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| Of the Two Different and Dissimilar Communities of Angels, Which are Not Inappropriately Signified by the Names Light and Darkness.
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Chapter 33.—Of the Two Different
and Dissimilar Communities of Angels, Which are Not Inappropriately
Signified by the Names Light and Darkness.
That certain angels sinned, and
were thrust down to the lowest parts of this world, where they are,
as it were, incarcerated till their final damnation in the day of
judgment, the Apostle Peter very plainly declares, when he says
that “God spared not the angels that sinned, but cast them down
to hell, and delivered them into chains of darkness to be reserved
into judgment.”515
Who, then,
can doubt that God, either in foreknowledge or in act, separated
between these and the rest? And who will dispute that the rest
are justly called “light?” For even we who are yet living by
faith, hoping only and not yet enjoying equality with them, are
already called “light” by the apostle: “For ye were
sometimes darkness, but now are ye light in the Lord.”516
But as for
these apostate angels, all who understand or believe them to be
worse than unbelieving men are well aware that they are called
“darkness.” Wherefore, though light and darkness are to be
taken in their literal signification in these passages of Genesis
in which it is said, “God said, Let there be light, and there was
light,” and “God divided the light from the darkness,” yet,
for our part, we understand these two societies of angels,—the
one enjoying God, the other swelling with pride; the one to whom it
is said, “Praise ye Him, all His angels,”517
the other whose prince says, “All
these things will I give Thee if Thou wilt fall down and worship
me;”518
the one
blazing with the holy love of God, the other reeking with the
unclean lust of self-advancement. And since, as it is written,
“God resisteth the proud, but giveth grace unto the humble,”519
we may say,
the one dwelling in the heaven of heavens, the other cast thence,
and raging through the lower regions of the air; the one tranquil
in the brightness of piety, the other tempest-tossed with
beclouding desires; the one, at God’s pleasure, tenderly
succoring, justly avenging,—the other, set on by its own pride,
boiling with the lust of subduing and hurting; the one the minister
of God’s goodness to the utmost of their good pleasure, the other
held in by God’s power from doing the harm it would; the former
laughing at the latter when it does good unwillingly by its
persecutions, the latter envying the former when it gathers in its
pilgrims. These two angelic communities, then, dissimilar and
contrary to one another, the one both by nature good and by will
upright, the other also good by nature but by will depraved, as
they are exhibited in other and more explicit passages of holy
writ, so I think they are spoken of in this book of Genesis under
the names of light and darkness; and even if the author perhaps had
a different meaning, yet our discussion of the obscure language has
not been wasted time; for, though we have been unable to discover
his meaning, yet we have adhered to the rule of faith, which is
sufficiently ascertained by the faithful from other passages of
equal authority. For, though it is the material works of God
which are here spoken of, they have certainly a resemblance to the
spiritual, so that Paul can say, “Ye are all the children of
light, and the children of the day: we are not of the night, nor
of darkness.”520
If, on the
other hand, the author of Genesis saw in the words what we see,
then our discussion reaches this more satisfactory conclusion, that
the man of God, so eminently and divinely wise, or rather, that the
Spirit of God who by him recorded God’s works which were finished
on the sixth day, may be supposed not to have omitted all mention
of the angels whether he included them in the words “in the
beginning,” because He made them first, or, which seems most
likely, because He made them in the only-begotten Word. And,
under these names heaven and earth, the whole creation is
signified, either as divided into spiritual and material, which
seems the more likely, or into the two great parts of the world in
which all created things are contained, so that, first of all, the
creation is presented in sum, and
then its parts are enumerated
according to the mystic number of the days.E.C.F. INDEX & SEARCH
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