“Moreover thou leddest them in the day by a cloudy pillar; and in the night by a pillar of fire, to give them light in the way wherein they should go.” (Nehemiah 9:12). When we walk in the light of day, the Lord stands before us as a pillar of Cloud. No matter where we are in our life, we can see the cloud and do all that we can to make our way towards it. Just like the cloud, the Lord and His ways are higher than our ways. He is an ideal towards which we can strive, but it will require patience and continual effort and a reliance on His grace if we are ever to reach that lofty goal. But as long as we keep pushing ourselves, we will start to draw closer to that cloud. In the darkness of night, the Lord is instead a pillar of fire. During the day we have enough light to make our own choices and chart our own course to draw nearer to the Pillar of Cloud. But at night, we cannot see and so the Lord is not some far off ideal but rather has descended to our own level and is lighting the way before us. When we are in the midst of the refiner's fire, the Lord is our Pillar of Fire to support us as we strive to endure the heat of the flames. We need both Pillars. We need lofty ideals to strive for as we are anxiously engaged and doing many things of our own free will as we work out our salvation through much trial and error. And we also need a strong foundation to bear us up when the devil and all his hail and his mighty wind try to drag us down into the gulf of misery and endless woe. The Lord will support us as we exercise our agency and when we do not have the strength to keep moving forward under our own power. He is both as far away as the clouds and as close as the flame in the lamp that we hold in our hands. I hope that day or night, in freedom or captivity, we feel the Lord supporting us with pillars of cloud and fire.
