Romans 13:12

Romans 13:12

The Day of the Lord.

It is more than eighteen hundred years since the Apostle uttered this exulting cry. We cannot repeat it today when once more we come to our Advent time without some sense of hopelessness. For what has come of it? we ask; is the night gone, is the day at hand? Century after century, with the indestructible aspiration of the heart, has this note of joy been taken up. and the aspiration has been disappointed and the joy unreached. The drama of mankind has been charged with so much action, apparently wasted, and so much suffering, apparently squandered, on the ground of this incessant hope, and yet the great end seems no nearer. On and on, stumbling in the night with bleeding feet and wearied brain, the great world has struggled forward, hoping for the dawn. "There is no radiance," it mutters, "on the mountains yet. I hope for ever, that is my doom; but the night is deep, and the day delays. Would God I could see the morning glow!"

I. St. Paul was wrong when he expected the final close in his own time; but he was right in this that a new day was near at hand. We are wrong when we think we are near to the last great hour of time; but we are right when our heart tells us that God is coming to bring light to our own souls, to awaken our nation out of wrong into right, to set on foot new thoughts which will renew the life of mankind, for that is His continuous and Divine work. The reason, then, denies the nearness of the time when God will close this era of the world, and denies it on account of the slowness of God's work. In reality God's work is never slow or fast; it always marches at a constant pace; but to our sixty or seventy years it seems of an infinite tardiness. We live and grasp our results so hurriedly, and we have so short a time in which to work, that we naturally find ourselves becoming impatient with God. To work quickly seems to us to work well. But we forget how, even in our little life, we lose the perfection of results by too great rapidity. We seclude no hours of wise quiet, and our thought is not matured. God never makes these mistakes, the mistakes of haste. He never forgets to let a man, a nation, the whole of mankind rest at times, that they may each assimilate the results of an era of activity.

II. But though that great day is far away, the heart asserts, and truly, that when there is deepest night over nations and the world and men, a day of the Lord is at hand; that a dawn is coming not the last day, not the final dawn, but the uprising of Christ in light, deliverance, knowledge, and love. The belief is born not only out of our natural hatred of evil and suffering and the desire to be freed, but out of actual experience. Again and again have these days of the Lord come, has the night vanished and the sunlight burst on the world, not only in religion, but in the regeneration of societies, in the revolutions of nations, in the rush of great and creative thoughts over the whole of the civilised world. Men sunk in misery, ignorance, and oppression cried to the watchers, and the prophets answered, "The night is far spent," we see the coming day. And never has their answer been left unfulfilled.

S. A. Brooke, The Spirit of the Christian Life, p. 262.

References: Romans 13:12 . H. J. Wilmot Buxton, The Life of Duty, vol. i., p. 1; Clergyman's Magazine, vol. v., p. 271; A. Jessopp, Norwich School Sermons, p. 219. Romans 13:12-14 . E. Blencowe, Plain Sermons to a Country Congregation, vol. ii., p. 1.Romans 13:14 . Homilist, 3rd series, vol. vii., p. 96; Archbishop Maclagan, Church of England Pulpit, vol. iv., p. 273; F. W. Farrar, Contemporary Pulpit, vol. vi., p. 286; H. Bushnell, Christ and His Salvation, p. 371.Romans 13:14 . J. B. Mozley, University Sermons, p. 46.