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Psalm 84:11:
11The Lord God is a sun and a shield.
Of a dear child, especially if it is a girl, father and mother often say: "Our little darling is the sunshine of our house and of our life."
But however grateful one may be who may own such a miniature sun to brighten the home, especially in seasons of trouble, infinitely higher is the praise in which the Psalmist indulged when he gloried in Jehovah as the Sun on his pathway of life, and sang in the ear of the saints of all time: "The sun of my life is my God."
To this tender, deeply passionate language of Scripture-poetry our Western heart should be more accustomed. The music of the Psalter is always uplifting and inspiring. "The Lord God is a sun and a shield" (Psalm 84:11). Whenever read or sung it finds an echo in our heart. But this does not come to us from ourselves. Everywhere, among rich and poor alike, a sunny child in the home is a ready topic of conversation, but when do you ever hear one tell from deep, personal experience: "My God has been a sun unto me all my life, and will be till I die."
The figure is still in use, but preferably in a doctrinal way, almost exclusively in the limited sense of "Sun of Righteousness," whereby righteousness is given the emphasis at the expense of the rich imagery of the sun.
And yet, this luxurious imagery of the sun contains such transcendent riches. It is not a mere comparison, for when you truly realize that God is the sun of your life, this blessed knowledge is a treasure, that brings you closer to God, casts a sheen upon all of life, and imparts a reality to your Christian knowledge which liberates you from barren abstractions.
Truly, the sun is not to us what it was to the Psalmist in the East.
The firmament there glows and glitters with sparkling radiancy, the splendor of which our Western eye does not surmise from afar.
The skies flooded both the land from which Abraham emigrated, and the land God gave to him and to his seed, with a sheen of heavenly brightness, compared with which our sky seems wrapped in twilight.
A sky such as the shepherds saw by night bending over Bethlehem, was, as it were, prepared and appointed for the arrival and reception of the angelic hosts, and where the stars enchanted the eye in such a way by their magic beauty, and the moon filled the mind with such ecstatic animation, what in such a country must the sun be, of which the Psalmist sang (19:6): "His going forth is from the end of the heaven, and his circuit unto the ends of it; and there is nothing hid from the heat thereof."
If then there ever was an idolatry that is intelligible, it is not the worship of images, nor of spirits, but that hushed worship, in that glorious region, with which the wandering Bedouin by night looked up to the stars, and by day looked up to the dazzling brightness of the sun; in his rapture at length imagining that that wondrous, majestic, all-pervading and all-governing sun, was not a mere heavenly body, but even God Himself.
This error the Psalmist in Israel has righted. That sun in the sky is not God, but God is my Sun, even the Sun of my life. The sun has been appointed of God Himself to bless us in nature, and also to provide a glorious, rich imagery of what God is to us in the emptiness of our life.
It is not original with us, to compare God with the sun; we have not chosen the sun as an image of God, but the sun is the image in nature of what God is to us in our life. He himself speaks to us in that sun and in His operations in the whole round of our existence. And when with all your analytical studies of the virtues of God, and with all your reasonings about His Providence, you have at length reached barren, distinctive definitions, and are past feeling and can no more get warm, it is as though suddenly the glow of the higher life communicates itself to your entire inner being, and you epitomize everything in this single phrase of delight: "God is my sun, he is the sun of my life.'"
This holy imagery is peculiarly effective in this particular, that it places before our eye so clearly and vividly the penetration of the hidden power of God in our inner existence.
The sun is heaven-high above you, and yet right by you, round about you; you feel and handle him; you escape him in the shade, and shut him out of your room by blinds; he is a power far off and equally close by; and of this power, this working of the sun, you know that it enters into the earth, and there underneath the ground, hidden from every human eye, it causes the seed to germinate and sprout.
And the same workings and the same contrast apply to God. In the heavens, far above you is His Throne, and yet the selfsame, exalted God with His Presence everywhere is even close by and round about you, and enters into your heart, fills its deepest places, works within you with hidden power, and if ever holy seed has germinated in you or ever a sacred flower has budded on the stem of your soul, it is God, your Sun, who with power worked this in you.
Imagine for a moment that the sun had gone out of your life, and a condition such as is found at the north pole would prevail in nature round about you. Everything that lives would die, every plant and every herb; every tint would pale, and all would be covered over with one immense shroud of snow and ice. And that this is not so, that everything lives and pulsates, and exhibits color and glow, that food springs from the ground and the flower-cup bends upward, and sweet loveliness breathes throughout the whole of nature, yea, the whole of life—is the result of the sun alone that pours out life and warmth, and by it, as by magic, brings life out of death and turns the barren wilderness into a fruitful land.
And such is the case with your soul and God.
Think for a moment of your bereft and desolate soul deprived of the gracious inward shining and working of your God. It would be for your heart as though life were departing from you, and all glow and warmth were leaving, and that icy cold would cause your soul to freeze. Not one flower more would unfold in the garden of your heart, no holier motion would anymore stir itself in your soul; all would wither and die, and the heart within you would cease to be a human heart.
Whether it is said: "With thee, O Lord, is the fountain of Life," or whether the Psalmist cries: "In thy light shall we see light," or whether the heart exultingly sings: "God is my Sun," one dominating thought is expressed: With God there is life, without God there is death in my soul. From Him, and from Him alone, I derive all life, power and animation.
That which makes the sun so rich toward the whole creation, enriches my heart, and my whole human existence. With Him I am aboundingly rich, blessed and supremely happy; without Him I am poor, empty and cold.
But there is more.
The sun not only cherishes life by his warmth, he also colors and exhibits it by his splendors of light. With the lengthening of shadows by night everything becomes pale grey, and vague and nebulous till dissolved in darkness, but sunrise brings friendly light, which makes you see proportions, measure distances, perceive forms and tints and colors, and nature catching these splendors speaks clearly to your heart.
And this is what God, your Sun, effects for you in your inner life. When He is hidden to your darkened eye, your life is nothing but somber greyness, a life without point of departure, direction or aim. Then all knowledge and insight fails, there is no courage to go forward, no inspiration to finish the course—a groping for the wall as one blind, a being shut up as in oneself, without cheerful, friendly association, without knowledge, without self-consciousness, without color or form, a life as among tombstones where weeds thrive, snakes lurk about and the shriek of the night-bird startles.
But when God breaks through the mists, and the sun rises again in your soul, then everything becomes different as by a holy magic wand. Light dispels your inner darkness. Peace in its kindly way rids your troubled mind of oppression, and seeing with heavenly clearness, by the light of God's countenance, the way before your feet, bravely you walk on while the Sun from on high cheers and sanctifies your heart.
The image of the sun is also significant in that the shining of God on the heart is no unbroken brightness.
As day is followed by night, and summer by winter, it has ever been the same in the life of God's saints.
Now a time of clear conscious fellowship with God, so that life from hour to hour was, as it were, a walking with God, and then again, a time of overwhelming activities which exhaust mind and body—difficulties that absorb the soul, cares that burden the heart. Then a change in the spiritual life as of day and night. And it is well with him who can say, that in every twenty-four hours his estrangement from God has lasted no longer than the hours of his sleep.
But apart from this rise and fall almost every day in the intimacy of our fellowship with God, there is a drawing back of the shining of this Sun, and then again a drawing near, whereby also in the life of the soul summer and winter alternate one with the other.
Blessed, uninterrupted, ever equally intimate fellowship with God is not of this earth; it only awaits us in the palaces of everlasting light. Here on earth there have always been and always will be changes and turns, whereby one year yields a far richer harvest than the other; difficulties through which the soul struggles in order to climb from a lower to a higher viewpoint, trials which make it pass through the depths of gloom and darkness, whereby for weeks and months the soul is covered, as it were, by a layer of ice.
The sun then is not gone, but thick clouds prevent his breaking through. And this keeps on until God's hour is come. And then gradually the clouds dissolve, until at length they entirely disappear. It becomes spring again in the soul. That spring is the prelude to a glorious summer. And in the end we thank God for that cold dearth of spiritual winter, which now makes our enjoyment of both spring and summer so much the richer.
There is still another trait of comparison that should not be ignored.
In nature the selfsame heat of the sun has this twofold effect upon the ground that, on one hand it warms and cherishes, which causes germination and fruition, and on the other, that it hardens the clod and scorches it, and also singes the leaf and withers the blossom.
This describes God's working on our conscience.
When we glory in God as the Sun of our life, it implies that the love and the grace of God are never abused with impunity.
Hardening of the heart is a thing to fear, and yet it came upon Israel and frequently comes upon us now. Hardening, because the heat that radiates from God upon us does not soften and inwardly warm us, but repulsed by resistance within us attacks and sears our outward religious life.
Here we would rather not mention that mortal hardening which leads to an eternal ruin. He who is in this state will not read our devotional meditations.
But there is also a temporary hardening which as long as it lasts dangerously retards the process of our spiritual life; and it is this temporary singeing by grace, this temporary hardening by God's love, this temporary scorching by the outshining of God's faithfulness, which is all too frequently observed.
Then it is either a sin from which we will not break away, a sacrifice we will not bring, a step we will not take, an exertion from which we shrink or a sin in the sensual, domestic, public or church life, which we try to unite and harmonize with the enjoyment of God's grace. And this is not possible, in the nature of God it is unthinkable, and when we go on in this, the sun keeps on shining, even fiercely sometimes, but the result is that there is no more striking of root, and the very heat of God's grace hardens us.
"Thou Lord art the Sun of my life!" Oh, it is glorious language wherewith to enter eternity; beware, lest at some time it will witness against you.
For the "fall and rising again" applies here also.
* * * * * * *This devotional classic offers 110 meditations on a single thought from Psalm 73: "As for me, it is good to be near to God." The author states, "The fellowship of being near unto God must become reality ... it must permeate and give color to our feeling, our perceptions, our sensations, our thinking, our imagining, our willing, our acting, our speaking. It must not stand as a foreign factor in our life, but it must be the passion that breathes throughout our whole existence."
The meditations reflect the blending of spiritual vigor with doctrinal loyalty so consistently expressed in the life of Abraham Kuyper. These are devotions with true substance, avoiding the extremes about which Kuyper adds a word of caution: "Stress in creedal confession, without drinking from the Living Fountain, runs dry in barren orthodoxy, just as truly as spiritual emotion, without clearness in confessional standards, makes one sink in the bog of sickly mysticism."
Abraham Kuyper (1837-1920) was a Dutch political leader and Calvinist theologian. Elected to parliament in 1874, he became Prime Minister in 1901 and served in that capacity until 1905. As a theologian, he revived a systematic, orthodox Calvinism. He founded the Free Reformed Church and the Free University of Amsterdam. His other works include Principles of Sacred Theology, Lectures on Calvinism, and The Work of the Holy Spirit
Further information about Abraham Kuyper's life can be seen in the translator's "Biographical Note"; further information about To Be Near Unto God can be found in Abraham Kuyper's "Preface" to that book.
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