Night and Day

In Hebrew thought, in the Old Testament of our Bibles, each day begins at sunset. This seems strange to us. Perhaps, though, it is no more odd than our usual arrangement in the West. We are fast asleep when day starts at midnight and only wake – if we are fortunate enough to be good sleepers – when a fair few hours of the day are already spent and gone. Even so, to have a day that begins as night falls must change one’s perspective on life.

The eminent 19th-century Baptist preacher Charles Haddon Spurgeon wrote a meditation on Genesis 1:5 (“And the evening and the morning were the first day”) that gave me much pause to ponder.

Spurgeon explains that the fact of darkness coming first in the Hebrew “day” makes a spiritual point for us. “Observe that the evening comes first. [In our spiritual natures] we are darkness first in order of time, and the gloom is often first in our mournful apprehension, driving us to cry out in deep humiliation, ‘God be merciful to me, a sinner.’ The place of the morning is second, it dawns when grace overcomes nature.”

Spurgeon also points out that the word we use to describe a 24-hour period is “day”. It includes both darkness and light, “and yet the two together are called by the name that is given to the light alone!” This too corresponds exactly to our spiritual experience. “In every believer there is darkness and light, and yet he is not to be named a sinner because there is sin in him, but he is to be named a saint because he possesses some degree of holiness.”

This should be an enormous comfort to those who wonder how God can regard them as children of His when there is so much sin and spiritual darkness still in them. Just as the day takes its name not from the darkness but from the daylight, so the word of God treats believers as if they were full of light, as indeed they will be before long. “You are called the child of light, though there is darkness in you still. You are named after what is the predominating quality in the sight of God, which will one day be the only principle remaining.”

How supremely encouraging this is! On the one hand, all our spiritual darkness as sinners is intolerable and disgusting to God, to be shunned and rejected. Yet by His mercy in Christ God matches us up with the “sacred, high, eternal noon” which is the condition of things when we are finally in His presence.

The sun shall be no more

your light by day,

nor for brightness shall the moon

give you light;

but the Lord will be your everlasting light,

and your God will be your glory.

Your sun shall no more go down,

nor your moon withdraw itself;

for the Lord will be your everlasting light,

and your days of mourning shall be ended.

Isaiah 60:19-20 ESV

Thank God for His patience in treating us this way. Let us resolve to honour Him by banishing the remaining darkness in

our lives as far as we can!