 |  |
may be forfeited. Men may emphasize "grace", they may call such teaching "legal", they
may seek to throw out the idea of reward from the epistles of the mystery, but the apostle
concludes his words of warning by saying:--
"Let no man deceive you with vain words" (Eph. 5: 6).
The parallel in Colossians but endorses or enforces this:--
"Beware lest any man spoil you through . . . . . vain deceit . . . . . Let no man beguile
you of your reward" (Col. 2: 8-18).
Because of these things the wrath of God is coming on the children of disobedience,
and the members of the church are not to be partakers with such. There must be an
outward expression of the inward change. Once they too were darkness and walked in
darkness, producing the unfruitful works of darkness. Now, however, they are light in
the Lord and so the exhortation comes, "Walk as children of light". Love leads to
sacrifice, and repudiates lust which is but the expression of selfishness. Light leads to
fruitfulness and reproves the unfruitful works of darkness. Where the A.V. reads:--
"For the fruit of the Spirit is in all goodness and righteousness and truth" (Eph. 5: 9).
the revised text read, "the fruit of the light".
This reading contains a truth which is everywhere confirmed in the works of God
around us. The student of Horticulture is early impressed with the essential place that
light has in plant growth. The bulk of the food upon our tables daily are carbo-hydrates
or starchy foods, such as bread and all cereals, potatoes, sugar, &100: Now this carbon is
obtained by plants, not from the soil but from the air. Carbon assimilation, called also
Photo-synthesis ("placing together by light"), is the work of the green chlorophyll in the
leaves, and is entirely dependent upon the action of sunlight. If a patch of black be put
upon a leaf in the morning and the leaf be examined under a microscope at night, it will
be found that the exposed cells of the leaf are full of starch grains, whereas the cells
beneath the black patch are empty.
It is scientific to the last degree to teach that on the first day of creation God should
say, "Light be, and light was". It is the fuller truth to see in this statement of Genesis a
type of the gospel:--
"For God, Who commanded the light to shine out of darkness, hath shined in our
hearts, to give the light . . . . . the light of the glorious gospel" (II Cor. 4: 4, 6).
Not only does light produce fruit, but darkness has its unfruitful works. We all have
seen the varied coloured toadstool that, like the mushroom, do not depend upon the light.
No one, however, has seen a green toadstool or mushroom. Such have no power of using
sunlight, they are vegetable parasites living upon others, or saprophytes living upon the
decaying tissue of dead plants. Such are nature's pictures of the unfruitful works of
darkness. Darkness and death and unfruitfulness are all in the passage before us:--