Light, Air, and Water—Emblems of Christ – Charles Spurgeon

YOU will have observed that all the good things which God has made are diffusive. There is light; you cannot confine light within narrow limits. Suppose we were to grow so bigoted and conceited as to conceive that we had all the light in the world inside the Tabernacle. We might have iron shutters made to keep the light in, yet it is very probable that the light would not agree with our bigotry, and would not come in at all, but leave us in the dark for wanting to confine it. With splendid mirrors, Turkey carpets, jewelry, fine pictures, rare statuary, you may court the light to come into palatial halls, it comes, it is true, but as it enters it whispers, “And I passed through the iron grating of a prison, just now. I shone upon the poor cottager beneath the rude thatched roof, I streamed through the window out of which half the glass was gone, and gleamed as cheerily and willingly upon the rags of poverty as in these marble halls.” You cannot clip the wings of the morning, or monopolize the golden rays of the sun. What a space the light has traversed, doing good. Millions of miles it has come streaming from the sun, and yet further from yonder fixed star. O light! why could you not be contented with your own sphere, why journey so far from home? Missionary rays come to us from so vast a distance that they must have been hundreds of years in reaching us, and yet their mission is not over, for they flash on to yet remoter worlds. So with the air; as far as the world is concerned, the air will throw itself down the shaft of the deepest coal pit, climb the loftiest Alp, and although men madly strive to shut it out, it will thrust itself into the fever lair and cool the brow of cholera. So with water. Here it comes dropping from every inch of the cloudy sky, flooding the streets, flushing the foul sewers, and soaking into the dry soil. Everywhere it will come, for water claims to have its influence everywhere felt. Fire, too, who can bind its giant hands? The king cannot claim it as a royal perquisite. Among those few sticks which the widow woman with the red cloak has been gathering in the wood, it burns as readily as in Her Majesty’s palace. It is the nature of Jesus to diffuse himself; it is his life to do good.