West Port Experiment

In a couple of passages Paul seems to have colored the word “day” forming part of the phrase with the (not-purely chronological), but likewise physical-pictorial association of the element of “light.” “Light” belongs to the day as its characteristic, the opposite of the darkness that pertains to the night. Hence “the day of the Lord” can be visualized as a day of deliverance, joy and blessedness. There is perhaps no figure more pregnant in its religious associations than the figure of “light.” In the sphere of the emotions (no less than in that of the intellect for knowledge) it is made to render service as a physical analogon for spiritual rejoicing. The two main passages inviting to this, as at least a partial interpretation interwoven with the preceding usage, are Rom. 13:11–14 and 1 Thess. 5:1–8. According to the former the world-night is a time of wickedness, characterized, as the night-time in the pagan world usually is, by such things as revelling, drunkenness, chambering, wantonness, strife, jealousy, because the publicity inseparated from daylight holds these and other things under restraint, vs. 13. Moreover, for the wicked as well as the good, the night is the period of sleep, vs. 11. Of this world-night the Apostle further affirms the nearness of the end: it is far spent; the emergency, therefore, demands watchfulness (“waking out of sleep”) and abstinence from all forms of pagan immorality, through the consciousness of the imminence of the crisis: it is high time; salvation, eschatological salvation, is relatively at hand. Believers must put on the “armor of light,” vs. 12. Besides the usual warning attached to the thought of the approaching moment of the judgment, there is here an allusion to the ushering in of the future state as a state of light, and salvation, a day in the literal (not merely chronological) sense; the day has become a qualitative conception, by reason of its association with light; the word has received ethico-religious import bono sensu, it is a day and not a night. And, through its contrast with “the night which is far spent,” it has also ceased to be the mere marking of a point in the eschatological process; this day so quickly to ensue is quantitatively stretched out to a period of extended duration. As the night had a course of which a “being far spent” could be predicated, so the day has its extension and means more, to speak in terms of the same figure, than the break of day, or the morning.

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