star darkened? thou hast an angel. Is thy angel withdrawn? thou hast God. See now what knowledge is; as we are said to see all things by the crystal sphere in the eye, so the spirit is the crystal in the eye of the soul; and as the soul has the Divine knowledge within it, so it perceives.
II. But it is a progression. Follow on. I can only conceive of the state of souls as a state of immortal consciousness, a state where hope and memory are as one, and love is only passive in certain and secure possession. "Then shall we know," but the quality of our knowledge will be the same as that which makes the holy life and joy and certainty of earth. We shall live then, not by the accumulation of facts but by consciousness, by feeling, and by thought.
E. Paxton Hood, Dark Sayings on a Harp,p. 223.
References: Hosea 6:3. Spurgeon, Sermons,vol. xxi., No. 1246. Hosea 6:3; Hosea 6:4. Ibid.,vol. xv., No. 852; H. W. Beecher, Christian World Pulpit,vol. v., p. 75.
It is Christ whom our faith must grasp under these two figures, the Day-dawn and the Rain.
I. The day-dawn and the rain represent some resemblances between the coming of Christ in His Gospel and in His Spirt. (1) They have the same manifest origin. The day-dawn comes from Heaven, and so also does the rain. They are not of man's ordering and making, but of God's. It is not less so with the Gospel and Spirit of Christ. The same God who makes morning to the world by the sun, gives the dawn of a new creation to the spirits of men through the Saviour. (2) They have the same mode of operation on the part of God. That mode of operation is soft and silent. The greatest powers of nature work most calmly and noiselessly. And like to these in their operations are the Gospel and Spirit of Christ. The kingdom of heaven cometh not with observation. (3) They have the same form of approach to us in perfect freeness and fulness. The morning light comes unfettered by any condition, and so also descends the rain. And in this they are fit and blessed emblems of the way in which Christ approaches us, both with His Gospel and His Spirit. (4) They have the same object and end. It is the transformation of death into life, and the raising of that which lives into higher and fairer form. Here, too, they are emblems of the Gospel and Spirit of Christ. These, in like manner, have the same aim life and revival. The Gospel of Christ is the word of life. The Holy Ghost is the Spirit of life.
II. Notice some of the points of distinction between them. (1) Christ's approach to men has a general and yet a special aspect. The sun comes every morning with a broad, unbroken look, shining for all and singling out none. But the rain as it descends breaks into drops, and hangs with its globules on every blade. There is this twofold aspect in the coming of Christ. (2) Christ's coming is constant and yet variable. The sunrise is of all things the most sure and settled. But for the rain man knows no fixed rule. Christ visits men in His Gospel, steady and unchanging as the sun. But with the Holy Spirit it is otherwise: His coming may vary in time and place, like the wind which bloweth where it listeth, or the rain, whose arrival depends on causes we have not fathomed. (3) Christ's coming may be with gladness, and yet also with trouble. And as God's sun and cloud in the world around us are not at variance, neither are the gladness that lies in the light of His Gospel and the trouble that may come from the convictions of His Spirit. (4) Christ's coming in His Gospel and Spirit may be separate for a while, but they tend to a final and perfect union. The Gospel, without the Spirit, would be the sun shining on a waterless waste. The Spirit, without the Gospel, would be the rain falling in a starless night.
J. Ker, Sermons,p. 82.