Luke 11:33-36 No man, when he has lighted a candle, puts it in a secret place, neither under a bushel, but on a candlestick… I. THE EVIL WE ARE WARNED AGAINST. Turning the light within us into darkness. To help our understanding of this, let us consider with ourselves those intolerable evils which bodily blindness, deafness, stupefaction, and an utter deprivation of all sense, must unavoidably subject the outward man to. For what is one in such a condition able to do? And what it he not liable to suffer? And yet doing and suffering, upon the matter, comprehend all that concerns a man in this world. If such a one's enemy seeks his life (as he may be sure that some or other will, and possibly such a one as he takes for his truest friend) in this forlorn ease, he can neither see, nor hear, nor perceive his approach, till he finds himself actually in his murdering hands. He can neither encounter nor escape him, neither in his own defence give nor ward off a blow; for whatsoever blinds a man, ipso facto disarms him; so that being thus bereft both of his sight and of all his senses besides, what such a one can be fit for, unless it be to set up for prophecy, or believe transubstantiation, I cannot imagine. These; I say, are some of those fatal mischiefs which corporal blindness and insensibility expose the body to; and are not those of a spiritual blindness inexpressibly greater? II. THE DANGER OF FALLING INTO THIS EVIL. It is as in a common plague, in which the infection is as bard to be escaped as the distemper to be cured; for that which brings this darkness upon the soul is sin. And as the state of nature now is, the soul is not so close united to the body as sin is to the soul; indeed, so close is the union between them, that one would even think the soul itself (as much a spirit as it is) were the matter, and sin the form, in our present constitution. In a word, there is a set combination of all without a man and all within him, of all above ground and all under it (if hell be so), first to put out his eyes, and then to draw or drive him headlong into perdition. III. How AND BY WHAT COURSES THIS DIVINE LIGHT COMES TO BURN FAINT AND DIM. 1. Whatever defiles the conscience, in the same degree also darkens it. 2. Whatever puts a bias upon the judging faculty of conscience, weakens, and, by consequence, darkens the light of it. 3. We now pass from these general observations to particulars. (1) Every single gross act of sin is much the same thing to the conscience, that a great blow or fall is to the head: it stuns and bereaves it of its senses for a time. (2) The frequent and repeated practice of sin has also a mighty power in it to obscure and darken the natural light of conscience, nothing being more certainly true, nor more universally acknowledged, than that custom of sinning takes away the sense of sin; and, we may add, the sight of it too. For though the darkness consequent upon any one gross act of sin be, as we have shown, very great, yet that which is caused by custom of sinning is much greater and more hardly curable. (3) Every corrupt passion or affection of the mind will certainly pervert the judging, and obscure and darken the discerning power of conscience. (R. South, D. D.) Parallel Verses KJV: No man, when he hath lighted a candle, putteth it in a secret place, neither under a bushel, but on a candlestick, that they which come in may see the light. |
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