Genesis 1:5 And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day. 1. One of the first lessons which God intends us to learn from the night is a larger respect for wholesome renovation. Perhaps this may not show itself in any great lengthening of our bodily life, but rather in a more healthy spirit, less exposed to that prevailing unrest which fills the air and which troubles so many minds. 2. The night is the season of wonder. A new and strangely equipped population, another race of beings, another sequence of events, comes into and fills the world of the mind. Men who have left their seal upon the world, and largely helped in the formation of its deepest history — men whose names stand up through the dim darkness of the past, great leaders and masters, have admitted that they learned much from the night. 3. The next thought belonging to the night is that then another world comes out, and as it were, begins its day. There is a rank of creatures which moves out into activity as soon as the sun has set. This thought should teach us something of tolerance; senses, dispositions, and characters are very manifold and various among ourselves. Each should try to live up to the light he has, and allow a brother to do the same. 4. Such extreme contrasts as are involved in light and darkness may tell us that we have as yet no true measure of what life is, and it must be left to some other conditions of existence for us to realize in anything like fulness the stores, the processes, the ways of the Kingdom of the Lord which are provided for such as keep His law. 5. Let us learn that, whether man wake or sleep, the universe is in a state of progress, "the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together." 6. Let us learn to use day rightly and righteously, to accept the grace and the forces of the Lord while it is called today, and then the night shall have no forbidding, no repulsive significance. The evening and the morning were the first day. — Parallel Verses KJV: And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day. |
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