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The sermon treats Zechariah 14:7 as a broad principle of God’s gracious dealings: He gives light to His church and people when circumstances appear to be at evening. This light includes deliverance in temporal hardship, strength in spiritual warfare, encouragement for sinners seeking Christ, and hope in old age and death. Spurgeon strongly distinguishes the destiny of those united to Christ from the darkness awaiting the unconverted. The sermon is warmly reassuring toward believers but urgently evangelistic in calling hearers to choose Christ before life ends.
Theological center: God’s sovereign and unchanging grace preserves His people through trials, spiritual conflict, old age, and death, ultimately bringing them into eternal salvation through Christ.
Applications: Trust God in dark seasons · Come to Christ as a seeking sinner · Choose Christ before life’s evening · Consider grace’s consistent pattern
Primary texts: Zechariah 14:7 · Psalms 37:6 · Psalms 103:1
“It shall come to pass that at evening time it shall be light.” Zechariah 14:7 I SHALL not stay to notice the particular occasion upon which these words were uttered, or to discover the time to which they more especially refer. I shall rather take the sentence as a rule of the kingdom, as one of the great laws of God’s dispensation of grace, that “at evening time it shall be light.” Whenever philosophers wish to establish a general law, they think it necessary to collect a considerable number of individual instances. These being put together, they then infer from them a general rule. Happily, this need not be done with regard to God. We have no need, when we look abroad in providence, to collect a great number of incidents and then from them infer the truth. For since God is immutable, one act of His grace is enough to teach us the rule of His conduct. Now, I find in this one place it is recorded that on a certain occasion, during a certain adverse condition of a nation, God promised that “at evening time it should be light.” If I found that in any human writing, I should suppose that the thing might have occurred once, that a blessing was conferred in emergency on a certain occasion, but I could not from it deduce a rule. But when I find this written in the book of God, that on a certain occasion when it was evening time with His people, God was pleased to give them light, I feel myself more than justified in deducing from it the rule—that always to His people at evening time there shall be light. This, then, shall be the subject of my present discourse. There are different evening times that happen to the church and to God’s people, and as a rule we may rest quite certain that at evening time there shall be light. God very frequently acts in grace in such a manner that we can find a parallel in nature. For instance, God says, “As the rain cometh down and the snow from heaven, and returneth not thither, even so shall my word be, it shall not return unto me void, it shall accomplish that which I please, it shall prosper in the thing whereto I have sent it.” We find Him speaking concerning the coming of Christ, “He shall come down like rain upon the mown grass, as showers that water the earth.” We find Him likening the covenant of grace to the covenant which He made with Noah concerning the seasons and with man concerning the different revolutions of the year—“Seed-time and harvest, and cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night shall not cease.” We find that the works of creation are very frequently the mirror of the works of grace and that…