Whatever the first use and intent of this phrase, it describes a waiting and a joy to come; a waiting under darkness and shadow, and a joy to come with the light. And so the words answer well the purpose of suggesting the truth, that there are many things in life and destiny that are to be awaited.
I. We wait for rest. If the question were raised, Is man made for toil or for rest? the answer would be a mixed and qualified one. He is appointed to toil, he is destined to rest; one is his condition, the other is his end. Unceasing toil is the largest feature of human life. As the sun journeys about the earth, it summons the greater part of those it shines on to hard and heavy toil, till its setting dismisses them to brief rest. And this rest is chiefly found in sleep, the nightly death to life, as though rest were no part of man's conscious life. We die, in a sense, to this daily life of toil, to get rest, and thus go off into a world of freedom that is revealed to us by fragments of chance-remembered dreams. Now, surely, it is an intimation that the other death ushers us into a world of absolute freedom and repose; for freedom and repose are correlatives. Rest is something to be awaited in God's own time. To unduly seize it is ruin; it breaks the mould in which our life is cast. To patiently wait for it makes toil endurable, and assures us that our external lives are not a mockery of the hopes wrought into us. Some morning this shadow will flee away. In the Church of St. Nazaro in Florence is an epitaph upon the tomb of a soldier, as fit for the whole toiling race as for his own restless life, "Johannes Divultino, who never rested, rests hush!" We say of our dead, "They rest from their labours."
II. We wait for the renewal of lost powers. St. Paul speaks of the redemption of the body as something that is waited for. He means no narrow doctrine of a physical resurrection, but a renewal of existence a restoration of lost powers.
III. We wait for the full perfecting of character. We are keyed, not to attainment, but to the hope of it by struggle towards it. And it is the struggle, and not the attainment, that measures character and foreshadows destiny.
IV. We wait the renewal of sundered love. Love may suffer an eclipse, but it is not sent wailing into eternal shadows. It is as sure as God Himself that human love shall again claim its own.
V. We wait for the mystery to be taken off from life. Mystery may remain, but it will be harmonious mystery. The accusing doubt, the seeming contradiction, the painful uncertainty, will pass away, and we shall see "face to face," and know even as we have been known.
VI. We wait for full restoration to the presence of God.
T. T. Munger, The Freedom of Faith,p. 379.
At its longest, the night can only run its appointed hours. The aggregate of the trouble that is to be in this world was a preordained, fixed quantity. The older we grow the easier it ought to be to say, "Till the day break."
I. There are four things which seem to me to make the night of this present state. (1) Indistinctness. We see a very little way, and what we do see is so imperfect, and we make such sad mistakes. (2) Oppressiveness. Who has not felt the weight of night? Have we not all had consciousness of power which we could not put forth an awe, an enervating sense of the unknown, all about us? (3) Loneliness makes a great part of the feeling of night. (4) The want of God's felt presence. This world is simply what it is because Christ has not His proper place in it. All things else, be they what they may, become dark in consequence of that one eclipse.
II. But there are signs, glowing signs, that the cheer of the morning is coming. Only two unfulfilled prophecies stand between us and the second Advent. (1) The evangelisation of the whole world; but already the Gospel is a witness to the whole world. (2) The restoration of the Jews; but it is just possible that that restoration may follow, not precede, His coming. But if not, their return might occupy such a small space of time, that literally a nation might be born in a day.
J. Vaughan, Fifty Sermons,4th series, p. 258.
References: Song of Solomon 2:17. H. J. Wilmot-Buxton, Waterside Mission Sermons,1st series, p. 53.Song of Solomon 3:1. Spurgeon, Morning by Morning,p. 19; J. M. Neale, Sermons on the Song of Songs,p. 127.