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No.(?).
The Excellent Glory, in the face of Jesus Christ.
pp. 101 - 104
We have been some time arriving at the `text' adopted as the heading of this series,
namely II Cor. 4: 6, but on the other hand, a text is not a verse lifted out of its context
and used merely as a peg upon which to hang the three points of a sermon. The text
should conform to its derivation textus `that which is woven, a fabric', and so related to
the whole as the threads of a textile fabric are related to the weft. Shakepeare's words are
worth remembering:
"In religion
What error, but some sober brow
Will bless it, and approve it with a text" (Merchant of Venice).
And so all the threads, the `watering down of the Word' that is so strenuously
repudiated, the solemn comparison of the two Covenants, the veiled face of Moses, the
unveiled face of the believer, the veil fabricated by the evil one out of undispensational
related texts, and the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, all these threads are now
gathered up and presented in the words:
"For God, Who commanded the light to shine out of darkness, hath shined in our
hearts, to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ"
(II Cor. 4: 6).
We have no knowledge, nor do we possess the power to understand what the
conditions of life must have been before the overthrow of the world. We do know that
so far as God Himself is concerned, He was under no necessity to be faced with
darkness before He could appreciate light, "God is light, and in Him is no darkness at all"
(I John 1: 5).
"Make no mistake about this, my beloved brothers: all we are given is good, and all
our endowments are faultless, descending from above, from the Father of the heavenly
lights, Who knows no change of rising and setting, Who casts no shadow on the earth"
(James 1: 16, 17, Moffatt).
During the ages, darkness alternates with light, and good is set over against evil, but
these alternations are limited to the time being, and when the ages have run their courses
the former things will pass away and a suggestion of what will be the new condition is
found in the New Jerusalem:
"The city had no need of the sun, neither the moon to shine in it: for the glory of God
did lighten it, and the Lamb is the light thereof . . . . . . . there shall be no night there"
(Rev. 21: 23, 25).
During the ages, however, we see through a glass darkly, we reflect as in a mirror the
glory of the Lord; we see the story of God in the face of Jesus Christ.