Loading...
At evening time it shall be light - At the close of this awful visitation, there shall be light. The light of the glorious Gospel shall go forth from Jerusalem; and next, from the Roman empire to every part of the earth.
And it shall be one day: it shall be known unto the Lord: not day, and not night; and at the eventide it shall be light - “One” special “day; one,” unlike all beside; known unto God, and to Him alone. For God alone knows the day of the consummation of all things, as He saith, “Of that day and that hour knoweth no one, neither the angels in Heaven, nor the Son, (so as to reveal it) but the Father only” Mark 13:32. Neither wholly “day,” because overclouded with darkness; nor wholly “night,” for the streaks of light burst through the darkness chequered of both; but in “eventide,” when all seems ready to sink into the thickest night, “there shall be light.” Divine light always breaks in, when all seems darkness; but then the chequered condition of our mortality comes to an end, then comes the morning, which has no evening; the light which has no setting; “perpetual light, brightness infinite;” when “the light of the moon shall be as the light of the sun, and the light of the sun shall be sevenfold” Isaiah 30:26; and “the glory of God doth lighten” Revelation 21:23 the eternal city, “and the Lamb is the light” thereof; and “in Thy light we shall see light” Psalm 36:9. “Christ shall be to us eternal light, a long perpetual day.”
Jacob had ever been a man of deep and ardent affection; his love for his sons was strong and tender, and his dying testimony to them was not the utterance of partiality or resentment. He had forgiven them all, and he loved them to the last. His paternal tenderness would have found expression only in words of encouragement and hope; but the power of God rested upon him, and under the influence of Inspiration he was constrained to declare the truth, however painful. PP 237.1
The last blessings pronounced, Jacob repeated the charge concerning his burial place: “I am to be gathered unto my people: bury me with my fathers ... in the cave that is in the field of Machpelah.” “There they buried Abraham and Sarah his wife; there they buried Isaac and Rebekah his wife; and there I buried Leah.” Thus the last act of his life was to manifest his faith in God's promise. PP 237.2
Jacob's last years brought an evening of tranquillity and repose after a troubled and weary day. Clouds had gathered dark above his path, yet his sun set clear, and the radiance of heaven illumined his parting hours. Says the Scripture, “At evening time it shall be light.” Zechariah 14:7. “Mark the perfect man, and behold the upright: for the end of that man is peace.” Psalm 37:37. PP 237.3
Jacob had sinned, and had deeply suffered. Many years of toil, care, and sorrow had been his since the day when his great sin caused him to flee from his father's tents. A homeless fugitive, separated from his mother, whom he never saw again; laboring seven years for her whom he loved, only to be basely cheated; toiling twenty years in the service of a covetous and grasping kinsman; seeing his wealth increasing, and sons rising around him, but finding little joy in the contentious and divided household; distressed by his daughter's shame, by her brothers’ revenge, by the death of Rachel, by the unnatural crime of Reuben, by Judah's sin, by the cruel deception and malice practiced toward Joseph—how long and dark is the catalogue of evils spread out to view! Again and again he had reaped the fruit of that first wrong deed. Over and over he saw repeated among his sons the sins of which he himself had been guilty. But bitter as had been the discipline, it had accomplished its work. The chastening, though grievous, had yielded “the peaceable fruit of righteousness.” Hebrews 12:11. PP 237.4
Read in context »