February 2

And this I pray, that your love may abound yet more and more in knowledge and in all judgment; - Philippians 1:9.

AFTER all we know of Christ and divine things, how slight is our acquaintance with the one or the other! There is a hope laid up for the Christian in heaven, but what know we of it as yet? Believers partake of a joy, but that joy is “unspeakable and full of glory.” The Saviour, therefore, addressing Nathanael, says, “Thou shalt see greater things than these.” The apostle prays for the Ephesians, that they might be “able to comprehend, with all saints, what is the breadth, and length, and depth, and height, and to know the love of Christ which passeth knowledge, that they might be filled with all the fulness of God.” He allows that this love is incomprehensible, yet he prays that they may be able to comprehend it; he allows that it passeth knowledge, and yet desires that they may know it; that is, that they may have more enlarged and influential views of it.

There is not only a real but a wonderful difference as to knowledge between believers and others, and between their present and their future state,-as much difference as between night and day. But in God’s light they see light; that is, they see things divinely; or, as Archbishop Usher expresses it, “As the sun can only be seen by its own shining, so God can only be known by his own revelation.” The apostle speaks of God’s revealing his Son in him, as well as to him; and when the eyes of our understanding are enlightened by the Spirit of wisdom and revelation, in the knowledge of Christ, there are no new revelations made to the mind; that is, no new revelations that are new in themselves: they are indeed new to us. They were, however, all in the Scriptures before we saw any of these things, but the Saviour promised to his disciples that the Spirit of truth should guide them into all truth; not only into the belief of it, but into the enjoyment of it, into the experience of it, and into the power of it.

Christians not only see the reality of the things revealed, but their infinite excellency. They are supremely enamoured with them. They feel their infinite value. They live under their influence. And thus they evince that they are “neither barren nor unfruitful in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ.”