We feel instinctively the beauty and the grandeur of this passage descriptive of the Church of Christ when she shall have passed through the successive stages of her earthly warfare and shall once more have her Lord reigning peaceably and triumphantly in her midst, all enemies subdued, all hindrances surmounted, all stains cleansed and purged away. For it is the purpose of her great Head, as St. Paul witnesses in his epistle to the Ephesians, to make His Church a glorious Church and to present her to His Father without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, but that she shall be holy and without blemish. God Almighty, though distributing His gifts and ordering His providence at sundry times and in divers manners, has yet had one unchanging purpose from beginning to end. The patriarchal dispensation was preparatory to the Mosaic, the Mosaic to the Christian, and the Christian to that yet fuller development of the wealth of God's loving-kindness when redeemed humanity all redeemed, even though they know it not, by the one and self-same precious blood shall come from the east, and from the west, and from the north, and from the south, and shall sit down with Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob in the kingdom of God.
I. There are two main ideas that seem to me to stand out amidst all this figurative language, and with these two I propose mainly, if not exclusively, to deal. They are the idea of brightness and the idea of proportion. The city was full of light, not the light of the sun, nor the moon, nor of candles, nor any artificial illumination; the Lord God was its light. "The glory of God did lighten it, and the Lamb is the Light thereof." Christ is the Light of the world. He came to scatter away the clouds of darkness; He came to make the whole body of the individual man and the whole body of the Church full of light, and in no part dark. Where the power of Christ's Gospel has penetrated, there, in the fullest and broadest sense of the term, should be light. And light implies joyousness and brightness. And so we must remember we have to preach a "Gospel," not a gloomy message. The great feature of Christianity is hope. Heathen religions fostered despair. Any one who has read the poems of Lucretius knows the sad tone that runs through them; and even the brighter-eyed Virgil would say, "We see all things rushing backward by a sort of inevitable destiny." The Romans thought society was wretched because the world's prospects were so dark before them, but not so with us who live in the sunshine of the Gospel. No doubt there is, and must be, an element of sadness in our worship when we think how unworthy we are of the manifold mercies which God our Father has so bountifully provided for us; and yet even when we think of our unworthiness there will be an overmastering element of confidence and even of joy.
II. And now to pass on to the other thought: the thought of proportion. The whole of this great city was of a certain proportion. It was all measured out with a measuring rod, and every part fitted to the other; and the length, and the breadth, and the height of it were equal. You will notice that this one idea of proportion runs through the visions both of Ezekiel and John. And so in the spiritual Church of Christ, to which you and I belong, and of whose glories these visions were but faint images; proportion is the great law of Christ's gospel, both in its dogmatic and its practical aspects. If any man prophesy, says Paul, let him prophesy according to the proportion, the analogy, of faith. I have heard it said of Dr. Chalmers that it was one of his rules to a young minister that he should unfold the whole plan of salvation in every sermon, and his reason for it was this: that it might happen that in the congregation there was one man who had never heard that whole plan before, and might not again, and, therefore, for his sake the whole plan was to be unfolded. I do not know whether he who gave the precept acted upon it; but if most of us were to do so, we should very soon empty our churches. St. Paul wisely drew the distinction between milk for babes and strong meat for men.
Bishop Fraser, Church Sermons,vol. ii., p. 65.