To be near unto God - pagina 73

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people of Western lands should be more familiar with the tender and passionate language of the poetry of Scripture. The music of the Psalter is uplifting: For the Lord God is a sun and a shield. The Lord will give grace and glory. No good thing will He withhold from them that walk uprightly (Ps. §4:11). It raises grateful echoes in the heart. But, alas, they are not original with us. Among rich and poor we speak of a sunshine in the house. But who volunteers to confess from long experience The Lord has been a Sun unto me all days, and will be till I die. The figure is still used, but mostly in a doctrinal way, and almost exclusively in the limited sense of "Sun of Righteousness." And righteousness has the emphasis at the expense of the rich imagery of the Sun. But this beautiful imagery of the Sun contains a world of thought. It is more than sheer comparison. For when we realize that God is the Sun of our life, the joy of it brings us nearer to him. It illumines all of life and liberates us from abstract thoughts of him. The sun is not to us what he was to the Psalmist in the East. The Western mind can but faintly surmise the sparkling radiancy of Eastern heavens. The firmament that overarches the lands :

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from which Abraham emigrated and those which God gave him for an inheritance glistens with a sheen of heavenly brightness which makes our heavens at noon seem wrapped in twilight. The midnight sky which the shepherd's saw bending over Bethlehem was prepared, as it were, for the coming of the angelic hosts. And in a country where stars enchant the eye by their dazzling splendor and the moon puts the mind, as it were, 69

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