John 9:4-5

DAY AND NIGHT

John 9:4-5. “ It behooveth us to work the works of Him that sent us while it is day; the night cometh when no one is able to work. While I am in the world, I am the Light of the world.” As God is original light, everything else in the spiritual universe is shining in different degrees by light reflected from Him, as in the material world, planets, moons, and all material entities, shine by light reflected by the sun. When Satan captured the world in the fall, God retreating away and veiling His face because of sin, he threw his black wing over all this world, bringing on a dismal night of storms, which has lasted six thousand years, with a solitary exception of Immanuel's presence the short period of His earthly life, which was really a sunburst from heaven, bringing down the daylight to the elect few, who so heeded redeeming grace as to walk in it. Paul says, “The night is far spent, and the day draweth nigh” (Romans 13:12), alluding to the coming of the Lord to arrest Satan, take him out of the world, and reign forever, thus superseding the long, dreary night, intervening between Eden and the millennium, by the glorious reign of incoming celestial day, descending from heaven when our Lord, in His glory, shall return to reign. You see here that He applies the word “day” to His presence, and “night” to his absence.

John 9:1-41. “ Speaking these words, He spat on the ground, and made mortar of the spittle, and besmeared the mortar upon his eyes, and said to him, Go, wash in the Pool of Siloam, which is interpreted ‘ Sent.' Then he departed, and washed, and came seeing.” Evidently the clay and the spittle, and the waters of Siloam, were not used medicinally, but merely as objects of attention, to concentrate his mind upon the stupendous miracle, proving auxiliaries to his perceptive faculties. As the body is material, any physical transaction is calculated to concentrate the mental faculties, and prove an auxiliary to an invisible, spiritual, miraculous operation; as this was not simply a matter of healing, but creation of the eyesight, which the man had never enjoyed. In both of my tours at Jerusalem, I visited this pool. It is in a deep gorge, down the southwestern slope of Mount Zion, in a half mile of its base, in the Valley of Jehoshaphat and that of Hinnom, being in the angle between the two, and about equidistant from each valley, and about one mile from their confluence. When I saw it, in June, 1895, it had a good supply of water in November, 1899, it was very scarce. There is a Mohammedan minaret at the pool, having been erected during the interval of my visits. “ Then the neighbors, and those formerly seeing him when he was a beggar, continued to say, Is not this the one sitting down and begging? Some said, It is he; others said, No , but he is like him; he said, I am he. Then they said to him, How were your eyes opened? He responded, A man called Jesus made mortar, and besmeared my eyes, and said to me, Go to Siloam, and wash. Therefore, having departed and washed, I looked up. They said to him, Where is He? He says, I know not.”