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Proverbs 20:27:
27The spirit of man is the candle of the LORD....
To be near unto God is a luxury of soul, which by Grace can be our portion even in an unconscious state.
When a child of God, who has enjoyed the hidden walk, is put under an anesthetic in order to be operated upon, the fellowship between his heart and his God is not thereby broken. The same holds true of fainting, during which consciousness is lost. In high fever, when the heated blood over-stimulates the brain, and the patient becomes wild with delirium, the tie that binds him to God remains equally intact. Even of sleep, which deprives us for many hours of "our own knowledge of ourselves," no other idea should be entertained, and this quite apart from our consciousness by night in dreams.
Only, in each of these conditions in life the being near unto God has become inoperative as regards your conscious life. The consciousness of the fellowship with God has not gone out from you. Being gently touched, and having become awake, you feel it again and resume it. It was only inoperative in you. It is with this as it is with your capacity of sight. This too in your sleep is not gone, but is at rest. The electric light illustrates this to us so clearly. Turn the button or even slightly touch it with your finger, and everything is light, turn it once more and everything is dark. But equally quickly and immediately you have the light again. The electricity itself was still present; it only withdrew its radiancy.
And to this must be added the fact that from God's side, fellowship with the life of the soul of His child operates uninterruptedly; even when His child is under anesthesia, in a swoon or asleep, it maintains itself and continues its activity. To know this imparts that sense of rest wherewith one undergoes an anesthetic, and, no less, that peaceful feeling wherewith by night we sink away in sleep. "In my sleep let me wait for thee, O Lord, then shall my sleep be peaceful," as reads the Moravian hymn. And who can doubt but that in our very sleep the bracing and strength-renewing ministries whereby our Father Who is in heaven favors His children, are still more manifold and effective than by day. The third part of our life which binds us to our couch serves by no means the needs of the body alone. It has a higher import. Especially by night God builds His temple in our heart.
Yet this does not do away with the fact that to be near unto God obtains its highest significance for us only when our clear day-consciousness permeates the blessed fellowship with Him, when we become aware of it, when we feel and know that our soul is near to God, and that God is close to our heart. When, humanly speaking, there is an exchange of heartfelt response between our God and ourselves. When, speaking reverently, with the telephone of prayer we call up our God and far from on high the answer comes.
But impress it well upon yourself that this calling and this answering are not exhausted by the words that you stammer nor by the thoughts that thereby become active in you. A mother has tender, inward fellowship with the babe at her breast apart from any word and outside of any intellectual understanding. What operates in this communion and what maintains it is the life itself, the drawing of the blood, the fervency of the feeling. And though this fellowship, when the infant has become a youth, will express itself in words and ideas, yet the root of this communion, in later years, will be far deeper seated than on the lips that speak the word. What does not the look of the eye convey, the expression of the face, a tear, a smile, and how sweetly in and underneath all this operates the fellowship of the same blood, the tenderness of sheltering love.
And all this is not unconscious, but is part of consciousness. It is as the fragrant exhalation of a flower, the distillation of love which we breathe in. It is the perfume and spray of the heart which we drink in with full draughts. And what the scent of a rose or of a hyacinth is you know full well, you are fully conscious of it, though the ablest botanist can not analyze this scent, nor describe it in words.
To be near unto God with your consciousness goes far deeper, therefore, than your understanding or your stammering. It is a becoming aware, a perceiving, a feeling, which you should not attribute to your emotions. That would be false mysticism. But a perceiving and an expressing of yourself in a spiritual way in the immediacy of the linking of your inner sense to the life of your God.
To make this plain, Scripture makes a difference between our soul and our inner being.
It speaks on one side of our heart and of our soul, and on the other side of something that lies far back and deep underneath these two. Plastically this is expressed in several ways, mostly by placing our reins in contrast with our heart, and by contrasting the soul with the "innermost parts" (Proverbs 20:27). Translating this into our way of speech, the soul of man here means our consciousness, and the innermost parts, what we call, our hidden inner being.
And in this sense it is said that our consciousness is a candle of the Lord that searches our inner being. Our consciousness is a searchlight which God Himself causes to illuminate our whole inner being, in order that by the glow and the clearness of this searchlight we should know our own inner self.
Thus only are these words intelligible to us. Thus only do they unveil before us a deep, far-reaching thought, with respect to which we feel how it enters into us and addresses us.
Our consciousness is not our handiwork. Our becoming conscious is not our deed. But all consciousness in us is a working, quickened in us by God, and from moment to moment it is maintained in us by God.
It is to be compared with the sun.
The sun is the light in the world of nature, by which God enables us to see nature, to observe and to investigate it.
And just so is the consciousness a light ignited by God in our personal ego; or rather a light which God lets shine in the world of our inner being, in order that in this spiritual light we should examine Our spirit and appraise it.
This light of our consciousness is called a candle, because when we look into ourselves we begin to sink away into darkness, and in this darkness of our inner being God meets us with the candle of our consciousness.
Of course our consciousness is no candle which the Lord uses in order to search our inner being.
God has no need of the light of the sun by which to see His whole creation. In the deepest parts of the earth, where no ray of sunlight ever enters, before God it is light as the day. As David expresses it in Psalm 139: "Yea, the darkness darkens not for thee, but the night shineth as the day; the darkness and the light are both alike to thee."
What here applies to the world of nature applies equally to the world of our inner being. In neither region has God need of a candle whereby to give light. In the darkness of our inner world also, the darkness shineth as the clear day.
But we have need of this candle, and it is by grace that God lightens the darkness of our inner being with the light of this candle of our consciousness.
We ourselves make artificial light. We do this by our thinking. We do this by our reasoning. We do this by our imaginations. And this too can have its use. But this artificial light ofttimes shines falsely. It misleads. And it never enters deeper than the surface. Into what Solomon plastically describes as "the innermost parts" this artificial light of our inventive and imaginative thought never enters. And all too frequently it blinds our eye, so that we can not see the light of the candle of the Lord with the eye of our soul. Thereby the so-called civilized world of our time is for the most part blind to the light of God's candle within us.
The light of this candle of the Lord within us does not argue, does not analyze, but lays bare whatever there is in us. It places our own being before the eye of our soul, gives us self-knowledge and cuts off all self-deception.
And now it is the light of this candle of the Lord which makes us see clearly, in the deepest underground of our being, the fibers by which the undermost parts of our being have fellowship with God. Fellowship by reason of our creation after the Image of God. Fellowship through the blessed, glorious regeneration of our sin-corrupted nature. Fellowship through the Divine indwelling of the Holy Ghost. Fellowship through the glorious working within of ever-increasing grace. Fellowship above all through the tie that binds us to Christ, causing us to be a member of His Body.
The brightness of this light is always the same in degree, but the effect of it gradually increases in strength.
At first there is still so much wrong in our heart, the dust of sin, which covers so much in it and renders brightest light invisible to us. But gradually the unclean dust flies away before the breath of the Lord, and then our eye comes to see what lay hidden underneath this dust. And so it can not be otherwise but that the deeper the light can shine in, the more gloriously it becomes manifest to the eye of our own soul how with all the ties of our life we are bound to our God, and how our fellowship with Him embraces the whole of our life.
* * * * * * *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 Abraham Kuyper's "Preface" to that book.
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