The fire was the centre, the cloud was wrapped around it. The former
was the symbol, making visible to a generation who had to be taught
through their senses, the inaccessible holiness and flashing brightness
and purity of the divine nature; the latter tempered and veiled the too
great brightness for feeble eyes.
The same double element is found in all God's manifestations of Himself
to men. In every form of revelation are present both the heart and core
of light, which no eye can look upon, and the merciful veil which,
because it veils, unveils; because it hides, reveals; makes visible
because it conceals; and shows God because it is 'the hiding of His
power.' So, through all the history of His dealings with men, there has
ever been what is called in Scripture language the 'face,' or the 'name
of God'; the aspect of the divine nature on which the eye can look; and
manifested through it, there has always been the depth and inaccessible
abyss of that Infinite Being. We have to be thankful that in the cloud
is the fire, and that round the fire is the cloud. For only so can our
eyes behold and our hands grasp the else invisible and remote central
Sun of the universe. God hides to make better known the glories of His
character. His revelation is the flashing of the uncreated and
intolerable light of His infinite Being through the encircling clouds
of human conceptions and words, or of deeds which each show forth, in
forms fitted to our apprehension, some fragment of His lustre. After
all revelation, He remains unrevealed. After ages of showing forth His
glory, He is still 'the King invisible, whom no man hath seen at any
time nor can see.' The revelation which He makes of Himself is 'truth
and is no lie.' The recognition of the presence in it of both the fire
and the cloud does not cast any doubt on the reality of our imperfect
knowledge, or of the authentic participation in the nature of the
central light, of the sparkles of it which reach us. We know with a
real knowledge what we know of Him. What He shows us is Himself, though
not His whole self.
This double aspect of all possible revelation of God, which was
symbolised in comparatively gross external form in the pillar that led
Israel on its march, and lay stretched out and quiescent, a guarding
covering above the Tabernacle when the weary march was still, recurs
all through the history of Old Testament revelation by type and
prophecy and ceremony, in which the encompassing cloud was
comparatively dense, and the light which pierced it relatively faint.
It reappears in both elements in Christ, but combined in new
proportions, so as that 'the veil, that is to say, His flesh,' is
thinned to transparency and all aglow with the indwelling lustre of
manifest Deity. So a light, set in some fair alabaster vase, shines
through its translucent walls, bringing out every delicate tint and
meandering vein of colour, while itself diffused and softened by the
enwrapping medium which it beautifies by passing through its purity.
Both are made visible and attractive to dull eyes by the conjunction.
'He that hath seen Christ hath seen the Father,' and he that hath seen
the Father in Christ hath seen the man Christ, as none see Him who are
blind to the incarnate deity which illuminates the manhood in which it
dwells.
But we have to note also the varying appearance of the pillar according
to need. There was a double change in the pillar according to the hour,
and according as the congregation was on the march or encamped. By day
it was a cloud, by night it glowed in the darkness. On the march it
moved before them, an upright pillar, as gathered together for
energetic movement; when the camp rested it 'returned to the many
thousands of Israel' and lay quietly stretched above the Tabernacle
like one of the long-drawn, motionless clouds above the setting summer
sun, glowing through all its substance with unflashing radiance
reflected from unseen light, and 'on all the glory' (shrined in the
Holy Place beneath) was 'a defence.'
Both these changes of aspect symbolise for us the reality of the
Protean capacity of change according to our ever-varying needs, which
for our blessing we may find in that ever-changing, unchanging, divine
Presence which will be our companion, if we will.
It was not only by a natural process that, as daylight declined, what
had seemed but a column of smoke in the fervid desert sunlight,
brightened into a column of fire, blazing amid the clear stars. But we
may well believe in an actual admeasurement of the degree of light,
correspondent to the darkness and to the need for certitude and
cheering sense of God's protection, which the defenceless camp would
feel as they lay down to rest.
When the deceitful brightness of earth glistens and dazzles around us,
our vision of Him may be 'a cloudy screen to temper the deceitful ray';
and when 'there stoops on our path, in storm and shade, the frequent
night,' as earth grows darker, and life becomes greyer and more sombre,
and verges to its eventide, the pillar blazes brighter before the
weeping eye, and draws nearer to the lonely heart. We have a God who
manifests Himself in the pillar of cloud by day, and in flaming fire by
night.