VII.

THE POWER OF DARKNESS.

Who hath delivered us from the power of darkness and hath translated us into the kingdom of His dear Son.COLOSSIANS i. 13.

AMONG the phenomena of nature there is nothing more striking and suggestive than the contrast between light and darkness. The first creative act in the bringing of order out of chaos was the production of light. "Let there be light" is the first recorded word of Him by whose Word the heavens and the earth were made. And the successive stages of this sublime work are each marked by "an evening and a morning," light breaking in upon and driving away the darkness.*

This world is still the scene of the struggle between light and darkness. This is true of the natural world. But nature is but a mirror, reflecting to us the tokens and operations of spiritual

*It is an interesting thought that this order is never reversed. It is not a morning and an evening that make a day in Genesis i. Light triumphs over and displaces each period of darkness. Everything in creation and redemption moves forward in this order, until finally light remains the triumphant master. (Rev. xxi. 23–25.)

powers, which are the real permanent forces in creation. There is a realm of light and of darkness lying back of these things that appear. There is a struggle between the powers that rule in each, of which the processes of life and growth, of decay and death, in nature are the outward token. It is not merely by a figure of speech that the Bible speaks of this world as a realm of darkness. Its pages glow with the promise of a world to come, in which there shall be no night and no curse, and of which God Himself shall be the light.

And in contrast with that day of splendor, this present time is night, and the reigning influences in this sphere of things temporal "the power of darkness."

This phrase, "the power of darkness," implies that there is a personal agent who has originated and perpetuates these malign influences. He it is whom Jesus denominates "the prince of this world," and whose approach in the final struggle which was then upon Him, He speaks of as "the hour of the power of darkness."

From this power, the text asserts, God hath delivered us. And by way of contrast, the previous verse declares that He hath "made us meet for the inheritance of the saints in light."

We shall now inquire, first, in what respect we were under bondage to this power of darkness, and, secondly, what is the character of our deliverance.

We have but little idea of the extent and ramifications of the evil power here specified. The terms in which it is described in the Bible indicate that it is a power coeval and commensurate with this existing order of creation, and that we become subject to it in the fact of our birth into this world-system. This "power of darkness" is felt not only in the hidden chambers of the heart, and in the reigning spirit of society: it pervades this natural system. And as our embodied being is developed out of this system, and is its microcosm, we become directly subject to it. We feel this power in all the depressing influences that debilitate and deaden our faculties of body and mind, and finally quench them into the grave. Satan has the power of death and of all the evil influences that produce it.

And especially is his fatal power felt in those who have known the stirrings of a divine life and are yearning after God. They often go "mourning because of the oppression of the enemy." (Ps. xliii. 2.) To know God and Jesus Christ His Son is to have the light of life. The power of darkness is put forth to quench this light, to stifle these heaven-born aspirations, and to keep us floundering in the mire and mould of sin. It exerts its potent energy through all the senses and appetites of our nature. The flesh, as the home and medium of the forces that control this natural

life, is pliant to its sway. The "lusts of the flesh" testify to its impelling power. Even its necessary appetites are avenues through which the "rulers of the darkness of this world" assail us. The whole sphere of our embodied life is the arena on which we wrestle with "principalities and powers."

This overshadowing power of darkness is not felt by those who are in bondage to it. It is like the atmospheric pressure in this respect. We know that our bodies are constantly subjected to a pressure on all sides of fifteen pounds to the square inch from the surrounding atmosphere. And yet we are not conscious of it. So the power of darkness rests like a pall and weighs like prison armor upon its subjects; and yet they do not feel it. But let a man try to escape; let him reach out after God and after that life of holiness without which no man can see Him, and he will soon discover that he is loaded down. Christians are the ones who know the most of this power of the enemy. Jesus measured and coped with its tremendous force to the utmost limit. He came to deliver man's nature from bondage to this present evil world. (Gal. i. 4.) And in that nature, He must struggle against its reigning power unto victory. In the pressure of this conflict He sweat, as it were, great drops of blood falling to the ground. Nor was He, as we are taught in Heb. v. 7, insensible to the fear of death.

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Every soul, born of God, knows something of the Christian conflict, as a struggle against physical forces which have power to enfeeble and deprave this embodied life, and to break down and scatter into dust the casket in which it is enshrined. But all do not know that it is along these avenues that we are to expect Satan's assaults, and that, in this region, we suffer under "the oppression of the enemy." Many good people make light of the idea that the devil has power to assail us through the body. They account for all its disorders by the operation of what they call natural laws, and smile when the idea of Satanic temptation is suggested. But the very meaning of the title prince of this world" is, that somehow the power of Satan has come into the whole sphere of natural law. Scripture, indeed, recognizes no blind agents in nature. Its forces of nature are living powers. And among these forces is this tremendous power of darkness. All the ties which connect us with this system of nature become avenues for its malign influence. Bodily disorders are, therefore, messengers of Satan to buffet us, as was Paul's thorn in the flesh. Even such infirmities as that which bowed together, for eighteen years, the woman whom Jesus healed, and which might have been due to an ordinary rheumatism, He ascribed to Satan. (Luke xiii. 16.) All this, however, does not exclude the thought