“The Candle that lighted the sun and the moon was blown out” by Samuel Rutherford

“Mount Calvary, since God laid the first stone of it, did never bear such a weight as when the Lord of Glory was hanging upon a tree there—

O! it was made a fair tree when such an Apple grew on it!

It was a green orchard! It was our summer, but death’s winter!

Darkness was in all Judea when our Lord suffered.

And why? Because the Candle that lighted the sun and the moon was blown out.

The Godhead was eclipsed; and the world’s eye was put out.

He took away the sun with Him, as it were, to another world, when He that was the world’s sun was put out.

When He went out of the earth, the sun would not stay behind Him.

Sun, what ails thee? ‘I have not will to shine when my Lord is going to another world.’

As if the sun had said to Jesus, ‘Lord, if Thou be going to another world, take me with You.'”

–Samuel Rutherford, Fourteen Communion Sermons, ed. Andrew A. Bonar, Second Edition (Glasgow: Charles Glass & Co., 1877), 286-287.