He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in their hearts, yet so that man can’t find out the work that God has done from the beginning even to the end.
Parallel Translations
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He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in their hearts, yet so that man can’t find out the work that God has done from the beginning even to the end.
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He hath made every thing beautiful in his time: also he hath set the world in their heart, so that no man can find out the work that God maketh from the beginning to the end.
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He hath made every thing beautiful in its time; also He hath set the world in their heart, yet so that man cannot find out the work that God hath done from the beginning even to the end.
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Cross-references (14)
Passages linked to Ecclesiastes 3:11 in the Treasury of Scripture Knowledge, ordered by reader-vote popularity; verse text shown in World English Bible.
- Romans 1:19-20 because that which is known of God is revealed in them, for God revealed it to them. For the invisible things of him since the creation of the world are clearly seen, being perceived through the things that are made, even his everlasting power and divinity, that they may be without excuse.
- Romans 11:33 Oh the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and the knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments, and his ways past tracing out!
- Job 11:7 “Can you fathom the mystery of God? Or can you probe the limits of the Almighty?
- Ecclesiastes 8:17 then I saw all the work of God, that man can’t find out the work that is done under the sun, because however much a man labors to seek it out, yet he won’t find it. Yes even though a wise man thinks he can comprehend it, he won’t be able to find it.
- Job 5:9 who does great things that can’t be fathomed, marvelous things without number;
- Mark 7:37 They were astonished beyond measure, saying, “He has done all things well. He makes even the deaf hear, and the mute speak!”
- Psalms 104:24 Yahweh, how many are your works! In wisdom, you have made them all. The earth is full of your riches.
- Genesis 1:31 God saw everything that he had made, and, behold, it was very good. There was evening and there was morning, a sixth day.
- Ecclesiastes 7:29 Behold, I have only found this: that God made man upright; but they search for many schemes.”
- Deuteronomy 32:4 The Rock: his work is perfect, for all his ways are just. A God of faithfulness who does no wrong, just and right is he.
- Matthew 13:22 What was sown among the thorns, this is he who hears the word, but the cares of this age and the deceitfulness of riches choke the word, and he becomes unfruitful.
- Romans 1:28 Even as they refused to have God in their knowledge, God gave them up to a reprobate mind, to do those things which are not fitting;
- Job 37:23 We can’t reach the Almighty. He is exalted in power. In justice and great righteousness, he will not oppress.
- Matthew 11:27 All things have been delivered to me by my Father. No one knows the Son, except the Father; neither does anyone know the Father, except the Son, and he to whom the Son desires to reveal him.
Cross-references from openbible.info (CC BY 4.0)
Explain this verse (19 sources)
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Geneva Bible translators 1599 · Public Domain God hath given man a desire, and affection to…
God hath given man a desire, and affection to seek out the things of this world, and to labor therein.
Geneva Bible (1599) marginal notes — public domain.
John Trapp 1656 · Public Domain Ecc 3:11 He hath made every [thing] beautiful in…
Ecc 3:11 He hath made every [thing] beautiful in his time: also he hath set the world in their heart, so that no man can find out the work that God maketh from the beginning to the end.
Ver. 11. He hath made everything beautiful, {a} &c.] Plato was wont to say that God did always γεωμετρειν - work by geometry. Another sage said, Pondere, mensura, numero, Deus omnia fecit, God hath done all in number, weight, and measure; made and set all things in comely and curious order and equipage; he hath also prefined beforehand a convenient and beautiful season for everything; ordering the disorders of the world to his own glory and his Church’s good.
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Also he hath set the world in their heart,] i.e., He hath given to men the creature to contemplate, together with an earnest desire to search into nature’s secrets. The Vulgate renders this text thus: Et mundum tradidit disputationi eorum, And he hath delivered the world to their disputations. But so foolishly {b} and impiously have men disputed of God, of his providence, of his judgments, of the chief happiness, &c., that they have reasoned, or rather wrangled away the truth, being able to find out neither the beginning nor end of the causes or uses of God’s works. {Rom 1:21-22} Veritatem philosophia quaerit, theologia invenit, religio possidet, said Picus Mirandula; Philosophy inquires after truth, divinity finds it out, and religion only improves it.
{a} Kοσμος, ab ornatu; Mundus, a mundicie.
{b} εμωρανθησαν. {Rom 1:22}
John Trapp, A Commentary or Exposition upon All the Books of the Old and New Testament (1647–1656) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
Matthew Poole 1685 · Public Domain He hath made every thing beautiful in his time:…
He hath made every thing beautiful in his time: this seems to be added as an apology for God’s providence, notwithstanding all the contrary events and confusions which are in the world.
He (i.e. God, expressed in the last clause of the verse)
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hath made (or doth make or do, by his providence in the government of the world)
every thing (which he doth either immediately, or by the ministry of men or other creatures, for God worketh in and with all his creatures in all their actions, as is agreed by divines and philosophers)
beautiful (decently and conveniently, so that, all things considered, it could not have been done better) in his time; in the time which he had appointed, or which he saw most proper and fit for it; or, in its time or season, when it was most fit to be done. Many events seem to men’s shallow and perverse judgments, at least for a time, to be very irregular and unbecoming, as when wicked men prosper in their impious and unrighteous enterprises, and good men are sorely oppressed and afflicted, and that for righteousness’ sake; but when men shall come thoroughly to understand God’s works, and the whole frame and contexture of them, and to see the end of them, they will then say that all things were done most wisely and most seasonably; whereof we have eminent instances in Joseph, and David, and Mordecai, and the Jews of his time.
He hath set the world in their heart, i.e. in the hearts of men, as the following words show, where man is expressed. The sense is either,
1. Although all God’s works are beautiful, yet men do not discern the beauty of them, because the world is in their hearts; their minds are so busied and distracted with the thoughts, and cares, and love, and business of this world, that they have neither leisure nor heart seriously to study God’s works. But this inordinate love of the present world comes from man’s own corruption, and not from God; and therefore it seems harsh to impute it to God, and improbable that Solomon would have phrased it thus, that God hath set or put the world i.e. worldly lusts, in men’s hearts. Or,
2. As God’s works are beautiful in themselves, so men are capable of discerning the beauty of them, because God hath set the world in men’s hearts; he hath exposed the world, and all his dispensations in the world, unto the view of men’s minds; both because he hath wrought his works so evidently and publicly, that men might easily observe them; and because he hath given men reason whereby they may discover the wisdom and beauty of all God’s works, if they diligently apply themselves to the study of them.
So that no man can find out the work that God maketh from the beginning to the end: so this is another reason why men do not discern the beauty of God’s works, because they do not see the whole frame or course of them from the beginning to the end, but only some small parcels or fragments of them; the eminent works of God being oft begun in one age, and finished in another. Or, yet so that, &c. or, except that (as this phrase properly signifies, and is elsewhere used) no man can find out, &c. Thus it is an exception to the next foregoing clause, and the sense is, It is true God hath put the world into men’s hearts, or made them capable of observing all events and dispensations of God in the world; but this is to be understood with a limitation, because there are some more mysterious works of God which no man can fully understand, because he cannot search them out through or from the beginning to the end.
Matthew Poole's English Annotations on the Holy Bible (1683–1685) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword/MySword module.
Matthew Henry 1710 · Public Domain We have seen what changes there are in the…
We have seen what changes there are in the world, and must not expect to find the world more sure to us than it has been to others. Now here Solomon shows the hand of God in all those changes; it is he that has made every creature to be that to us which it is, and therefore we must have our eye always upon him.
I. We must make the best of that which is, and must believe it best for the present, and accommodate ourselves to it: He has made every thing beautiful in his time (Ecc 3:11), and therefore, while its time lasts, we must be reconciled to it: nay, we must please ourselves with the beauty of it. Note, 1. Every thing is as God has made it; it is really as he appointed it to be, not as it appears to us. 2. That which to us seems most unpleasant is yet, in its proper time, altogether becoming. Cold is as becoming in winter as heat in summer; and the night, in its turn, is a black beauty, as the day, in its turn, is a bright one. 3. There is a wonderful harmony in the divine Providence and all its disposals, so that the events of it, when they come to be considered in their relations and tendencies, together with the seasons of them, will appear very beautiful, to the glory of God and the comfort of those that trust in him. Though we see not the complete beauty of Providence, yet we shall see it, and a glorious sight it will be, when the mystery of God shall be finished. Then every thing shall appear to have been done in the most proper time and it will be the wonder of eternity, Deu 32:4. Eze 1:18.
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II. We must wait with patience for the full discovery of that which to us seems intricate and perplexed, acknowledging that we cannot find out the work that God makes from the beginning to the end, and therefore must judge nothing before the time. We are to believe that God has made all beautiful. Every thing is done well, as in creation, so in providence, and we shall see it when the end comes, but till then we are incompetent judges of it. While the picture is in drawing, and the house in building, we see not the beauty of either; but when the artist has put his last hand to them, and given them their finishing strokes, then all appears very good. We see but the middle of God's works, not from the beginning of them (then we should see how admirably the plan was laid in the divine counsels), nor to the end of them, which crowns the action (then we should see the product to be glorious), but we must wait till the veil be rent, and not arraign God's proceedings nor pretend to pass judgment on them. Secret things belong not to us. Those words, He has set the world in their hearts, are differently understood. 1. Some make them to be a reason why we may know more of God's works than we do; so Mr. Pemble: "God has not left himself without witness of his righteous, equal, and beautiful ordering of things, but has set it forth, to be observed in the book of the world, and this he has set in men's hearts, given man a large desire, and a power, in good measure, to comprehend and understand the history of nature, with the course of human affairs, so that, if men did but give themselves to the exact observation of things, they might in most of them perceive an admirable order and contrivance." 2. Others make them to be a reason why we do not know so much of God's works as we might; so bishop Reynolds: "We have the world so much in our hearts, are so taken up with thoughts and cares of worldly things, and are so exercised in our travail concerning them, that we have neither time nor spirit to eye God's hand in them." The world has not only gained possession of the heart, but has formed prejudices there against the beauty of God's works.
III. We must be pleased with our lot in this world, and cheerfully acquiesce in the will of God concerning us, and accommodate ourselves to it. There is no certain, lasting, good in these things; what good there is in them we are here told, Ecc 3:12, Ecc 3:13. We must make a good use of them, 1. For the benefit of others. All the good there is in them is to do good with them, to our families, to our neighbours, to the poor, to the public, to its civil and religious interests. What have we our beings, capacities, and estates for, but to be some way serviceable to our generation? We mistake if we think we were born for ourselves. No; it is our business to do good; it is in doing good that there is the truest pleasure, and what is so laid out is best laid up and will turn to the best account. Observe, It is to do good in this life, which is short and uncertain; we have but a little time to be doing good in, and therefore had need to redeem time. It is in this life, where we are in a state of trial and probation for another life. Every man's life is his opportunity of doing that which will make for him in eternity. 2. For our own comfort. Let us make ourselves easy, rejoice, and enjoy the good of our labour, as it is the gift of God, and so enjoy God in it, and taste his love, return him thanks, and make him the centre of our joy, eat and drink to his glory, and serve him with joyfulness of heart, in the abundance of all things. If all things in this world be so uncertain, it is a foolish thing for men sordidly to spare for the present, that they may hoard up all for hereafter; it is better to live cheerfully and usefully upon what we have, and let tomorrow take thought for the things of itself. Grace and wisdom to do this is the gift of God, and it is a good gift, which crowns the gifts of his providential bounty.
IV. We must be entirely satisfied in all the disposals of the divine Providence, both as to personal and public concerns, and bring our minds to them, because God, in all, performs the thing that is appointed for us, acts according to the counsel of his will; and we are here told, 1. That that counsel cannot be altered, and therefore it is our wisdom to make a virtue of necessity, by submitting to it. It must be as God wills: I know (and every one knows it that knows any thing of God) that whatsoever God does it shall be for ever, Ecc 3:14. He is in one mind, and who can turn him? His measures are never broken, nor is he ever put upon new counsels, but what he has purposed shall be effected, and all the world cannot defeat nor disannul it. It behoves us therefore to say, "Let it be as God wills," for, how cross soever it may be to our designs and interests, God's will is his wisdom. 2. That that counsel needs not to be altered, for there is nothing amiss in it, nothing that can be amended. If we could see it altogether at one view, we should see it so perfect that nothing can be put to it, for there is no deficiency in it, nor any thing taken from it, for there is nothing in it unnecessary, or that can be spared. As the word of God, so the works of God are every one of them perfect in its kind, and it is presumption for us either to add to them or to diminish from them, Deu 4:2. It is therefore as much our interest, as our duty, to bring our wills to the will of God.
V. We must study to answer God's end in all his providences, which is in general to make us religious. God does all that men should fear before him, to convince them that there is a God above them that has a sovereign dominion over them, at whose disposal they are and all their ways, and in whose hands their times are and all events concerning them, and that therefore they ought to have their eyes ever towards him, to worship and adore him, to acknowledge him in all their ways, to be careful in every thing to please him, and afraid of offending him in any thing. God thus changes his disposals, and yet is unchangeable in his counsels, not to perplex us, much less to drive us to despair, but to teach us our duty to him and engage us to do it. That which God designs in the government of the world is the support and advancement of religion among men.
VI. Whatever changes we see or feel in this world, we must acknowledge the inviolable steadiness of God's government. The sun rises and sets, the moon increases and decreases, and yet both are where they were, and their revolutions are in the same method from the beginning according to the ordinances of heaven; so it is with the events of Providence (Ecc 3:15): That which has been is now. God has not of late begun to use this method. No; things were always as mutable and uncertain as they are now, and so they will be: That which is to be has already been; and therefore we speak inconsiderately when we say, "Surely the world was never so bad as it is now," or "None ever met with such disappointments as we meet with," or "The times will never mend;" they may mend with us, and after a time to mourn there may come a time to rejoice, but that will still be liable to the common character, to the common fate. The world, as it has been, is and will be constant in inconstancy; for God requires that which is past, that is, repeats what he has formerly done and deals with us no otherwise than as he has used to deal with good men; and shall the earth be forsaken for us, or the rock removed out of his place? There has no change befallen us, nor any temptation by it overtaken us, but such as is common to men. Let us not be proud and secure in prosperity, for God may recall a past trouble, and order that to seize us and spoil our mirth (Psa 30:7); nor let us despond in adversity, for God may call back the comforts that are past, as he did to Job. We may apply this to our past actions, and our behaviour under the changes that have affected us. God will call us to account for that which is past; and therefore, when we enter into a new condition, we should judge ourselves for our sins in our former condition, prosperous or afflicted.
Matthew Henry's Commentary on the Whole Bible (1708–1710) — public domain (CC PDM 1.0). Text via the HelloAO Bible API.
John Gill 1763 · Public Domain He hath made every thing beautiful in his time,....…
He hath made every thing beautiful in his time,.... That is, God has made everything; as all things in creation are made by him, for his pleasure and glory, and all well and wisely, there is a beauty in them all: so all things in providence; he upholds all things; he governs and orders all things according to the counsel of his will; some things are done immediately by him, others by instruments, and some are only permitted by him; some he does himself, some he wills to be done by others, and some he suffers to be done; but in all there is a beauty and harmony; and all are ordered, disposed, and overruled, to answer the wisest and greatest purposes; everything is done in the time in which he wills it shall; be done, and done in the time most fit and suitable for it to be done; all things before mentioned, for which there is a time, and all others: all natural things are beautiful in their season; things in summer, winter, spring, and autumn; frost and snow in winter, and heat in summer; darkness and dews in the night, and light and brightness in the day; and so in ten thousand other things: all afflictive dispensations of Providence; times of plucking up and breaking down of weeping and mourning, of losing and casting away are all necessary, and seasonable and beautiful, in their issue and consequences: prosperity and adversity, in their turns, make a beautiful checker work, and work together for good; are like Joseph's coat, of many colours, which was an emblem of those various providences which attended that good man; and were extremely beautiful, as are all the providences of God to men: and all his judgments will be, when made manifest; when he shall have performed his whole work, and the mystery of God in providence will be finished; which is like a piece of tapestry; when only viewed in parts no beauty appears in it, scarce any thing to be made of it but when all is put together, it is most beautiful and harmonious. The words may be rendered, "the beautiful One hath made all things in his time" (m); the Messiah; who, as a divine Person, is the brightness of his Father's glory; as man, is fairer than the sons, of Adam; as Mediator, is full of grace and truth; is white and ruddy, altogether lovely, exceeding precious to his people: this fair and lovely One has made all things in creation; works with his Father in the affairs of providence; and has done all things well in grace and redemption, Joh 1:2;
also he hath set the world in their heart; so that no man can find out the work that God maketh from the beginning to the end; not a sinful love of the world, and the things of it; not a criminal desire after them, and a carking care for them, whereby persons have no heart and inclination, time and leisure, to search into and find out the works of God; for though all this is in the heart of the sons of men, yet, not placed, there by the Lord: nor an opinion of living for ever; of a long time in this world, the word for "world" having the signification of perpetuity in it; so that they regard not, the work of the Lord, nor the operations of his hands, tomorrow being with them as this day, and much more abundant; but this sense meets with the same difficulty as the former. Rather the meaning is, that God hath set before the minds of men, and in them, the whole world of creatures, the whole book of nature, in which they may see and read much of the wisdom power, and goodness of God in his works; and to some he gives an inclination and desire hereunto; but yet the subject before them is so copious, there is such a world of matter presented to them, and their capacity so small, and life so short, that they cannot all their days find out the works of God, either of creation or providence, to perfection; or find out what God works, from the beginning of the world to the end of it; for, of what he has wrought, but a small portion is known by them, and they know less still what shall be done hereafter: some of God's works of providence are set on foot and but begun in the life of some men; they do not live to see them finished, and therefore cannot find them out; and others are so dark and obscure, that they are obliged to say, "O the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God! how unsearchable are his judgments, and his ways past finding out!" see Rom 1:19; and though everything is beautiful in its time, yet till they are made manifest, and all viewed together; they will not be perfectly understood, or the beauty of them seen, Rev 15:4. For God has put something "hidden", or "sealed up", in the midst of them, as it may be rendered (n), so that they cannot be perfectly known.
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(m) "haec omnia facit pulcher in tempore suo, i.e. Messias"; so some in Rambachius. (n) Vid. Schultens de Defect. Hod. Ling. Heb. s. 180.
John Gill's Exposition of the Whole Bible (1746–1763) — public domain (CC PDM 1.0). Text via the HelloAO Bible API.
John Wesley 1765 · Public Domain He hath - This seems to be added as…
He hath - This seems to be added as at apology for God's providence, notwithstanding all the contrary events and confusions which are in the world. He hath made (or doth make or do, by his providence in the government of the world) every thing (which he doth either immediately, or by the ministry of men, or other creatures) beautiful (convenient, so that, all things considered, it could not have been done better) in its time or station, (when it was most fit to be done). Many events seem to mens shallow judgments, to be very irregular and unbecoming, as when wicked men prosper, and good men are oppressed; but when men shall throughly understand God's works, and the whole frame and contexture of them, and see the end of them, they will say, all things were done wisely. He hath set - It is true, God hath put the world into mens hearts, or made them capable of observing all the dispensations of God in the world; but this is to be understood with a limitation, because there are some more mysterious works of God, which no man can fully, understand, because he cannot search them out from the beginning to the end.
John Wesley, Explanatory Notes Upon the Whole Bible (1754–1765) — public domain. Text via the GEBible commentary corpus.
Adam Clarke 1810 · Public Domain Verse 11. Beautiful in his time] God's works are…
Verse 11. Beautiful in his time] God's works are well done; there are order, harmony, and beauty in them all. Even the caterpillar is a finished beauty in all the changes through which it passes, when its structure is properly examined, and the end kept in view in which each change is to issue. Nothing of this kind can be said of the works of man. The most finished works of art are bungling jobs, when compared with the meanest operation of nature.
He hath set the world in their heart] העולם haolam, that hidden time - the period beyond the present, - ETERNITY. The proper translation of this clause is the following: "Also that eternity hath he placed in their heart, without which man could not find out the work which God hath made from the commencement to the end." God has deeply rooted the idea of eternity in every human heart; and every considerate man sees, that all the operations of God refer to that endless duration. See Ec 3:14. And it is only in eternity that man will be able to discover what God has designed by the various works he has formed.
Adam Clarke's Commentary on the Bible (1810–1826) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword/MySword module.
Joseph Benson 1811 · Public Domain Ecc 3:11. He hath made every thing beautiful in…
Ecc 3:11. He hath made every thing beautiful in his time — This seems to be added as an apology for God’s providence, notwithstanding all the contrary events and confusions which are in the world. He hath made — Or, doth make, or do, by his providence in the government of the world; every thing — Which he doth, either immediately, or by the ministry of men, or other creatures; beautiful — Convenient, so that, all things considered, it could not have been better; in its time — Or season, when it was most fit to be done. Many events seem to men’s shallow judgments to be very irregular and unbecoming, as when wicked men prosper and good men are oppressed; but when men shall thoroughly understand God’s works, and the whole frame and contexture of them, and see the end of them, they will say, All things were done wisely. He hath set the world, &c. — It is true, God hath put the world into men’s hearts, or made them capable of observing all his dispensations in the world; but this is to be understood with a limitation, because there are some more mysterious works of God which no man can fully understand, because he cannot search them out from the beginning to the end.
Joseph Benson's Commentary on the Old and New Testaments (1811–1818) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
Albert Barnes 1834 · Public Domain Rather, He hath made all (the travail, Ecc 3:10)…
Rather, He hath made all (the travail, Ecc 3:10) beautiful (fit, in harmony with the whole work of God) in its time; also He hath set eternity in their heart (i. e., the heart of the sons of men, Ecc 3:10).
The word, translated “world” in the text, and “eternity” in this note, is used seven times in Ecclesiastes.
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The interpretation “eternity,” is conceived in the sense of a long indefinite period of time, in accordance with the use of the word throughout this book, and the rest of the Old Testament. God has placed in the inborn constitution of man the capability of conceiving of eternity, the struggle to apprehend the everlasting, the longing after an eternal life.
With the other meaning “the world,” i. e., the material world, or universe, in which we dwell, the context is explained as referring either to the knowledge of the objects with which this world is filled, or to the love of the pleasures of the world. This meaning seems to be less in harmony with the context than the other: but the principal objection to it is that it assigns to the word in the original a sense which, although found in rabbinical Hebrew, it never bears in the language of the Old Testament.
So ... find - i. e., Without enabling man to find. Compare Ecc 7:13; Ecc 8:17.
Albert Barnes' Notes on the Bible (1834–1885) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword/MySword module.
Haydock's Catholic Bible Commentary 1859 · Public Domain Consideration. Literally, "dispute." Hebrew and Septuagint, "heart." (Haydock) ---…
Consideration. Literally, "dispute." Hebrew and Septuagint, "heart." (Haydock) --- Pagnin, "He has implanted the desire of immortality in their hearts." --- End. If we could discover the properties of each thing, we should be in raptures; (Calmet) but as we cannot, this increases our vexation. (Menochius)
George Leo Haydock (1774–1849), Haydock's Catholic Family Bible and Commentary, 1859 edition — public domain. Excludes Psalms (Douay-Rheims chapter numbering differs from Protestant) and Deuterocanonical books (Catholic canon only).
Robert Jamieson, A. R. Fausset & David Brown 1871 · Public Domain his time--that is, in its proper season (Psa 1:3),…
his time--that is, in its proper season (Psa 1:3), opposed to worldlings putting earthly pursuits out of their proper time and place (see on Ecc 3:9).
set the world in their heart--given them capacities to understand the world of nature as reflecting God's wisdom in its beautiful order and times (Rom 1:19-20). "Everything" answers to "world," in the parallelism.
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so that--that is, but in such a manner that man only sees a portion, not the whole "from beginning to end" (Ecc 8:17; Job 26:14; Rom 11:33; Rev 15:4). PARKHURST, for "world," translates: "Yet He hath put obscurity in the midst of them," literally, "a secret," so man's mental dimness of sight as to the full mystery of God's works. So HOLDEN and WEISS. This incapacity for "finding out" (comprehending) God's work is chiefly the fruit of the fall. The worldling ever since, not knowing God's time and order, labors in vain, because out of time and place.
Jamieson, Fausset & Brown — Commentary Critical and Explanatory on the Whole Bible (1871) — public domain (CC PDM 1.0). Text via the HelloAO Bible API.
Daniel D. Whedon 1874 · Public Domain 11. Made every thing beautiful — Koheleth’s inference as…
11. Made every thing beautiful — Koheleth’s inference as to God’s scheme for man warms into poetic beauty. Every item of it is “beautiful” in its intended place and order. The word rendered world is the only Hebrew word for unmeasured time, that is, eternity. Many various views have been given on this word. Some excellent scholars have thought it should have been a word now found in the Arabic, elem, meaning intelligence, instead of ‘holam. But the simplest is here the best. God has not only ordered this “world” well, but has put into man’s heart a sense and apprehension of what is beyond life and time.
So that — These words should be, but that. The English has no word conveying the idea of exclusiveness so peculiarly as the Hebrew here used; yet “but that” comes nearest. The idea is, that the harmony of the divine arrangements for man, and his relation to the unmeasured future, would be plain and practicable but that man does not take into account and study the whole plan of God from beginning to… end.
Daniel D. Whedon (gen. ed.), Commentary on the Old and New Testaments (1874–1909) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
The Cambridge Bible for Schools and Colleges 1878 · Public Domain 11. He hath made every thing beautiful in his…
11. He hath made every thing beautiful in his time] Better, as removing the ambiguity of the possessive pronoun in modern English ears, “in its time.” The thinker rests for a time in the primeval faith of Israel that all things were created “very good” (Gen_1:31), in the Stoic thought of a divine system, a Cosmos of order and of beauty, of a plan, even in the development of human history, in which all things work together for good. So even in Lucretius,
“Certa suo quia tempore semina rerum
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Cum confluxerunt, patefit quodcumque creator.”
“So when the germs of things in season due
Have met together, all creation’s work
Is to our eyes made open.”
De Rer. Nat. i. 176.
What hinders it from being a final resting-place of thought is that his knowledge is confined within narrow limits. He sees but a fragment, and the “most part” of the Divine Work “is hid.”
also he hath set the world in their heart] The Hebrew for “world” (primarily, “the hidden”) is that which, in its adverbial or adjectival use, constantly appears in the English Version as “for ever,” “perpetual,” “everlasting,” “always,” “eternal,” and the like. No other meaning but that of a duration, the end or beginning of which is hidden from us, and which therefore is infinite, or, at least, indefinite, is ever connected with it in the Hebrew of the Old Testament, and this is its uniform sense in this book (chs. Ecc_1:4; Ecc_1:10, Ecc_2:16, Ecc_3:14, Ecc_9:6, Ecc_12:5). In post-Biblical Hebrew it passes into the sense of the Greek αἰῶν, for the age, or the world considered in its relation to time and, on the theory of authorship adopted in the Introduction there is, perhaps, an approximation to that sense here. We must however translate, as the nearest equivalent, He hath set eternity (or, the everlasting) in their heart. The thought expressed is not that of the hope of an immortality, but rather the sense of the Infinite which precedes it, and out of which at last it grows. Man has the sense of an order perfect in its beauty. He has also the sense of a purpose working through the ages from everlasting to everlasting, but “beginning” and “end” are alike hidden from him and he fails to grasp it. In modern language he sees not “the beginning and the end,” the whence and the whither, of his own being, or of that of the Cosmos. He is oppressed with what German thinkers have named the Welt-Schmerz, the world-sorrow, the burden of the problems of the infinite and unfathomable Universe. Here again we have an echo of Stoic language as reproduced by Cicero, “Ipse autem homo natus est ad mundum contemplandum et imitandum” (de Nat. Deor. ii. 14. 37). All interpretations resting on later ideas of the “world,” as meaning simply the material universe, or worldly pleasures, or worldly wisdom, have to be rejected as inconsistent with lexical usage. By some writers, however, the word, with a variation in the vowels, has been taken as itself meaning “wisdom,” but though this signification is found in a cognate word in Arabic, it is unknown in Hebrew.
The Cambridge Bible for Schools and Colleges (gen. ed. J. J. S. Perowne; Cambridge University Press, 1878–1918) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
Ellicott's Commentary for English Readers 1878 · Public Domain (11) In his time.—In modern English, “its.”
(11) In his time.—In modern English, “its.”
The world.—The word here translated “world” has that meaning in post-Biblical Hebrew, but never elsewhere in the Old Testament, where it occurs over 300 times. And if we adopt the rendering “world,” it is difficult to explain the verse so as to connect it with the context. Where the word occurs elsewhere it means “eternity,” or “long duration,” and is so used in this book (Ecc_1:4; Ecc_1:10; Ecc_2:16; Ecc_3:14; Ecc_9:6; Ecc_12:5). Taking this meaning of the word here (the only place where the word is used with the article), we may regard it as contrasted with that for “time,” or season, immediately before. Life exhibits a changing succession of weeping alternating with laughing, war with peace, and so forth. For each of these God has appointed its time or season, and in its season each is good. But man does not recognise this; for God has put in his heart an expectation and longing for abiding continuance of the same, and so he fails to understand the work which God does in the world.
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So that no.—The connecting phrase here employed is rendered “because none” (Deu_9:28; 2Ki_6:3, &c), “so that none” (Jer_9:10; Zep_3:6, &c).
End.—Ecc_7:2; Ecc_12:13; Joe_2:20; 2Ch_20:16. A word belonging to the later Hebrew.
A Bible Commentary for English Readers, edited by Charles John Ellicott (1878–1897) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
The Pulpit Commentary 1880 · Public Domain He hath made every thing beautiful in his (its)…
He hath made every thing beautiful in his (its) time. "Everything:" (eth hacol) does not refer so much to the original creation which God made very good, (Gen_1:31) as to the travail and business mentioned in ver. 10. All parts of this have, in God"s design, a beauty and a harmony, their own season for appearance and development, their work to do in carrying on the majestic march of Providence. Also he hath set the world in their heart. "The world;" eth-haolam, placed (as haeol above) before the verb, with eth, to emphasize the relation. There is some uncertainty in the translation of this word. The LXX has, Sumpanta ton aijwna; Vulgate, Mundum tradidit disputationi eorum. The original meaning is "the hidden," and it is used generally in the Old Testament of the remote past, and sometimes of the future, asn), Da 3, so that the idea conveyed is of unknown duration, whether the glance looks backward or forward, which is equivalent to our word "eternity." It is only in later Hebrew that the word obtained the signification of "age" (aijw) or "world" in its relation to time. Commentators who have adopted the latter sense here explain the expression as if it meant that man in himself is a microcosm, a little world, or that the love of the world, the love of life, is naturally implanted in him. But taking the term in the signification found throughout the Bible, we are justified in translating it "eternity." The pronoun in "their heart" refers to "the sons of men" in the previous verse. God has put into men"s minds a notion of infinity of duration; the beginning and the end of things are alike beyond his grasp; the time to be born and the Lime to die are equally unknown and uncontrollable. Koheleth is not thinking of that hope of immortality which his words unfold to us with our better knowledge; he is speculating on the innate faculty of looking backward and forward which man possesses, but which is insufficient to solve the problems which present themselves every day. This conception of eternity may be the foundation of great hopes and expectations, but as an explanation of the ways of Providence it fails. So that no man can find out the work that God maketh from the beginning to the end; or, without man being able to penetrate; yet so that he cannot, etc. Man sees only minute parts of the great whole; he cannot comprehend all at one view, cannot understand the law that regulates the time and season of every circumstance in the history of man and the world. He feels that, as there has been an infinite past, there will be an infinite future, which may solve anomalies and demonstrate the harmonious unity of God"s design, and he must be content to wait and hope. Comparison of the past with the present may help to adumbrate the future, but is inadequate to unravel the complicated thread of the world"s history. (comp. Ecc_8:16, 17 9:1, where a similar thought is expressed)
Vers. 11-14.
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All things beautiful; or, God, man, and the world.
I THE BEAUTIFUL RELATION OF THE WORLD TO GOD. Expressed by four words.
1. Dependence: no such thing as independence, self-subsistence, self-origination, self-regulation, in mundane affairs. The universe, out to its circumference and in to its center, from its mightiest Structure down to its smallest detail, is the handiwork of God. Whatever philosophers may say or think upon the subject, it is simple absurdity to teach that the universe made itself, or that the incidents composing the sum of human life and experience have come to pass of themselves. It will be time enough to believe things are their own makers when effects can be discovered that have no causes. Persons of advanced (?) intelligence and culture may regard the Scriptures as behind the age in respect of philosophic insight and scientific attainment; it is to their credit that their writers never talk such unphilosophic and unscientific nonsense as that mundane things are their own creators. Their common sense if not permissible to say their inspiration appears to have been strong and clear enough to save them from being befooled by such vagaries as have led astray many modem savants, and to have taught them that the First Cause of all things is God (Gen_1:1; Exo_20:11; Neh_9:6; Job_38:4; Psa_19:1; Isa_40:28; Act_14:15 Act_17:24; Rom_11:36; Eph_3:9; Heb_3:4; Rev_4:11)
1. Variety no monotony in mundane affairs. Obvious as regards both the universe as a whole and its individual parts. The supreme Artificer of the former had no idea of fashioning all things after one model, however excellent, but sought to introduce variety into the works of his hands; and just this is the principle upon which he has proceeded in arranging the program of man"s experiences upon the earth. To this diversity in man"s experience the twenty-eight instances of events and purposes given by the Preacher (vers. 2-8) allude; and this same diversity is a mark at once of wisdom and of kindness on the part of the Supreme. As the material globe would be monotonous were it all mountain and no valley, so would human life be uninteresting were it an unchanging round of the same few incidents. But it is not. If there are funerals and deaths, there are as well marriages and births; if nights of weeping, days of laughing; if times of war, periods of peace.
2. Order: no chance or accident in mundane affairs. To short-sighted and feeble man, human life is full of accidents or chances; but not so when viewed from the standpoint of God, Not only does no event happen without his permission (Mat_10:29; Luk_12:6) but each event occurs at the time and falls into the place appointed for it by infinite wisdom. Nor is this true merely of such events as are wholly and exclusively in his power, like births and deaths (ver. 2), but of such also as to some extent at least are within man"s control, as e.g. the planting of a field and the plucking up of that which is planted (ver. 2), killing and healing, breaking down and building up (ver. 3), weeping and laughing (ver. 4), etc. Men may flatter themselves that of these latter actions they are the sole originators, have both the choosing of their times and the fixing of their forms; but according to the Preacher, God"s supremacy is as little to be disputed in them as in the matter of man"s coming into or going out from the word. We express this thought by citing the well-known proverb, "Man proposes, but God disposes," or the familiar words of Shakespeare
There"s a divinity that shapes our ends, Rough-hew them how we will. ("Hamlet," act 5: Son 2:)
3. Beauty: no defect or deformity in mundane affairs. This cannot signify that in such events and actions as "killing," "hating," "warring," there is never anything wrong; that God regards them only as good in the making, and generally that sin is a necessary stage in the development of human nature. The Preacher is not pronouncing judgment upon the moral qualities of the actions he enumerates, but merely calling attention to their fitness for the times and seasons to which they have been assigned by God. Going back in thought to the "Very good!" of the Creator when he rested from his labors at the close of the sixth day, (Gen_1:31) the Preacher cannot think of saying less of the work God is still carrying on in evolving the plan and program of his purpose. "God hath made everything beautiful in its time" (cf. ver. 11): beautiful in itself, so far as it is a work of his; but beautiful not less in its time, even when the work, as not being entirely his, is not beautiful in itself, or in its inward essence. Cf. Shakespeare"s
How many things by season seasoned are To their right praise and true perfection! ("Merchant of Venice," act 5. sc. 1. )
Beautiful in themselves and their times are the seasons of the year, the ages of man, and the changing experiences through which he passes; beautiful, at least in their times, are numerous human actions which God cannot be regarded as approving, but which nevertheless he permits to occur because he sees the hour has struck for their occurring. As it were, the glowing wheels of Divine providence never fail to keep time with the great clock of eternity.
II THE BEAUTIFUL RELATION OF MAN TO THE WORLD. Also expressed in four words.
1. Weariness: no perfect rest in the midst of mundane affairs. Not only is man tossed about continually by the multitudinous vicissitudes of which he is the subject, but he derives almost no satisfaction from the thought that in all these changes there is a beautiful because divinely appointed harmony, and a beneficent because Heaven-ordained purpose. The order pervading the universe is something outside of and beyond him. The fixing of the right times is a work in which he cannot, even in a small degree, cooperate. As a wise man, he may wish to have every action in which he bears a part performed at the set time marked out for it on the clock of eternity; but the very attempt to find out for each action the right time only aggravates the fatigue of his labor, and increases the sense of weariness under which he groans. "What profit hath he that worketh in that wherein he laboreth?" Not, certainly, "no profit," but not enough to give him rest or even free him from weariness. And this, when viewed from a moral and religious standpoint, is beautiful inasmuch as it prevents (or ought to prevent) man from seeking happiness in mundane affairs.
2. Ignorance: no perfect knowledge of mundane affairs. "No man can find out the work that God maketh from the beginning to the end." One more proof of the vanity of human life that no man, however wise and farseeing, patient and laborious, can discover the plan of God either in the universe as a whole or in his own life; and what renders this a special sorrow is the fact that God hath set "the world or.," eternity" in his heart." If the "world" be accepted as the true rendering (Jerome, Luther, Ewald), then probably the meaning is that, though each individual carries about within his besom in his own personality an image of the world is, in fact, a microcosmus in which the macrocosmus or great world is mirrored nevertheless the problem of the universe eludes his grasp. If, however, the translation "eternity" be adopted (Delitzsch, Wright, Plumptre), then the import of the clause will be that God hath planted in the heart of man "a longing after immortality," given him an idea of the infinite and eternal which lies beyond the veil of outward things, and inspired him with a desire to know that which is above and beyond him, yet he cannot find out the secret of the universe in the sense of discovering its plan. With an infinite behind and. before him, he can grasp neither the beginning of the work of God in its purpose or plan, nor the end of it in its issues and results, whether to the individual or to the whole. What his eye looks upon is the middle portion passing before him here and now in comparison with the whole but an infinitesimal speck and so he remains with reference to the whole like a person walking in the dark.
3. Submission: no ground for complaining as to mundane affairs. Rather in the view presented is much to comfort man had the ordering of the universe, or even of his own lot, been left to man, man himself would have been the first to regret it. As Laplace is credited with having said that, if only the Almighty had called him into counsel at the making of the universe, he could have given the Almighty some valuable hints, so are there equally foolish persons who believe they could have drafted for themselves a better life-program than has been done for them by the supreme Disposer of events. A wise man, however, will always feel grateful that the Almighty has retained the ordering of events in his own hand, and will meekly submit to the same, believing that God"s times are the best times, and that his ways are ever "mercy and truth unto such as keep his covenant and his testimonies". (Psa_25:10)
4. Fear: no justification for impiety or irreverence in mundane affairs. A proper study of the constitution and course of nature, a due recognition of the order pervading all its parts, with a just consideration both of the perfection and permanence (ver. 14) of the Divine working, ought to inspire men with "fear of such sort as both to repress within them irreligion and impiety, and to excite within them humility and awe.
This unintelligible world.
How shall we solve all those great problems which continually confront us, which baffle and bewilder us, which sometimes drive us to the very verge of distraction or even of unbelief? The solution is partly found in
I A WIDE VIEW OF THE WORTH OF PRESENT THINGS. If we look long and far, we shall see that, though many things have an ugly aspect at first sight, God "has made everything beautiful in its time." The light and warmth of summer are good to see and feel; but is not the cold of winter invigorating? and what is more beautiful to the sight than the untrodden snow? The returning life of spring is welcome to all hearts; but are not the brilliant hues of autumn fascinating to every eye? Youth is full of ardor, and manhood of strength; but declining years possess much richness of gathered wisdom, and there is a dignity, a calm, a reverence, m age which is all its own. There is a joy in battle as well as a pleasantness in peace. Wealth has its treasures; but poverty has little to lose, and therefore little cause for anxiety and trouble. Luxury brings many comforts, but hardness gives health and strength. Each climate upon the earth, every condition in life, the various dispositions and temperaments of the human soul, these have their own particular advantage and compensation. Look on the other side, and you will see something that will please, if it does not satisfy.
II THE HELP WE GAIN FROM THE GREAT ELEMENT OF FUTURITY. "Also he hath set eternity" (marginal reading, Revised Version) "in their heart." We are made to look far beyond the boundary of the visible and the present. The idea of "the eternal" may help us in two ways.
1. That we are created for the unseen and the eternal accounts for the fact that nothing which is earthly and sensible will satisfy our souls. Nothing of that order ought to do so; and it would put the seal upon our degradation if it did so. Our unsatisfiable spirit is the signature of our manhood and the prophecy of our immortality.
2. The inclusion of the future in our reasoning makes all the difference to our thought. Admit only the passing time, this brief and uncertain life, and much that happens is inexplicable and distressing indeed; but include the future, add "eternity "to the account, and the "crooked is made straight," the perplexity is gone. But, even with this aid, there is
III THE MYSTERY WHICH REMAINS, AND WILL REMAIN No man can find out," etc. We do well to remember that what we see is only a very small part indeed of the whole only a page of the great volume, only a scene in the great drama, only a field of the large landscape and we may well be silenced, if not convinced. But even that does not cover everything. We need to remember that we are human, and not Divine; that we, who are God"s very little children, cannot hope to understand all that is in the mind of our heavenly Father cannot expect to fathom his holy purpose, to read his unfathomable thoughts. We see enough of Divine wisdom, holiness, and love to believe that, when our understanding is enlarged and our vision cleared, we shall find that "all the paths of the Lord were mercy and truth even those which most troubled and bewildered us when we dwelt upon the earth. C.
The Pulpit Commentary (1880–1919), ed. H.D.M. Spence-Jones & Joseph S. Exell — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
The Biblical Illustrator 1887 · Public Domain He hath made everything beautiful in His time.
Ecc_3:11
He hath made everything beautiful in His time.
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Beauty
How rich are the traits and manifestations of mans creative genius! Think of the vast number and diversity of gorgeous and attractive forms, with which descriptive and imaginative talent has enriched the literature of all ages. And the fruits of mental toil in all times, from the rude lyric of the savage to the rounded and polished productions of the most advanced culture, how redolent of beauty,--how thickly studded with gems of the purest lustre and transcending magnificence! Art, too, how endlessly varied in its embodiments of all that is fair, and grand, and glorious! How numberless, also, are the combinations of blended or interchanging majesty and beauty which rise and are yet to rise in the simple and the complex, the lowly and the lofty forms of architecture--in column, tower, and dome--in cottage, temple, and cathedral! But whence this power in man? What are his creations but copies of the thoughts of God? That they are nothing else is implied in the fundamental canons of literature, art, and taste. Truth to nature is the sole test of beauty. Do we admire the partial copies that man has made? Do we bow down to the genius that can see and hear a little portion of the Divine idea? Shall not, then, our thoughts go up with unspeakably loftier reverence and more fervent adoration to Him who has made everything beautiful? Reflect for a moment on beauty as an attribute of the Supreme Intelligence. Reflect on God as the Originator of all that delights the eye and charms the fancy. What an inconceivable wealth of beauty must reside in the mind, which, without a copy, first called forth these numberless hues and shades that relieve each other and melt into each other in the vast whole of nature,--which devised these countless forms of vegetable life, from the wayside flower that blooms to-day and withers to-morrow, to the forest giant that outlasts the rise and fall of nations and of empires,--which meted out the heavens, measured the courses and arranged the harmonies of the stars, spread the ocean, poured the river, torrent, and waterfall! What an infinity of resources do we behold in the alternate phases of the outward universe, each of which seems too beautiful to be replaced by one of equal loveliness, and yet yields at once its fancied pre-eminence to its successor! The depths of the Divine Intelligence we indeed cannot fathom; but there are some views of practical interest to be derived from these thoughts.
1. First, they suggest one mode of worship, which must always make us better,--that of the devout contemplation of the visible works of God. To enjoy is to adore. There can be no full and true enjoyment of nature, except by those who see the hand and hear the voice of the Eternal in His works. To enter into the heart of nature is to talk face to face with its Author.
2. The thoughts which I have suggested lend, also, a motive to our conversance with the monuments of human art, taste, and genius. The genuine poet or artist stands between us and Gods world of beauty, in the same relation in which the seer or the evangelist stands between us and his realm of truth. But most of all does the devout mind love to commune with truth and beauty in those forms of literature, in which they have been blended by Divine inspiration. It finds no poetry so sublime as that of psalmist, prophet, and apostle,--that which connects the image of the heavenly Shepherd with the green pastures and still waters, draws lessons of a paternal Providence from the courses of Orion and Arcturus, names for the rain and for the drops of dew their Father, and resorts to every kingdom of nature, and gathers in materials from every portion of the visible universe, to portray the New Jerusalem, the golden city of our God, the gates within which the sun goes not down, for the glory of God doth lighten it, and the Lamb is the light thereof.
3. Again, beauty, though distinct from love, is the minister of love. Its every ray is edged and fringed with mercy. Its every form bears the inscription, God is love. When it beams upon us from the heavens, it reveals His benignity. When it glows on the earth, or gleams from the ocean, it reflects His smile. When it stretches its many-coloured bow on the cloud or the waterfall, it utters His thoughts of peace. Have not all these scenes a voice of tender sympathy and consolation for the grief-stricken? In a world thus full of beauty, thus suffused by the smile of the Universal Father, there can be no sorrow sent as sorrow. It can be only those whom God loves that he chastens. Not to blight the harvest of human hope and joy, but to bring forth in fresh luxuriance every plant of our Heavenly Fathers planting, do the rains descend and the floods come upon the afflicted heart. Not to destroy or hopelessly bow down the soul, but to dispel the suffocating mist of worldliness, to open a clearer, higher range of vision for the inward eye, to make the upper heavens look serene and beautiful, falls the bolt that sends alarm and agony to our homes and hearts. Let us, then, in our sorrows, welcome the revelation of Divine love, with which the heavens are dropping and the earth teeming, which day utters to day and night rehearses to night. (A. P. Peabody.)
Everything beautiful
The Creator, when He formed the world, had the loveliness of things before Him as an end and object, as well as the usefulness of things. And so, wherever we walk, we see reflected the love of beauty in the Divine mind. And the more minutely we examine the works of God, the more exquisite is their beauty. How unlike the works of man! Take a finely polished needle, and place it under a powerful microscope, and it becomes a huge, rough bar of steel, with miniature caverns and ravines of black clinker. Take again some common insect, a wasp, for instance; and under the same microscope it grows into a miracle of sheeny scales of semi-transparent gauze of gold, each scale geometrically perfect. Or take that buttercup and look down into its heart, and you will look into an enchanted fairy chamber of flashing lights that shames all the extravagances of the Arabian Nights. God loves to have things beautiful: and it is wise for us to foster in ourselves the love of beauty. No doubt business rivalries are so intense and keen that men are obliged to consider chiefly utility. What can I make or get out of it? is the primary question. Bread, not beauty, is their principal concern. Trade is sowing cities like shells along the shore: and the things of the mart and the street are in danger of crowding nature and God out of mens minds and freezing their hearts. But let us hope that the fight for the front places in all the callings which is the prevailing ambition at present will never become so severe as to absorb all thought and time, and destroy all care for the cultivation of this joyous side of life. Indeed, the fiercer the struggle for life becomes, the greater the need for the sweet alleviations which admiration of nature brings. Nor can we doubt that when the Creator lavished, and still lavishes so much beauty in the natural world, He had and has in view the highest usefulness; for surely it is as serviceable a thing to give refreshment and tone and elevation to the soul, as to provide wheat for bread, or wool for clothing. Let us lift our thoughts from the loveliness of nature to Him, who is the Rose of Sharon all glowing with the wealth of heavenly love, and the Lily of the Valley, holy, harmless, undefiled, and the True Vine laden with ripe clusters for the famishing souls of men--yes, to Him, who is unique in His splendour of very Godhead and perfect manhood. One of the most patent wants of our Churches to-day is that of spiritual beauty of character; beauty of spiritual character. Not the surface beauty of morality unvitalized by personal love to the Saviour. This is but the crystal, symmetrical, clean-cut in exactness of outline, cold as the snow, dead as the stone. Our want is the beauty of the living soul, of the holy life. Not any mimicry of it, however successful, however unconscious; not any simulation of its life; not painted blooms and waxen fruit. But actual conformity to the image of the man Christ Jesus: a life of prayer and self-renouncing faith, of surrender to the yule of our King, and leal-hearted service. This is the beauty of holiness of which all fair things beneath the sun are faint pictures; and by which Christ is made manifest to men. (R. C. Cowell)
The beauty of the world
I. The beauty of lifes outward scenes and circumstances. We need not linger to determine what is the philosophy of beauty; how far it depends on the things we behold, how far on the eyes which behold them, or rather on the soul of intelligence and emotion which looks through the eyes. The beautiful is beautiful in the measure of our discernment; that is true. Still, beauty is not determined exclusively by our perception; that also is true. Beyond what any single individual has seen or has power to see lie a myriad things, the fruit of the Creators wonderful and multitudinous thoughts. Treasures of beauty fill the depths of the sea, and there are unvisited nooks and corners of the earth thronged with lovely forms. Not only in the broad effects, but in the minute detail, of nature there is to be found beauty. Men need not go into strange lands to learn that the Lord hath made all things beautiful in His time. Pleasure in the beauty of the world may become a mere lust of the eye, rather than the glow of the soul. An aesthetic taste is not a sanctifying faith. Discerning the beauty crowding earth and heaven, we are to remember that the Lord hath made it. We are to think of Him; see everywhere the signs of His wisdom, the images of His loveliness and tenderness, the outgoing of His glory, the suggestions of His infinity.
II. The orderliness of this beauty. Everything is beautiful in its appointed time. The fulness and harmony of things is largely an element of beauty. The order, the perfect sequence, of natures law is as wonderful as the varied beauty of her forms. Every winter turns to spring. The seed, the blade, the ear, the full corn in the ear, each has its beauty. There are here in the worlds order and beauty familiar analogies of spiritual things. The complex beauty of a perfected character is not wrought except by preparations and processes. Men come to perfectness in their season. The great Worker works most surely in unbroken order, in grand, calm patience, and brings His work to its perfect issue at the appointed time.
III. The transitoriness of the worlds beauty. All the beauty of outward scene and circumstance is but for a time. This fair world, though it holds us sometimes with the spell of its enchantment, is not our rest; its beauties are flowers upon a pilgrims path. We pluck fair flowers, but in a little while, such a little while, the soft petals are worn and crumpled and ready to die[ The worlds and the treasures that are in them God carries in His hand; but those that love Him He carries in His heart--the dear children of His love; and that love is round about them, a light from heaven, fairer and surer than the beauty of the morning. (W. S. Davis.)
Religion and the beautiful
I. There is an essential unity in all forms of the beautiful. It will not do to object to art, to embellishment of dress and furniture, and yet to say that in speech and in manners and in moral elements the beautiful is right. For the beautiful is an element that is meant to go out in every part of the mind, and to lend its light and peculiar influence in every direction in which the mind develops itself. Now it is admitted, the world over, by those who object to art in dress, in furniture, or in the embellishment of grounds, that beauty of speech, and manners, and social and moral elements, is right. Now, why is beauty consistent with self-denial and the example of Christ in these things, and inconsistent with self-denial and the example of Christ in those other things?
II. There is a moral function belonging to the beautiful, which redeems it from the objections which men raise against it. It is true that beauty is employed to build up vice. Did you ever stop to analyze that statement, and see what it meant? The moral function of the beautiful is used to lead men to sin; but this fact reveals the power that is in the beautiful to raise the enjoyment of any faculty on which it is employed from lower to higher forms. Beauty always tends upward. If you introduce it to the thinking power, it draws the intellect upward; if you introduce it to the conscience, it draws the conscience upward; if you introduce it into morals, it elevates those morals; if you introduce it into dress, it refines and lifts it up.
III. If, then, there is a moral function in the beautiful, its full benefit cannot be expected until it develops itself harmoniously in all parts of the mind. It must be applied to the understanding, to the moral faculties, to the social elements, to the animal instincts, and to all the relations of physical life in the family and in society. It is not the beautiful in too great a measure that leads to excess of mischief and selfishness. It is because it is cultivated but partially, or only on one side of the mind, that it produces mischiefs. With this statement of the moral function of the beautiful, I proceed to apply it more particularly to the individual and the household. How can a man consent to indulge in the beautiful while the world is lying in wickedness? I say, the world being in wickedness, I am going to educate myself in beauty, that I may be the better fitted to elevate it out of that wickedness. The beautiful is one of the elements with which I am to familiarize myself, in order that I may the more successfully engage in this work. God educates men for labouring in His kingdom on earth by spreading Out before them the beauties which He has created in the natural world. The beautiful, therefore, may be made a moral instructor, and it may make the soul of man powerful; so that indulgence in it, instead of being selfish, is a part of ones lawful education. The same argument is applicable to the household. The question arises in the minds of many persons, How much time ought I to expend for my family, and how much for God? You split your ship on a rock at the outset, b v putting God in one balance and your family in the other. Your family must never be separated from God. Your idea of religion and of consecration must be such that you shall consider everything that is given to your cradle or to your family as being given to God. Now, how much may a man give to build up a family, and make it powerful for God? If it is necessary that a mans children should have shoes and clothes, and he gives them to them, he gives them to God. If it is necessary that they should have intelligence, and he sends them to costly schools, he sends them for Gods sake. But remember that you must carry such a heart into this work that every child shall feel that every picture and every book has a moral purpose in it, and realize that there is a life to come, and understand the relations of Gods kingdom on earth to immortality. And then every flower that blossoms will have a meaning. But it is said, How can you reconcile these indulgences with the example of our Saviour? He did not indulge in the beautiful. Our Saviour set the example to us of moral qualities, but not of social conditions. He had not a place to lay His head: do you seriously think that it would be best for every man to be a vagabond? Do you think it would be best for civilization that the family should be broken up, and that men should have no property and no regular occupation, in order that they might follow Christ? Still further, it is asked, How can we imitate Christ in the self-denial which He practised, and yet indulge in the beautiful? Nowhere else in the world can a man be more self-denying than in taking a nature thoroughly refined and cultured, and with that nature going to the poor and needy. Christ laid aside the glory that He had before the world was, and came upon earth, and lived without it, and ascended, and retook it; and now, having taken it again, He lives to legislate with all this plenitude; and He is self-denying still, making His life a perpetual living for others. If, then, God has endowed any man with wealth, let him use it for himself, for his children, and for his friends, and so use it for the world. If God has given a man power to read literature in every language, let him read it, that he may be the better able to defend the ignorant and instruct them. If God has given a man the element of beauty, let him employ it, not for the sake of self-indulgence, but that he may lift up, and refine, and civilize those that are low, and rude, and gross. In the hands of all who follow these directions, the elements of the beautiful are entirely in consonance with the Divine will. (H. W. Beecher.)
The mission of beauty
Beauty is a term of varied and extensive import. Whatever excites the emotion, be it a statue fresh from the chisel of the sculptor, a flower by the wayside, chronicling some old buried memory, or a glorious sunset among the hills, a speech, a poem, a virtue, a deed or a song, that is beautiful.
I. Beauty and its mission as seen in nature. There is affluence of beauty in the broad, blue heavens and on the green earth; in the stars that look so gently and kindly upon us; in the orchards, groves and forest trees; in the plumage and song of birds; in the modest flower that blooms in the hedge; in the sturdy oak which has wrestled with the storms and the winds of a thousand years; in the tall and stately cedar of Lebanon, in the pendent branches of the willow, sighing like a mourner by the silent stream. There is beauty in the morning dew, shining like diamond points all over field and meadow; in drops of water as they hang like costly pearls on trees and telegraph wires after a refreshing shower. There is beauty in the little rill which bursts away from some sequestered nook in the hillside, like a truant child, and runs--now glancing out in the light and then hiding itself in entangled shrubbery till it seems to find its playfellows in the babbling brook. There is beauty in the majestic river as it rolls, strengthened by innumerable tributaries, proudly into the broad sea. There is beauty in the alternations of day and night, in the still evening, when the shadows deepen over the plain and the veil of mist rises slowly over the valley, and the sombre woods which skirt the distant horizon grow more indistinct, and the sun sinks to rest, leaving the clouds above all aglow with his setting radiance. There is beauty in the seasons; in the spring arrayed in verdure; in the summer teeming with luxuriance; in autumn loaded with golden harvests. And winter, too, has its charms, covering the earth with its robe of purity and adorning the forests with gems of dazzling and enchanting brilliancy. It is no wonder that Solomon, in his wisdom, should have said, God hath made everything beautiful in His time, because everything is adapted to some end or use. Nothing is made in vain. Whatever is beautiful in nature has its use, to secure harmony in the great orchestra of all created things, or reflect the superlative glory of the uncreated God.
II. Artificial beauty, or those forms of beauty which may be regarded as copies of nature--the creations of genius and art. These, too, may exalt our conceptions of the Divine Being, as all the beautiful forms from the chisel of the sculptor, from the pencil of the artist, exist as types or models in the great gallery of Nature, of which God is the Author. Art is the shadow of Nature, the photograph of external beauty, the pictured diagrams of a higher and more exalted finish. Art may be the handmaid of religion, an auxiliary to worship. The old Hebrew temple, in its form and finish, in its utensils of gold, in its altars of ivory, in its outer and inner courts, was the very perfection of art, and all was designed as an aid to worship and an emblem of heaven. The magnificent cathedrals of the Old World and the costly pictures with which they are adorned have a higher purpose than simply to attract the vulgar eye or awaken a temporary admiration. They are designed as helps, acting through the senses to lead the worshippers on to a proper conception of that uncreated beauty that dwelleth not in temples built with hands.
III. Intellectual beauty. We speak of the canvas or the sculptured marble as uttering thoughts that breathe and words that burn: but when we thus figuratively speak, we speak in praise of the creative mind of the artist and the sculptor. These are only the outward and visible expression of the ideal beauty that was in his own thought. Knowledge, genius, wisdom, taste, whenever, wherever perceived are beautiful. Mind is the measure not only, but the chief attraction either of woman or man. A well-stored, a highly-educated mind is to me the most attractive thing in the universe; and to see such a mind at work solving the problems of science, analyzing the most difficult subjects, charming by its eloquence or song, raising the heavy burdens from the groaning heart of humanity, cannot fail to awaken the highest emotions of admiration and of beauty. God, whose intellect is infinite, and always devising for the good of His creatures, must ever be regarded, when properly perceived, as the most beautiful Being in the universe, shedding His light and beauty over all the works of His hands; and we can offer no more appropriate prayer and join with the psalmist and say, Let the beauty of the Lord our God be upon us.
IV. Moral beauty and its mission. Right is always beautiful; truth, honour, integrity are beautiful; magnanimity, justice and benevolence are as really beautiful as the most lovely of material forms. If we contemplate the act of the Good Samaritan dismounting from his beast at the risk of his own life and affording the needed aid to a wounded Jew, we feel in our inmost soul that compassion is beautiful. There is beauty in purity. If the lily bending on its stem is beautiful to the eye, so is purity, of which the lily is a favourite and impressive emblem. In an age of general licentiousness, to see a youthful captive break away from the solicitations of his royal mistress is a spectacle that commands admiration of every mind not absolutely brutalized by lust. Illustrations of moral beauty are not wanting in our age and time. The family united in a loving fellowship, where heart responds in cordial sympathy to heart, is certainly one of the most beautiful sights on earth, and the most impressive type of heaven. Thus the Church, as the Bride of Christ, all-glorious within and without, humble yet active, conservative yet aggressive, clad in the seamless robe of a Redeemers righteousness, adorned with all the graces of the Spirit, and charity crowning the whole, is the very climax of beauty, more gorgeous to behold than all the glory and riches of Solomon. Remember the words of our text, Everything is beautiful in His time--beautiful, because useful and answering fully the end of its being; and nothing can be more beautiful than woman intellectually and morally educated and working in her sphere for the benefit of her race. This is the highest type and style of beauty, outliving the physical, surpassing that of art, over which death and the grave have no power. Arrayed in this imperishable robe, the spirit only grows younger as the body decays; and when released from the tenement of clay shall ascend to mingle with forms celestial on a mission still, through endless years of beauty and of love. (S. D. Burchard, D. D.)
The Author of beauty
I have no very definite conception of what these words mean. I do not intend to use them for purposes of instruction, but for purposes of suggestion and inspiration. This is poetry. The aim of poetry is to exalt the feelings, to kindle the imagination. A statement not sharply defined to thought may yet by suggestion carry and inspire one more energetically and penetratingly than any clearly defined proposition. This text contains several intimations which may prove valuable to us. He hath made everything beautiful in its time. Here is a distinct announcement that beauty is a prime object in this world, and that beauty is very extensively sought by the Creator. He has not only made beautiful objects, but has made everything beautiful in its own time and manner. We must bear in mind that beauty is a distinct appeal to us over and above all the utilities and economies. A world that met all the needs of its creatures and nothing more would be standing proof that those creatures were simply in the animal order. When you build a stall for a horse, you plan for nothing beyond animal needs--warmth, ventilation, food, cleanliness, rest. Any touch of beauty beyond these is for your own eye. If you added beauty for the eye of your horse, you would thereby recognize in him an aesthetic nature like your own. So a world devoted to grey and angular utilities would be proof positive that we were a race of creatures which needed good housing and feeding and nothing more. But what shall we say of that knot of blue violets in the grass? They do not catch the eye of the grazing ox. The dog leaps over them in pursuit of game, or in wanton play. But when you, the Divine child, come, this utterance from the heart of your Father stops you as imperatively as a command. You drop on your knees beside the exquisite token from the heavens, and with full heart and suffused eyes read His loving thought as from an illuminated missal. Something has been said to you from on high that no other eye or ear on earth can interpret. And when you lift up your eyes upon the green and spacious earth, with its endlessly varied beauties of tint and form and grouping, and over all the deep and wide heavens with their unbearable glory of light and their flying cloud-forms or spaces of fadeless blue, the voice that speaks in your heart of hearts is from the depths within to the deeps of God without--deep calling unto deep: This is my Fathers house, my home, the very gate of heaven. Beauty in our world--Everything made beautiful in its season--is the divine, omnipresent witness that we are something more than physical beings, fit only for a world of stark utilities and necessities; we are the children of the supreme Intelligence and Imagination and Love. We follow Him with clear eye and responsive heart through the heights and depths of His creative work. Not a curve is added to leaf or petal, not a point of gold-dust on an insects wing, but is there for your eye and mine, and has answered its purpose when we lift our hearts in grateful recognition to Him who is the eternal fountain and source, of beauty. Our text declares that also He hath set the world in their hearts. I do not care much what the poets precise thought is here. I get this impression: We are so vitally joined to the world that it somehow gets immense power over us. It somehow gets in there to some central depths of us, with its overshadowing truths and great, overmastering moods. This is why I believe that it is salutary, actually medicinal, for us to get away from our artificial life as often as possible, and to be alone with the ancient, unperverted powers of the world. I, for one, can testify that no chapters of judgment, no penitential psalms, have ever searched and winnowed my soul like the living, awful presence of the primeval forest. The purity of the vast deep life there, stretched in unaffected sincerity to the heavens; the majesty of the great brotherhood of trees, the tranquillity, the chaste beauty, the solemnity, have enwrapped the soul and penetrated it, till one could only cover the face, as in the Divine presence, and cry, Unclean, unclean! God be merciful to me, a sinner! Oh, the awful purity of this great life about us! Crimes and degradation multiply just in proportion as men crowd together and forget the unstained life of the physical world, which, in normal conditions, holds such purifying uplifting influence over us as the life of a mother. The power of Nature has likewise a salutary ministry for us. Have you never felt that it is good for you to have the personal equation reduced to zero?--to have your individuality stripped of all the little conceits, all the factious importance, which by degrees attach to us in our relations to men? You have doubtless felt this wholesome reduction to your original quantity in presence of the power of Nature as nowhere else. We may also well consider how the stability and unchangeableness of Nature hold us to truth. The same great truths from age to age are reiterated in precisely the same terms, until our slow hearts are compelled to learn. When we see men so careful and fearful respecting their little theories and notions one can hardly repress a smile of pity. As if the heavens and the earth were not keeping faith with God, their Creator, and would, sooner or later, bring all our little systems to terms! We make a little scheme of the heavenly bodies, and build a queer little religious doctrine respecting the earth, and read our Bibles and say our prayers accordingly, and fight among ourselves over our petty theory. But the stars hold on their courses; the earth swings in its orbit, turns on its axis. The truth is beaten in and in, age after age, until we get something like a rational astronomy. Then we have to begin to retranslate our Bibles, reconstruct our theologies, and adjust our thinking to the illimitable universe, and enlarge our thoughts of God by the same great measure. The last suggestion of our poet is mystery. Man cannot find out the work that God hath done from the beginning, even unto the end. And we praise Him for it! For what could equal the misery of living even for a year in an exhausted world I It would be to mind and soul a strait-jacket and a darkened cell. (J. H. Ecob, D. D.)
All thirsts beautiful in their season
The sentiment of the beautiful is universal. We lavish money, we expend strength, we incur dangers, we submit to inconveniences to gratify it. Now, what is the significance of this? What are the part and power of beauty in human life? Of course, the beautiful--like any other gift of life, like genius or wealth--may be used unspiritually, perverted so as even to minister to sensuousness and sin. In its art-forms no people ever worshipped the beautiful like the Greeks, and few peoples developed greater sensuousness. Every gift is a possibility of corresponding evil; no lights lead astray like lights from heaven. The real question is, whether in the right and purposed use of it, whether as interpreted and used by religious feeling, the beautiful has not a high and potent ministry in life; and whether, therefore, it is not a religious obligation so to use it, to nurture the sense of it, to seek gratifications for it, and to make it a minister of devout thought and feeling. The beautiful is much more than a mere gratification of the senses; although even this were not an unworthy ministry. One of the materialistic theories of our day is, that uses and fitnesses of things are not the result of creative design, but of natural selection, or of practical necessity. Nature produces the eye because man needs to see, and teeth because he needs to eat. But what is the causation of beauty? What principle of natural selection, what necessity of use, produces the plumage of the bird, the pencilling of the leaf? Is not beauty the absolute creation of God, and has it not a special religious ministry? Beauty, if I may reverently say so, is Gods taste, Gods art, Gods manner of workmanship. Beauty is the necessary conception of the Creators thought, the necessary product of His hand; variety in beauty is the necessary expression of His infinite mind. It is part of the perfection of Gods works, part of the perfection of God Himself; like truth, like holiness, like beneficence, like graciousness. We infer, therefore, that beauty is part of our human perfection also; that unbeautiful things are defective things. Beauty is not intended to minister to a mere idle sentiment. It is a minister to our moral nature. It is part of our religious culture and responsibility; so far as we can control them, we are as responsible for ideas and things of beauty as for ideas and things of truth and purity. In corroboration of all this we might adduce the recognitions and inculcations of the beautiful which we find in Scripture. Even in the physical beauty of nature the writers of the Bible have a rejoicing appreciation which we find in no other ancient literature. It is not difference of race that accounts for it, it is difference of culture. It is the deeper, more pervading sense of God; it is the religious sentiment of the soul. Unlovely passions, morbid tempers, hard goodness, ascetic forms of religious life, are repugnant to the sentiment of the Bible. In everything it inculcates beauty and joy; so that beauty has a moral basis, moral elements enter into it. How, then, does it minister to goodness in practical life? May not we say that there is a natural congruity between beauty and moral goodness? All sin, all wrong, are unbeautiful, even to the instinctive sense. It is vain to ask why. God has so made us. And because we are so made, vice, wrong, moral pollution, can never be made beautiful, can never satisfy our feeling, produce in us complacency and rest. On the other hand, we are equally constrained to deem all good things beautiful. We may not do them; we may not like them; our evil passion may disparage them; but we are compelled to admire them. The truth of things is too strong for even evil passion. Moral feeling will admire what passion dislikes; the most vicious never call goodness hideous. In this way, then, through the constitution that God has given us, through the moral order that He has established, the beautiful is a minister to goodness; the wrong thing that we do does violence to our sense of the beautiful. And the nearer to perfection men get, the more they are affected by the beautiful. In nature, in art, in poetry, in music, in social surroundings, the man of largest culture has the keenest sense of the beautiful; the man whose sense of God is deepest, whose holiness is highest, whose spiritual sensibilities are keenest, has the greatest appreciation of both physical and moral beauty. Nothing excites so much admiration as noble character, and the virtues that constitute it. It follows that the highest attainment of beauty is possible only to the good. What influence character has upon personal beauty! Mere features do not constitute the beauty of a face. An unbeautiful soul will make the finest face repellent. Beautiful expression irradiates the plainest features, so that the sense of plainness shall be altogether lost. Some faces charm you like a picture, hold you spellbound like a talisman. It is the beautiful soul that irradiates them--the purity, the unselfishness, the nobleness, the love. The artistic sense is overpowered by the instinctive moral admiration. The ministries of beauty are manifold. It ministers to goodness. I could not, I think, so love God if His works were repellent by their ugliness, instead of attractive by their beauty. To how much in both mind and heart they appeal! I yearn for a greater knowledge, a closer communion with Him, who adorns with so much beauty even His lowliest works. The religiousness of the Bible is more to us because of its eloquence and imaginative beauty, its glorious Psalms, its exciting and pathetic histories, its sublime prophecies. How the New Jerusalem fascinates and wins us by its pictured glories! Beauty ministers to love. When I look upon the countenance of wife or child, of friend or even stranger, inspired and made beautiful by some noble sentiment of virtue, piety, personal affection, patriotism, philanthropy, self-sacrifice, how easy it is to excite level Thus beauty is one of the ministries--ordained by God--of religion, virtue, affection, amiability. Beauty, therefore, is to be cultured; as gentleness is, as tenderness is, as unselfishness is. It is a vital part of our being, and cannot be neglected without injury to the rest. Social life is to be filled with amenities; family life is to be made gentle and graceful by courteous manners, by warm sympathies, by varied culture of literature and art, by bright and gladdening pleasures, as well as by rudimentary virtues and pieties. Church life is to be made gracious and joyous, by refined modes of fellowship and service, by culture of worship, and by gentle, loving, helpful charities of feeling and speech. In all relations personal goodness is to be adorned by gracious feeling and by divining love, by things that are lovely and of good report, by the gentleness of Christ, by the ornament of a meek and quiet spirit, by the crowning graces of the beatitudes. In every possible enumeration and array of the beatitudes of a holy life, the greatest of these is charity. (H. Allen, D. D.)
The beauty of change and glory of permanence
I prefer the reading of the margin of the R.V.: He hath made everything beautiful in its time; also He hath set eternity in their heart.
1. That the world as God has made it, and life as He has ordained it, have the charm of variety. He hath made everything beautiful in its time. It is a part of the Divine order of things that there should be seasons; for instance, that there should be seasons of the year. God made summer, said the inspired writer, but he also said that God made winter. Apart from the latter assurance, some men might have doubted it. Everybody can accept that. God made light. But it required an inspired assurance to convince men that He also made darkness, and it was night. Each of these is beautiful in its time; but out of its time it would lose its beauty. You men who go to London find that out in November. You go up in the morning, and at midday you have a night coming on. I have never yet seen a man who has said that anything that brings on night when there should be day is beautiful. In all that there is a sense of incongruity. If there be darkness, let it come at the proper hour: it will then bring soothing and restfulness beneath its sable wings. This teaches us a collateral truth which perhaps we are too apt to overlook. The curse of the world and of life is in its dislocation. Above all, man has lost his position. Now it is wonderful what mischief a little thing can do when it is out of its place. The other day I saw that a beautiful block had been battered. What was the matter? Oh, a little piece of type had been sucked up by the rollers in printing, and drawn to the surface of the block, and the cylinder passed over it, and thus marred its delicate beauty. That bit of type was beautiful in its place. It had a distinct meaning and mission of its own; but once out of its place, it not only lost its own beauty, but marred the beauty of something nobler than itself. If our organist were to play a wrong note, we should all feel it: a cold shudder would go through us. Why? It is true that even that note is in the organ; it has its place in there: but it was not meant to come in just where he in such a case put it; and that would make all the difference between harmony and discord. All the other notes would share its ignominy, and become apparently discordant with it; and even men like myself, who know little or nothing about music, would feel a cold shudder, when we should have felt the glow of response if that note had not come in at the wrong place. Further, the secret of the worlds discords is in its sin. When man sinned, he lost his position; he no longer occupied the place God intended him to occupy; and when he fell from his position, the whole creation fell with him. The whole creation groaneth and travaileth together in pain until now. What is it waiting for? For the manifestation of the sons of God. When man is brought back into his proper place, harmony shall be restored, not before. You see, therefore, the folly of visiting God with rebukes because of the miseries that abound on every hand. God never made these miseries. Everything was beautiful in its time according to the Divine order; but man has leapt out of his place, and when the greatest creature on Gods earth has lost his position, what must follow? Astronomers tell us that if one of those worlds that rush along their orbits were to lose its course, it would go on blundering through space and bringing discord with it wherever it went. Supposing such a world had the volition that man has, and wittingly and persistently departed from the course that God intended for it, and brought discord with it, would you find a difficulty in bringing home to the right quarter the responsibility of that discord?
2. That in the midst of lifes changes God has endued man with eternal attributes and longings. He hath set eternity in their heart. When men tell me that man is not immortal by nature, my own nature protests against it. I know that I am to live for ever, for good or ill. There are immortal yearnings in me which tell of powerful affinities for eternity which God has implanted there. It is this consciousness of eternity in man that is the compensating grace for all that would otherwise be distracting and discouraging in change and transiency. But there is also another aspect of this truth.
3. God, in putting eternal yearnings into mens hearts, has made it impossible for them to satisfy themselves with the joys which this world can supply. (D. Davies.)
He hath set the world in their heart.--
Eternity in man
God has set eternity in the heart of man. This explains--
I. Its sense of the emptiness of all mundane things. No more can the world satisfy what is in man than a dewdrop can quench the burning thirst of a lion. Its unbroken and unsilenceable cry after it has received all the world can give, is, More, more.
II. Its consciousness of the unstability of all things connected with our earthly life. The sense of mutation rests constantly and heavily on the soul. But this sense could not exist if there was not something in us that is unchanged and unchanging. As that rock, which lifts its majestic head above the ocean, and alone remains unmoved amidst the restless waves, and the passing fleets, is the only measure to the voyager of all that moves on the great world of waters, so the sense of the immutable, which Heaven has planted in our souls, is the standard by which alone we become conscious of the mutation of our earthly life.
III. Its yearning to look into the invisible. Inquiry into the reason of things is a deep and resistless instinct. In the child it is called curiosity, in the man, the philosophic spirit. But the reason of things is behind this sense, it is in the region of the invisible, and the invisible is the eternal. I see not my soul, and that is eternal, and its inquiries are after the eternal.
IV. Its constant anticipations of the future. Its past is gone, however long and eventful it might have been. Gone as a vision of the night. To the future it looks, onward is its anxious glance. It never is, but always to be blessed.
V. Its inexhaustibility by its productions. The more the fruitful tree produces, the less it will produce in the future, and it will at last exhaust itself by its productions. Not so with the soul. The more fruit it yields, the more fecundant it becomes. The more a man thinks, the more capable he is of thinking; the more he loves, the deeper becomes the fountains of affection within him.
VI. Its universal yearning for a God. Man as a race, says Liddon, is like those captains of whom we read, more than once, in history, that once having believed a throne to be within their grasp, they never could settle down again quietly as contented subjects. Man as man has a profound, an ineradicable instinct of his splendid destiny. He knows that the objects which meet his eye, that the average words which fall upon his ear, that the common thoughts and purposes and passions which haunt his heart and his brain, are very far indeed from being adequate to his real capacity. He wants God, nothing less than God Himself.
VII. Its abiding sense of personal identity. The old man who has passed through a long life of great changes, and whose bodily frame, too, has been several times exchanged, has, notwithstanding, an ineradicable belief that he is the same person as when a boy at school. He has no doubt of it. Bodies may be lost in bodies, but souls never lost in souls. Why this? It is because there is eternity in us. (Homilies.)
Eternity in the heart
He hath set eternity in their heart. Then perhaps if we look carefully we may find it. I look into the primitive heart of man, into the childlike and unsophisticated heart. What do I find? Do I find any traces of eternity? I find an instinct, which, being interpreted, seems to say: Im but a stranger here, heaven is my home. Here we have no continuing city; we seek one to come. I nightly pitch my moving tent a days march nearer home. In the heart of man, in Christendom and in savagedom, there is an instinct that time is not our home, that here we are only in tents, that here we sojourn, but do not abide, and the instinct is not born of fear nor of selfishness: the explanation is in my text, God hath set eternity in our hearts. Have we any further evidences of this implanting of eternity within us? When I go into my heart and listen, I hear a voice saying to me: This thou must do; this thou must not do. The voice does not speak in mere suggestion, offering friendly counsel. It speaks like a monarch in tones of command. It tells me that all things are not of one moral colour. Some things are morally black and some morally white, and I have to observe the distinction. Of the black, the voice says: Thou must not. Of the white, which it calls the right, the voice says: Thou must! I ask my fellow-man if he hears the same voice, and he answers: Yes, it speaks to me. I find that the voice speaks in every life. What is the voice? We call it conscience. But conscience has no birth in time. All the temporal explanations which have been attempted are painfully inadequate and futile. The voice of the Great Eternal speaks in that mighty tone. That secret voice which speaks to us of the eternal distinction between right and wrong finds its explanation in my text: God hath set eternity in their hearts. Can we find any further evidence? Look again into the heart of man. May we not say that in every heart there is a strange feeling after God? I know it may be numbed and blunted, but I dont think it can be altogether destroyed. Let me try to illustrate this. You know that hydrogen gas is considerably lighter than the atmosphere that is round about us. When you fill a substance with the gas, say the silk that forms a balloon, it seeks to rise above the heavier atmosphere around, just as a cork rises through water and rests upon its surface. The lighter element tugs and tugs, and seeks to get away into the finer and rarer regions above. Well, it seems as though our God had put into the make-up of a human being ethereal elements, spiritual longings and hungers, which seek to rise above the grossness of flesh and Lime, to find their home in purer regions beyond. A light gas must reach an atmosphere of its own rarity before it can be at rest. And these ethereal, spiritual elements within us, these implanted feelings, must rise into their own appropriate atmosphere, into communion with the great Spirit, before they can be at rest. Meanwhile, they tug at us, and we have all felt their tuggings! We have felt some good impulse tugging at us, tugging in the direction of God. When we have been walking with open eyes into gross and deliberate sin, we have felt the tugging of the lighter element within us, the spiritual feeling, seeking to lift us out of our grossness nearer to God. Call it by what name you will, there is something in every heart which makes for God, and will never be satisfied until it gets there. God has put a mouth in our hearts, a spiritual hunger, that He may draw us to seek satisfaction and rest where alone it can be found, in the presence and communion of the Eternal Spirit. He has put eternity in their heart. Now what are the consequences of this implanting? If eternity has been set within us as part of our very being, what must surely follow? The Eternal within us seeks the Eternal, and nothing but the Eternal will feed it. That mouth in the heart, that hunger of the spirit, can only be fed with one kind of bread, and that the Bread of Life. Now, what kind of efforts are men making to satisfy the eternity in their heart? Along what particular lines are they searching for bread? There was a book published some three or four years ago of extraordinary literary brilliancy and power. It speedily passed into many editions, it was most favourably reviewed, and appeared to make a great impression upon all who read it. I want to read you two or three lines from the preface, in which the author sums up the whole burden of the counsel which he desires to give to his countrymen: Stick to your work, and when your day is done, amuse and refresh yourselves. And he adds in the next sentence that this is wholesome doctrine. Wholesome doctrine! What are its ingredients? Two things--labour and pleasure. Follow those two and you are all right. But what about the eternity in my heart? I am not unmindful that labour is a glorious means of grace. A man can get rid of many a vicious humour by applying himself to work. But work may be altogether atheistic or temporal, and work that is atheistic or altogether temporal will leave a man full of hunger; it will not feed the eternity that God has set in his heart. If our work is to feed the eternity within us, the thought of the Eternal must be in our work. As it is with work so it is with pleasure. Pleasure of itself cannot feed the soul, but gaiety often goes hand in hand with spiritual leanness. If you take a low thought with you, then the pleasure which gratifies your body will starve your soul. But if you take into your pleasure the thought of the Eternal, then your pleasure is transformed into a soul-feeding joy. The thought of the Eternal in your pleasure feeds the eternity in your heart, but without that thought a life of gaiety is a life of emptiness, and will leave you at last with leanness for your soul, and with the mouth in your heart still hungering for the bread which has been so long denied. (J. H. Jowett, M. A.)
The world in the soul
I. The world is in every mans heart as a mental image. The men of the world whom we have known; the villages, towns, cities, which we have visited; the landscapes we have observed--in truth, all outside of us that have ever come under our notice have stamped their image on the heart. The photographs of all are within. Thus we carry within us all those parts and phases of the world that have ever come within the sweep of our observation.
II. The world is in every mans heart as a necessary influence. So many and so close are the ties with which the Creator has bound us to this world, that it comes into us as a mighty and constantly acting force. There are many affections planted in the heart that must bring the world into it as an active power. There is self-preservation. Our very subsistence so depends upon the cultivation of the fields, the exploration of the minerals, the navigating of the seas, the transactions of the market, and in working, in some way or other, in the outward world, that it necessarily absorbs such an amount of our attention, as to bring it into us as a most powerful force of action. There is social affection. There are boys and girls, men and women, on whom our affections are set--brothers, sisters, husbands, wives, father, mother, friends who are so near to our sympathies, that, without figure, we bring them into us. They live in us, and exert no small amount of influence upon the activities of our life. Had we the philanthropy of Christ, we should bear, as He did, the whole human world upon our hearts. There is the love of beauty. Mans instinct for the beautiful is deep and strong. This instinct not only brings the world near to him, but into him. The craving of the soul for the beautiful in form and colour and the grand in aspect gives this world, which abounds with the beautiful and sublime, a mighty power in the soul.
III. The world is in every mans heart as a great reality. The world is to every man according to the state of his soul; great or small, according to his conceptions; overspread with sadness or radiant with joy, according to his feelings; a scene of temptation to contaminate, or of discipline to refine, according to the ruling principles of the heart.
1. The character of the material world is to a man what he makes it. The world of the untutored rustic is very different from that of the man of science. What has made the difference--the difference in the state of intellect? The man of science has read and thought and investigated; and as he has done so, the world has grown in magnitude--m splendour, and in interest. Moreover, what a difference there is between the world of a cheerful and that of a gloomy man!
2. The character of the human world is to man what he makes of it. To the selfish all men are selfish; to the dishonest all men are dishonest; to the false all men are false; to the generous all men are generous.
3. The character of the God of the world is to man what he makes it. Polytheism is not confined to heathen lands where idols are made and worshipped. There is a certain kind of polytheism everywhere. The God the man worships is the God he has imaged to himself, and men have different images, according to the state of their own hearts. Hence, even in Christian theology, what different views we have of God! All go to the New Testament for arguments to support their views, and they succeed in getting them, for we can get from that Holy Book what we bring to it. Thus, even the God of the world is according to our hearts. To the pure Thou wilt show Thyself pure; and with the froward Thou wilt show Thyself froward.
Lessons:--
1. The greatness of the human soul. It has the capacity to receive, retain, reflect all outward things.
2. The duty of mental modesty. No man has absolute truths in him. All that he has are opinions formed by himself concerning those truths.
3. The necessity of soul culture. If you want a bright and lovely world--a world that you will enjoy as a paradise, you must endeavour to make the heart right.
4. The nature of the millennial glory. Change the worlds heart, fill it with truth, and love, and God, and it will have a new heaven and new earth--a new universe to live in.
5. The need of Divine influence. Who shall make these hearts right? Who shall repair and clean this beclouded mirror? Ah, who? We cannot do it ourselves. Nor can our fellow-men do it for us. This is Gods work. It is He who gives a new heart and a new spirit, and with that a new universe. (Homilist.)
Eternity
The difference between the splendid world of vegetation, with its myriad colours and its ever-changing life; between the animal world, with its studied gradations of form and of development--and man, is this: God hath set eternity in our hearts. All creation around us is satisfied with its sustenance, we alone have a thirst and a hunger for which the circumstances of our life have no meat and drink. In the burning noonday of lifes labour man sits--as the Son of Man once sat--by well-sides weary, and while others can slake their thirst with that, he needs a living water; while others go into cities to buy meat, he has need of and finds a sustenance that they know net of. Is not the strange, sad contrast, which is brought out before us here, true? Is not man a striking anomaly? He dwells amid the finite; he longs for the infinite. All the rest of creation can find enough to satisfy its wants--he cannot. He is like the bird that wings its way over the surging waters, seeking rest, and finding none, while the coarser thing can satisfy itself on the floating garbage. The truer and the nobler man is, the more certainly he feels all this, the more keenly he realizes eternity in his heart. There is none of us, however, who do not feel it sometimes. As you gaze on some setting sun, and its burning rays of gold seem to you like the very light of heaven across the glowing binges of her closing doors--as you stand amid some mountain solitude that rises like heavens ramparts against the sounds and strifes of earth--as some note of music seems to come from the soul of the organ and enter into thine--as some deep sorrow, or some deeper joy falls upon your life--in these, or other kindred experiences, the eternity which God has set in your heart will assert itself; you will feel in your soul the thirst of a life which cannot be satisfied, and which cannot end here. And why? Because God hath set eternity in our hearts. He has given us a hunger which can he satisfied only with the Bread of Life, a thirst which can be quenched only by the living water from the Rock of Ages. Well, granting the universal desire; granting the universal capacity; granting the almost universal conviction that there is such a life, may we not be deceived? That is the triumphant answer of some philosophers. Deceived! By whom? It is God who hath set eternity in our hearts. Do you mean we have been deceived by Him? Are, we, then, to believe that God sent the noblest, purest, best Teacher that ever visited this earth, and gave Him the moral illumination and power to dispel a thousand errors, and explode a hundred fallacies which ignorance had invented or superstition had nurtured, but left Him so ignorant upon this point--the one universal error--that it was the supreme sustenance of His own life and the very lever by which He did raise the world? Can you believe that? All that is best, truest, noblest in your souls rebels against the thought. O God, we trust Thee! We bow our heads before Thee in reverence for even daring to speak of it. We trust the word of Thy Incarnate Son! O Christ, we know Thy words were true when Thou saidst:--If it were not so I would have told you. Thou didst not tell us, and it is true! God hath set eternity in our hearts. Are we living worthy of it? Are we living as if we really believed it? The only way of doing so is by clinging close to Him, by dying with Him to all that He died to save us from, and living worthy of that life and immortality which He hath brought from out of the mists of speculation into the light of truth by His Gospel. Instead of the perhaps of philosophic speculation, we have, thank God, the Credo of Christianity. (T. T. Shore, M. A.)
The hope of immortality
1. Let us first take this text as it is given in our old Bible--He hath set the world in their heart. That is, the Creator hath set the world in the hearts of the children of men. This correspondence between the world without and the mind within is one of the most striking evidences of wisdom and the beneficence of the Creator. You see it in those outworks of the mind--those five senses. Between them and the qualities of the world outside there is a correspondence on which all the activity and movement of life depend. All the senses are inlets by which the forms and the glory of the world pass inwards to be set in the heart of man. But it is when you go a little further into the mind itself that you fully see the beneficence of the Creator. Take, for instance, what seems to be referred to in this verse--the sense of beauty in the mind. Beauty exists in the world in a thousand forms--in the lines of light, in the currents of the wind, in the circle of the moon and of the sun, in the forms of leaves and plants; and so on. But what would it all be if there were not in the mind a sense of beauty corresponding to it? Do you remember that ancient fancy of Plato that all knowledge is reminiscence--i.e. when the shapes of things present themselves to the senses they do not so much convey knowledge into the mind as wake up knowledge that is dormant in the mind. Have you not noticed when you looked for the first time on some glorious landscape that you felt as if you had known it all your life? So when you have met for the first time a fine specimen of human nature you had the impression that you had always been waiting for it. Why was it that Shakespeare, without any classical culture, was able with his Roman play to enter into the very spirit of the ancient world and in all his works to anticipate forms of society and describe how all possible forms of character would act in all possible circumstances? Was it not because, as another great poet has said, when he came into the world he brought all the world with him? Or, to put it in other words, God has set the world in his heart.
2. Secondly, let us take this text as it occurs in the margin of the R.V.
He hath set eternity in their heart. What is the meaning of that? Perhaps the meaning is suggested by the words which immediately follow--Man cannot find out the work that God hath done from the beginning even to the end. Great as is the satisfaction which the beautiful world gives to the mind of man, it is not a complete satisfaction; the questions of the mind are never all answered; the desires of the heart are never all satisfied. It is vaguely the Divine--something above the world, which you would fain be at. Many as are the things in the mind which find their corresponding satisfaction in the world, there is in the mind something deeper which reacheth forth to something above the world--to the Divine, the Infinite, and the Eternal. The whole Book of Ecclesiastes, from which this text is taken, may be said to consist of variations on this theme. It is a description of a splendid nature determined to find out all that the world contains for it, and to tear out of it its secret. From every one of his quests Solomon returned with the same verdict on his lips--All is vanity and vexation of spirit. And that, in every age, has been the verdict of every living soul that has sought its satisfaction in earthly things. It was the verdict of St. Francis that spring morning when he stood at the gate of Assisi, and looked down upon the smiling plain of Umbria, and yet felt in his own heart nothing but dust and ashes. It was the verdict of St. Augustine when, having lost a dearly-loved friend, he wept, and thought he would give up the ghost, and could no longer live in the town from which his friend had been taken away. He had tried friendship, learning, ambition, and honour; he had tried sensual gratification, and yet his heart was sick, unsatisfied, and broken. Yes, but the deep, searching mind of St. Augustine found out exactly what was the reason of his dissatisfaction, and expressed it in that immortal sentence which occurs in the first paragraph of his Confessions, Thou hast made each heart for Thyself, and it finds no rest until it rests in Thee. Blessed are they that discover that this is the reason of their disappointment and dissatisfaction.
3. Thirdly, there is one meaning that may be put on the words, He hath set eternity in their heart: and it is a very natural meaning--that the Creator has set in the human heart the hope and the desire of immortality. The Creator has put into us a conscience by which we judge the world round about us, but this conscience is very little satisfied with the world as it sees it. The conscience anticipates that in the world the righteous will always be prosperous and the unrighteous confounded. But how little that is the aspect of the world as at present constituted,--on every road the righteous man is bearing his cross amidst persecution and contempt, and the unrighteous lifts high his head while others bend before him. Therefore, the conscience anticipates another state of things where these difficulties will be redressed, where the righteous will be exalted, and where the unrighteous will be humbled. But this is only one of the pathways by which the mind arises to the idea of immortality. There are many others; in short, the Creator has set in the heart of man the desire and hope of immortality, and He has set it very deep. Now it can surely be shown that at a certain state of development the hope of immortality appears; and not only so, but that where this hope appears there sets in a new axis of development. When man realizes that he has before him not one life, but two, that he is not only the child of time, but the heir of eternity, he shoots up in moral stature, and a new dignity overspreads his existence. On the other hand, when, after being there, the hope of immortality perishes, it is as if there were extracted from the atmosphere a health-giving element, so that man becomes small and miserable. The late Professor Romanes, even before he became a Christian, confessed that the disappearance in his mind of the hope of immortality was like the disappearance of the sun from the firmament. It may be argued, indeed, that neither the universality of this belief, nor even of its exalting character, is any conclusive evidence that there actually is a future world corresponding to our desires; and that is quite proved if you take an atheistic view of the world. But if you take a theistic view of the world, I think the existence of the desire is evidence that it will be satisfied. God will not deceive His creatures. When the bird of passage, obeying the instinct which God has set in its heart, spreads its wings for the South, its Creator does not deceive it; there are sunny landscapes awaiting it where it goes. And do you think that, when the human spirit, rising out of selfishness and passion, spreads its wings for an immortal home, there is no paradise there to receive it? (J. Stalker, D. D.)
Eternity in mans heart
I. We cannot persuade ourselves that this present state of things is all with which we have to do, for God hath set eternity in our heart. We are lost in the thought of the duration, the magnitude, the grandeur of the material universe. Surely one might say: We have enough here to occupy and satisfy us: and yet something within us declares, This is not all. This is but the outward form; we want the real substance of which all this is but the shadow or the picture. This universe is passing and transient; we seek the permanent and eternal. These things, all of them, are but effects; our mind must, by the very law of its being, press on and up, and cannot rest content till a sufficient cause is found to account for them all. The eternal past and the eternal future are written deeply on the heart. We look back on the past, and we try to trace the long chain of events up to an eternal Creator. The soul looks on to the future, and, at that great Creators side, it sees itself passing unhurt through The wreck of ages and the crash of worlds, immortal as its Sire. One of the most valuable manuscripts of the New Testament, known to scholars as MS.C., is a palimpsest. The writing of the sacred text had grown dim or been carelessly washed away, and over it--for parchments were precious in those days--the works of some Syrian saint had been written. The old letters, however, had not been utterly obliterated; they began to peep through, and, by some chemical process, they were again made legible, and have been carefully deciphered. Eternity is written on our hearts by the finger of God; we cannot blot it utterly out. We try to cover it up; but the old writing ever and anon peeps through and takes us by surprise. I hold in my hand the thread with which to weave my life and destiny; but that thread comes to me out of the past and reaches far beyond me into the future. My life is short; but all eternity has been preparing for it, and it is meant to be a preparation for eternity to come. I am the lord of the world, and yet I feel there is One over me, a great eternal Person, from whom I come and to whom I go. Thus, in the midst of the order and beauty of the universe, man stands expectant, as some one puts it, like Elijah at Horeb, waiting for the still, small voice which will reveal the unseen and eternal. Conscience, reason, and heart are all athirst for God, the living God.
II. We cannot rest content with this world, for god has set eternity in our hearts, You tried to fill your heart and gain content by thinking of the money you had saved, of the pleasures with which your path of life was strewn, of your happy home and loving friends; but it was not satisfied. Doubts, fears, anxious questionings rose up ever and anon, and cast their dark shadow over you. You knew that all these things were transient and uncertain; and even while they lasted they did not fit into your desires and cravings at every point; they gave you much enjoyment, but not a settled peace. When you dared to think you looked forward with dread to loneliness and death and judgment. Eternity was in your heart, and time could not satisfy you. But there came a change. God had mercy on you. He wakened you thoroughly; He brought you to your right mind. Into the sanctuary of your spirit, where eternity is written, you entered reverently, and God was there. He spoke to you by His Word--that Word you had often read so carelessly; and you answered Him in prayer, in confession of sin, in supplication for mercy. Pardon was granted you in Jesus Christ; Gods favour was assured you; the earnest of the spirit was given you--eternal life was yours. As you passed out into the common walks and work of life all things seemed new. The world was brighter than it used to be, and yet smaller and more insignificant. Peace was yours, and sweet content. A fountain of joy and hope was welling up within you, which no loss or trial could dry up.
III. We need not despair about humanity, since God has set eternity in mans heart. Human nature is no sphinx; it is not a deception and a snare. The eye is made for light; and as it opens, lo! the light surrounds it. The appetite craves appropriate food, and, lo! corn appears on the world with man, and will grow wherever he can live. We seek companionship and love; we cannot help it; and, behold! the first thing the little child sees, as it begins to notice, is the lamp of love, held up to lighten his path through a dark and dangerous world. This longing after God and eternity--is there nothing provided to correspond to it? Surely God has not put eternity in mans heart simply to make him unhappy. Whence have I come? Why am I here? Whither am I going? Who is above me? How can I please Him? These questions press upon me. Surely an answer will be provided to them by that God whose I am, and by whom eternity has been set in my heart. At every point the revelation of God answers these desires and questionings. We feel there must be, behind the seen and temporal, another more enduring world; and as we turn to St. John
1. we hear that a Visitor has come from it, His mission authenticated by miracles, to bring us the very knowledge that we seek. The life was manifested, and we have seen it, and bear witness. This, then, is the message that we have heard of Him, and declare unto you--that God is light. And these things write we unto you that your joy may be full. We feel the world is not eternal; there must be some one, eternal and almighty, somewhere, to account for its existence; and the same apostle points to this very Being who came to teach and help us, and declares that all things were made by Him. He is the Son of God, Divine, eternal, the effulgence of Gods glory and the very image of His substance (Heb_1:3). We want to look into the eternal future, and to know what is in store for us, and, lo! each path of life is seen running to the judgment-seat; but, at that point, the paths divide--some pass downwards into the abode of darkness and woe eternal, where sin, and the misery sin brings, reign supreme; and others pass upwards to the sweet and holy heaven, where 144,000, clad in white robes, follow the Lamb, and serve God day and night for evermore. The most practical question comes last, and is not left unanswered: How am I to prepare for eternity, so as to escape the woe and share the glory? It is to answer that question, more than any other, the revelation of God is given. Christ, the Son of God, the Maker of the worlds, took up His peoples burden, and bore it to the death; through His sacrifice, which God has accepted, there is life and peace for me. Christ stands out, and says: I am the Way. He unbinds our chains; He gives pardon, purity, and peace. I have only to come to Him, to trust Him, to follow Him, and in Him eternal life is mine. (W. Park, M. A.)
Eternity in the heart
What meaning, what dignity, what surpassing hope and fear should lie in this--that God hath set eternity in your heart!
I. It ought to calm you. Recall the days of the past week--its toils, anxieties and cares, vexations and disappointments--how did you bear yourself with them? Were you despondent, did you lose self-control, did your blood boil to fever-heat, and were you rebellious? Do you think that such would have been the manner of your lille if you had turned your eyes inwardly, and quietly faced that Guest with the unfathomable eyes and awe-inspiring grace--Eternity? Get more intercourse with that awful yet august Guest in your soul--Eternity--it will keep you calm in hours when you would be otherwise grasping at the bolts of Jove.
II. It ought to inspire you. What an impression it should make on mind and heart, when we express in words the destiny which belongs to us all, I am to live for ever! The realization of this tremendous thought should give amplitude, probity, strength, and gentleness to our lives--liberate them from ascendancy of petty aims and the discomposedness of trifling worries--expose the immeasurable folly of letting ourselves drift under impulses of irresponsible opinion and unregulated passion; relax the destructive pressure of materialistic thought and secularistic care, and fasten us indissolubly to Him, whose fortress shall survive the crash of worlds, and whose glory shall be the inconceivable felicity of the faithful and triumphant.
III. It ought to ennoble you. Man is, let us say, made up of body and spirit. But there are persons who live in the body only; they do not live in the spirit, and, according to the Bible, that is not living, it is death. Man cannot live with any nobleness unless those high energies are at work whose impetus is originated by the presence in his heart of eternity. (D. B. Williams.)
Noble discontent
I. The reason of mans discontent. Discontent is an unnatural, strange thing, in a world full to overflowing, as this earth is, of wonders, beauties, and all good things, and with natures fitted as ours are, to our condition in such marvellous wise. Yet has there ever lived a man without deep, serious, frequent discontent? The sensual and frivolous are, probably, supremely satisfied so long as they can turn at their will from one excitement to another; but it is otherwise with all who think, and inquire, and feel the mysteries in which all their questionings end. All allow that the pleasures of mind and soul are loftier and nobler than the pleasures of sense; yet, in the degree in which a man shares them he shares discontent, hankers after something he cannot find: he knows too much for his peace. It is not mere eternity which thoughtful man desires, not even the perpetuity of things as they are; but eternal life worthy of the noble name, and in harmony with his highest nature, in which the good he aspires after shall be attained, and the evil he deplores be removed, and the unseen God be beheld with joy, and served with undecaying energies.
II. The mercy of mans discontent. Is it a paradox to say that we are better for having these unsatisfied cravings? that to be without them would be to sink in the level of creation? Picture some tropical forest, where vegetable and animal life luxuriate to the full, and where the swarms exuberant with life know no discontent. Would you give up your high though unsatisfied yearnings for bright but unreasoning life like theirs? Or, when, in spring, you wander through the fields, burdened with cares, and doubts, and fears about the future, while the birds, in utter freedom from care, are filling the air with song, would you change with them, and part with your hopes of an endless life, your longings for the Father in heaven? Or, if, with unsatisfied desires of this noble kind, you meet with one who cares for nothing higher than the worldly wealth, and ease, and pleasure he enjoys, would you change your noble discontent for his ignoble content with what perishes in the using? Remember two things. Our discontent should be of this noble sort--aspiration after worthier, divine life, truth, purity, goodness, God; not, as often, base craving for money, ease, repute; and our longings, being a mercy, a dignity, should be cherished and cultivated. We must let the eternity we crave have its due, and live by faith in the unseen.
III. The remedy for mans discontent. We cannot get rid of it till we reach eternity; but it need not remain a painful mystery. Christ has come, and shown us God and immortality; He bids us move cheerfully towards the Fathers house, and pursue the crown of life. And looking on the things unseen and eternal, and pursuing them with faith, and hope, and patience, and courage, our discontent will be forgotten, first in effort, then in victory. (T. M. Herbert, M. A.)
Eternity in the heart
I. Eternity is set in every human heart. The expression may be either a declaration of the actual immortality of the soul, or it may mean, an I rather suppose it to do, the consciousness of eternity which is part of human nature. The former idea is no doubt closely connected with the latter, and would here yield an appropriate sense. In our embers is something that doth live. Whatsoever befalls the hairs that get grey and thin, and the hands that become wrinkled and palsied, and the heart that is worn out by much beating, and the blood that clogs and clots at last, and the filmy eye, and all the corruptible frame; yet, as the heathen said, I shall not all die, but deep within this transient clay-house, that must crack and fall and be resolved into the elements out of which it was built up, there dwells an immortal guest, an undying personal self. In the heart, the inmost spiritual being of every man, eternity, in this sense of the word, does dwell. But, probably, the other interpretation of these words is the truer,--that the Preacher is here asserting, not that the heart or spirit is immortal, but that, whether it is or no, in the heart is planted the thought, the consciousness of eternity--and the longing after it. The little child taught by some grandmother Lois, in a cottage, knows what she means when she tells him you will live for ever, though both scholar and teacher would be puzzled to put it into other words. When we say eternity flows round this bank and shoal of time--men know what we mean. Heart answers to heart--and in each heart lies that solemn thought--for ever! That eternity which is set in our hearts is not merely the thought of ever-during Being, or of an everlasting order of things to which we are in some way related. But there are connected with it other ideas besides those of mere duration. Men know what perfection means. They understand the meaning of perfect goodness; they have the notion of infinite wisdom and boundless love. These thoughts are the material of all poetry, the thread from which the imagination creates all her wondrous tapestries. By the make of our Spirits, by the possibilities that dawn dim before us, by the thoughts whose very sweetness yieldeth proof that they were born for immortality,--by all these and a thousand other signs and facts in every human life we say--God has set eternity in their hearts!
II. The disproportionate between this our nature and the world in which we dwell. Every other creature presents the most accurate correspondence between nature and circumstances, powers and occupations. Man alone is like some poor land-bird blown out to sea and floating half-drowned with clinging plumage on an ocean where the dove finds no rest for the sole of her foot, or like some creature that loves to glance in the sunlight but is plunged into the deepest recesses of a dark mine. In the midst of a universe marked by the nicest adaptations of creatures to their habitation, man alone, the head of them all, presents the unheard-of anomaly that he is surrounded by conditions which do not fit his whole nature, which are not adequate for all his powers, on which he cannot feed and nurture his whole being. Is this present life enough for you? Sometimes you fancy it is. This world not enough for me! you say--yes! it is, only let me get a little more of it, and keep what I get, and I shall be all right. So then--a little more is wanted, is it? And that little more will always be wanted, and besides it, the guarantee of permanence will always be wanted, and failing these, there will ever be a hunger that nothing can fill which belongs to earth. A great botanist made what he called a floral clock to mark the hour of the day by the opening and closing of flowers. It was a graceful and yet a pathetic thought. One after another they spread their petals, and their varying colours glow in the light. But one after another they wearily shut their cups, and the night falls, and the latest of them folds itself together and all are hidden away in the dark. So our joys and treasures--were they sufficient did they last, cannot last. After a summers day comes a summers night, and after a brief space of them comes winter, when all are killed and the leafless trees stand silent.
III. The possible satisfying of our souls. The Preacher in his day learned that it was possible to satisfy the hunger for eternity which had once seemed to him a questionable blessing. Standing at the centre, he saw order instead of chaos, and when he bad come back, after all his search, to the old simple faith of peasants and children in Judah, to fear God and keep His commandments, he understood why God had set eternity in mans heart, and then flung him out, as if in mockery, amidst the stormy waves of the changeful ocean of time. And we, who have a further word from God, may have a fuller and yet more blessed conviction, built upon our own happy experience, if we choose, that it is possible for us to have that deep thirst slaked, that longing appeased. We have Christ to trust to and to love. As in mysterious and transcendent union the Divine takes into itself the human in that person of Jesus, and Eternity is blended with Time; we, trusting Him and yielding our hearts to Him, receive into our poor lives an incorruptible seed, and for us the soul-satisfying realities that abide for ever mingle with and are reached through the shadows that pass away. (A. Maclaren, D. D.)
The child of eternity
Here, indeed, is a bit of revelation. This man sees, at this instant, the real reason of the unrest of humanity, the real reason of the endless strife, the unquenchable thirst, the unsatisfied endeavours of himself and his fellow-men. Do you know, says the great French preacher Lamennais, what it is that makes man the most suffering of creatures? It is that he has one foot in the finite and the other in the infinite, and that he is torn asunder, not by four horses, as in the terrible old times, but between two worlds. If the Infinite God, the Creator, is a Personality, His children, who derive their personality from Him, must be sharers of His infinite attributes, and must, therefore, have wants, wishes, hopes, aspirations, needs which are limitless. If man possesses such a nature as this, whose capacities are simply boundless, if God hath set eternity in his heart, his conduct here on the earth will give some indication of this momentous fact. Perhaps the great phenomenon of human progress is one sign of it. The race appears to be always going forward. The further the race goes in the path of spiritual and moral attainment, the larger is the prospect and the promise of future growth. To the other animals no such progress seems to be possible. The writer of Ecclesiastes argues that man is no better than the beasts; he could scarcely have noted the capacity for progress which man possesses in such a marked degree, and which the beasts do not possess. Here is a sign of that divine endowment which we are considering. Viewed on its intellectual and spiritual side, the human race gives no hint of a term of existence. If anything is clear in the study of moral forces it is that the life of the spirit is steadily progressive. Stagnation and decay may indeed overtake tribes and peoples, but only when they forsake the ideals of humanity and turn aside to the worship of that which is beneath them. And the destruction visited upon these will show at length to the blundering generations the way of life. The race profits by the retributions of nations and people who persist in disobeying the organic law of humanity. It is a costly kind of tuition, but it seems to be the only effectual kind. Under its instruction the race seems to be slowly learning the way of life. And the evidence is strong that that way is an upward way. The case is clearer when we study the development of the individual soul. Here there is no sign of a term. In knowledge, for example, in mental power, is there any such thing as a fixed limit? Is not every advance in knowledge accompanied, not only by an increase in the power of knowing, but also by an increase in the desire to know? Even more obvious is mans kinship with the infinite when we consider his moral and spiritual nature. Here, surely, are possibilities that are boundless. The ideals which present themselves to human thought are not subject to quantitative measurement. Limit there is none; to think of one would be immoral. Be ye, therefore, perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect. That is the lowest standard that any man can fix. He will fall far short of it, but he can aim at nothing lower. And not only is this divine endowment seen in the boundless possibilities of good which open before the heroic and aspiring soul, it is seen not less in the perversions of character with which we are too familiar. Ponder the story of human ambition as it is outlined in such a life as that of Xerxes, or Alexander, or Napoleon, as it is displayed in such stupendous monuments of egoism as Babylon or Nineveh must have been, as the Pyramids of Egypt exhibit to us until this day. It is not toward royal palaces or mortuary piles that the insatiable spirit of man is directed in this age so much as toward bank accounts and accumulations of capital. The growth of a plutocracy in this democratic age--what a spectacle it is! How do you explain this towering greed which heaps millions on millions, which compasses land and sea to add to accumulations that can never be used? A friend of mine who is prospering, so far as this worlds goods are concerned, but who is freely using his gains in what he esteems to be humane and helpful ministries, and who is fully resolved not to die a rich man, told me not long ago that for several months he had lost no opportunity of inquiring of men whom he met who were getting rich rapidly why they were doing it. What is your reason for heaping up money? he asks them. What do you want so much for? And I tell you the truth, he said to me, when I say that not one of them gave me an answer that was really intelligible; not one gave an explanation that I could feel satisfied his own reason. Most of them had something to say about their families; but when I pushed the question whether they thought it really a good thing for children to leave them large amounts of wealth, they could never answer confidently. It was perfectly evident to me, in every case, that these men were driven on by an unreasoning craving, a kind of craze, that they wanted it, mainly, just for the sake of having it. And I found it very difficult to make most of them think that anybody could be actuated by any other motive. When I said to them, I am not in business simply or mainly for the sake of making money; if there was nothing in it but just piling one dollar on top of another it would have no interest for me, they looked at me in blank amazement. To my mind we have here an appalling example of the perversions of the highest powers. What makes men capable of this limitless ambition and greed is the endowment which they have received as the children of God. It is because He hath set eternity in their hearts that they have the power to compass the world in their insatiable desires. And yet how manifestly this is a case of perversion! It is the direction of infinite powers to finite ends. And the restlessness and misery of the world are largely due to this one fact: that men into whose hearts God has set eternity are striving to fill themselves with the gains of time. For this immortal hunger there is a satisfying portion even here. For God is in His world, my friends; He is always here; He is the one ever-present, inescapable Fact, the foundation of every reality with which we deal. How does He reveal Himself? One may find many answers, all inadequate, for He whom the heaven of heavens cannot contain cannot be expressed in any phrase that we can fashion. But we may say that we know Him in this world as Truth and Beauty and Love. And the soul that delights in truth, that rejoices in beauty, that lives for love, has entered into life. For the eternity that is in our hearts this is the provision. These are the elements of that knowledge of God with which Jesus seeks to lead those who will follow Him. This is what He is pointing to when He says, He that drinketh of the water that I shall give him shall never thirst, but it shall be in him a well of water springing up into everlasting life. (W. Gladden, D. D.)
No man can find out the work that God maketh from the beginning to the end.--
The Divine Worker and the human student
I. God is ever working.
1. In nature. That same power which created our world with all its variety of life and phenomena is constantly exerted in sustaining and governing the same; that same hand which first marshalled the hosts of heaven is ever engaged preserving the regularity of their movements in their vast orbits.
2. In providence. In the raising up and the removal of the wise and great, in the rise and fall of empires, we see His agency originating, or guiding, or overruling events.
3. In redemption. God was in Christ reconciling the world unto Himself. By His Holy Spirit, and by various Christian ministries, He is ever working for the salvation of men from sin.
II. Man is engaged in endeavouring to understand the work of god. He seeks to find out the work that God maketh. Man is inquisitive as to Gods work in the physical creation; the astronomer, the geologist, the naturalist, the physiologist, and others endeavour to penetrate into the mystery of the Divine work in the material realms. The psychologist seeks to understand the work that God maketh in the realm of mind and heart. Man also scrutinizes the work of God in providence and in redemption. This is right. Reverently prosecuted, this study, of the work that God maketh is most quickening, inspiring, and saving m its influence on the student.
III. Man is unable to understand fully the work of god.
1. Man can understand the work of God in part. He can find out--
(1) That the perfection of Gods work in man has been marred, destroyed.
(2) That by his own unaided efforts man is utterly unable to recover his lost perfection.
(3) That God has provided a glorious Restorer in Jesus Christ.
(4) That we need guidance and help in the walk and work of life.
(5) That infallible guidance and inexhaustible strength are given to those who seek them from God. Comp. Pro_3:4-5; Deu_33:25; 2Co_12:9.
(6) That there is a state of being beyond this present and visible one, in which our state and position will be determined by the character which we form here and now. Here also there are mysteries, but the great facts are very clearly revealed.
2. Man cannot understand the work of God fully. This is true as regards the material realm Every part of nature still has her mysteries to man. Nor are we able to understand fully Gods work in providence. There are chapters in the history of the human race which are inscrutable enigmas to us when we consider them in relation to His control of human affairs. Even in our own lives there are painful mysteries, e.g. privations, bereavements, afflictions, etc. Our very being is a mystery to us. We cannot understand much; we are speedily bewildered with difficulties, and troubled with what are to us dark and sad anomalies; but let us rejoice in the fact that God maketh everything beautiful in its time: the deformity, and sin, and sorrow are not of His making. Let us rejoice, too, that He will work on until order is developed out of the moral chaos of this world, and the sin-cursed earth blossoms into an Eden of unfading beauty. (W. Jones.)
The Biblical Illustrator, edited by Joseph S. Exell (c. 1880s–1900s) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
Alexander MacLaren 1905 · Public Domain
Ecclesiastes
ETERNITY IN THE HEART
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Ecc 3:11.
There is considerable difficulty in understanding what precise meaning is to be attached to these words, and what precise bearing they have on the general course of the writer’s thoughts; but one or two things are, at any rate, quite clear.
The Preacher has been enumerating all the various vicissitudes of prosperity and adversity, of construction and destruction, of society and solitude, of love and hate, for which there is scope and verge enough in one short human life; and his conclusion is, as it always is in the earlier part of this book, that because there is such an endless diversity of possible occupation, and each of them lasts but for a little time, and its opposite has as good a right of existence as itself; therefore, perhaps, it might be as well that a man should do nothing as do all these opposite things which neutralise each other, and the net result of which is nothing. If there be a time to be born and a time to die, nonentity would be the same when all is over. If there be a time to plant and a time to pluck, what is the good of planting? If there be a time for love and a time for hate, why cherish affections which are transient and may be succeeded by their opposites?
And then another current of thought passes through his mind, and he gets another glimpse somewhat different, and says in effect, ‘No! that is not all true-God has made all these different changes, and although each of them seems contradictory of the other, in its own place and at its own time each is beautiful and has a right to exist.’ The contexture of life, and even the perplexities and darknesses of human society, and the varieties of earthly condition-if they be confined within their own proper limits, and regarded as parts of a whole-they are all co-operant to an end. As from wheels turning different ways in some great complicated machine, and yet fitting by their cogs into one another, there may be a resultant direct motion produced even by these apparently antagonistic forces.
But the second clause of our text adds a thought which is in some sense contrasted with this.
The word rendered ‘world’ is a very frequent one in the Old Testament, and has never but one meaning, and that meaning is eternity. ‘He hath set eternity in their heart.’
Here, then, are two antagonistic facts. They are transient things, a vicissitude which moves within natural limits, temporary events which are beautiful in their season. But there is also the contrasted fact, that the man who is thus tossed about, as by some great battledore wielded by giant powers in mockery, from one changing thing to another, has relations to something more lasting than the transient. He lives in a world of fleeting change, but he has ‘eternity’ in ‘his heart.’ So between him and his dwelling-place, between him and his occupations, there is a gulf of disproportion. He is subjected to these alternations, and yet bears within him a repressed but immortal consciousness that he belongs to another order of things, which knows no vicissitude and fears no decay. He possesses stifled and misinterpreted longings which, however starved, do yet survive, after unchanging Being and eternal Rest, And thus endowed, and by contrast thus situated, his soul is full of the ‘blank misgiving of a creature moving about in worlds not realised.’ Out of these two facts-says our text-man’s where and man’s what, his nature and his position, there rises a mist of perplexity and darkness that wraps the whole course of the divine actions-unless, indeed, we have reached that central height of vision above the mists, which this Book of Ecclesiastes puts forth at last as the conclusion of the whole matter-’Fear God, and keep His commandments.’ If transitory things with their multitudinous and successive waves toss us to solid safety on the Rock of Ages, then all is well, and many mysteries will be clear. But if not, if we have not found, or rather followed, the one God-given way of harmonising these two sets of experiences-life in the transient, and longings for the eternal-then their antagonism darkens our thoughts of a wise and loving Providence, and we have lost the key to the confused riddle which the world then presents. ‘He hath made everything beautiful in his time: also He hath set Eternity in their heart, so that no man can find out the work that God maketh from the beginning to the end.’
Such, then, being a partial but, perhaps, not entirely inadequate view of the course of thought in the words before us, I may now proceed to expand the considerations thus brought under our notice in them. These may be gathered up in three principal ones: the consciousness of Eternity in every heart; the disproportion thence resulting between this nature of ours and the order of things in which we dwell; and finally, the possible satisfying of that longing in men’s hearts-a possibility not indeed referred to in our text, but unveiled as the final word of this Book of Ecclesiastes, and made clear to us in Jesus Christ.
I. Consider that eternity is set in every human heart.
The expression is, of course, somewhat difficult, even if we accept generally the explanation which I have given. It may be either a declaration of the actual immortality of the soul, or it may mean, as I rather suppose it to do, the consciousness of eternity which is part of human nature.
The former idea is no doubt closely connected with the latter, and would here yield an appropriate sense. We should then have the contrast between man’s undying existence and the transient trifles on which he is tempted to fix his love and hopes. We belong to one set of existences by our bodies, and to another by our souls. Though we are parts of the passing material world, yet in that outward frame is lodged a personality that has nothing in common with decay and death. A spark of eternity dwells in these fleeting frames. The laws of physical growth and accretion and maturity and decay, which rule over all things material, do not apply to my true self. ‘In our embers is something that doth live.’ Whatsoever befalls the hairs that get grey and thin, and the hands that become wrinkled and palsied, and the heart that is worn out by much beating, and the blood that clogs and clots at last, and the filmy eye, and all the corruptible frame; yet, as the heathen said, ‘I shall not all die,’ but deep within this transient clay house, that must crack and fall and be resolved into the elements out of which it was built up, there dwells an immortal guest, an undying personal self. In the heart, the inmost spiritual being of every man, eternity, in this sense of the word, does dwell.
‘Commonplaces,’ you say. Yes; commonplaces, which word means two things-truths that affect us all, and also truths which, because they are so universal and so entirely believed, are all but powerless. Surely it is not time to stop preaching such truths as long as they are forgotten by the overwhelming majority of the people who acknowledge them. Thank God! the staple of the work of us preachers is the reiteration of commonplaces, which His goodness has made familiar, and our indolence and sin have made stale and powerless.
My brother! you would be a wiser man if, instead of turning the edge of statements which you know to be true, and which, if true, are infinitely solemn and important, by commonplace sarcasm about pulpit commonplaces, you would honestly try to drive the familiar neglected truth home to your mind and heart. Strip it of its generality and think, ‘It is true about me. I live for ever. My outward life will cease, and my dust will return to dust-but I shall last undying.’ And ask yourselves-What then? ‘Am I making “provision for the flesh, to fulfil the lusts thereof,” in more or less refined fashion, and forgetting to provide for that which lives for evermore? Eternity is in my heart. What a madness it is to go on, as if either I were to continue for ever among the shows of time, or when I leave them all, to die wholly and be done with altogether!’
But, probably, the other interpretation of these words is the truer. The doctrine of immortality does not seem to be stated in this Book of Ecclesiastes, except in one or two very doubtful expressions. And it is more in accordance with its whole tone to suppose the Preacher here to be asserting, not that the heart or spirit is immortal, but that, whether it is or no, in the heart is planted the thought, the consciousness of eternity-and the longing after it.
Let me put that into other words. We, brethren, are the only beings on this earth who can think the thought and speak the word-Eternity. Other creatures are happy while immersed in time; we have another nature, and are disturbed by a thought which shines high above the roaring sea of circumstance in which we float.
I do not care at present about the metaphysical puzzles that have been gathered round that conception, nor care to ask whether it is positive or negative, adequate or inadequate. Enough that the word has a meaning, that it corresponds to a thought which dwells in men’s minds. It is of no consequence at all for our purpose, whether it is a positive conception, or simply the thinking away of all limitations. ‘I know what God is, when you do not ask me.’ I know what eternity is, though I cannot define the word to satisfy a metaphysician. The little child taught by some grandmother Lois, in a cottage, knows what she means when she tells him ‘you will live for ever,’ though both scholar and teacher would be puzzled to put it into other words. When we say eternity flows round this bank and shoal of time, men know what we mean. Heart answers to heart; and in each heart lies that solemn thought-for ever!
Like all other of the primal thoughts of men’s souls, it may be increased in force and clearness, or it may be neglected and opposed, and all but crushed. The thought of God is natural to man, the thought of right and wrong is natural to man-and yet there may be atheists who have blinded their eyes, and there may be degraded and almost animal natures who have seared their consciences and called sweet bitter and evil good. Thus men may so plunge themselves into the present as to lose the consciousness of the eternal-as a man swept over Niagara, blinded by the spray and deafened by the rush, would see or hear nothing outside the green walls of the death that encompassed him. And yet the blue sky with its peaceful spaces stretches above the hell of waters.
So the thought is in us all-a presentiment and a consciousness; and that universal presentiment itself goes far to establish the reality of the unseen order of things to which it is directed. The great planet that moves on the outmost circle of our system was discovered because that next it wavered in its course in a fashion which was inexplicable, unless some unknown mass was attracting it from across millions of miles of darkling space. And there are ‘perturbations’ in our spirits which cannot be understood, unless from them we may divine that far-off and unseen world, that has power from afar to sway in their orbits the little lives of mortal men. It draws us to itself-but, alas! the attraction may be resisted and thwarted. The dead mass of the planet bends to the drawing, but we can repel the constraint which the eternal world would exercise upon us-and so that consciousness which ought to be our nobleness, as it is our prerogative, may become our shame, our misery, and our sin.
That Eternity which is set in our hearts is not merely the thought of ever-during Being, or of an everlasting order of things to which we are in some way related. But there are connected with it other ideas besides those of mere duration. Men know what perfection means. They understand the meaning of perfect goodness; they have the notion of infinite Wisdom and boundless Love. These thoughts are the material of all poetry, the thread from which the imagination creates all her wondrous tapestries. This ‘capacity for the Infinite,’ as people call it-which is only a fine way of putting the same thought as that in our text-which is the prerogative of human spirits, is likewise the curse of many spirits. By their misuse of it they make it a fatal gift, and turn it into an unsatisfied desire which gnaws their souls, a famished yearning which ‘roars, and suffers hunger.’ Knowing what perfection is, they turn to limited natures and created hearts for their rest. Having the haunting thought of an absolute Goodness, a perfect Wisdom, an endless Love, an eternal Life-they try to find the being that corresponds to their thought here on earth, and so they are plagued with endless disappointment.
My brother! God has put eternity in your heart. Not only will you live for ever, but also in your present life you have a consciousness of that eternal and infinite and all-sufficient Being that lives above. You have need of Him, and whether you know it or not, the tendrils of your spirits, like some climbing plant not fostered by a careful hand but growing wild, are feeling out into the vacancy in order to grasp the stay which they need for their fruitage and their strength.
By the make of our spirits, by the possibilities that dawn dim before us, by the thoughts ‘whose very sweetness yieldeth proof that they were born for immortality,’-by all these and a thousand other signs and facts in every human life we say, ‘God has set eternity in their hearts!’
II. And then turn to the second idea that is here. The disproportion between this our nature, and the world in which we dwell.
The writer of this book {whether Solomon or no we need not stay to discuss} looks out upon the world; and in accordance with the prevailing tone of all the earlier parts of his contemplations, finds in this prerogative of man but another reason for saying, ‘All is vanity and vexation of spirit.’
Two facts meet him antagonistic to one another: the place that man occupies, and the nature that man bears. This creature with eternity in his heart, where is he set? what has he got to work upon? what has he to love and hold by, to trust to, and anchor his life on? A crowd of things, each well enough, but each having a time-and though they be beautiful in their time, yet fading and vanishing when it has elapsed. No multiplication of times will make eternity. And so with that thought in his heart, man is driven out among objects perfectly insufficient to meet it.
Christ said, ‘Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests, but the Son of man hath not where to lay His head’-and while the words have their proper and most pathetic meaning in the history of His own earthly life of travail and toil for our sakes, we may also venture to give them the further application, that all the lower creatures are at rest here, and that the more truly a man is man, the less can he find, among all the shadows of the present, a pillow for his head, a place of repose for his heart. The animal nature is at home in the material world, the human nature is not.
Every other creature presents the most accurate correspondence between nature and circumstances, powers and occupations. Man alone is like some poor land-bird blown out to sea, and floating half-drowned with clinging plumage on an ocean where the dove ‘finds no rest for the sole of her foot,’ or like some creature that loves to glance in the sunlight, but is plunged into the deepest recesses of a dark mine. In the midst of a universe marked by the nicest adaptations of creatures to their habitation, man alone, the head of them all, presents the unheard-of anomaly that he is surrounded by conditions which do not fit his whole nature, which are not adequate for all his powers, on which he cannot feed and nurture his whole being. ‘To what purpose is this waste?’ ‘Hast thou made all men in vain?’ Everything is ‘beautiful in its time.’ Yes, and for that very reason, as this Book of Ecclesiastes says in another verse, ‘Because to every purpose there is time and judgment, therefore the misery of man is great upon him.’ It was happy when we loved; but the day of indifference and alienation and separation comes. Our spirits were glad when we were planting; but the time for plucking up that which was planted is sure to draw near. It was blessed to pour out our souls in the effluence of love, or in the fullness of thought, and the time to speak was joyous; but the dark day of silence comes on. When we twined hearts and clasped hands together it was glad, and the time when we embraced was blessed; but the time to refrain from embracing is as sure to draw near. It is good for the eyes to behold the sun, but so certainly as it rolls to its bed in the west, and ‘leaves the world to darkness’ and to us, do all earthly occupations wane and fade, and all possessions shrivel and dwindle, and all associations snap and drop and end, and the whirligig of time works round and takes away everything which it once brought us.
And so man, with eternity in his heart, with the hunger in his spirit after an unchanging whole, an absolute good, an ideal perfectness, an immortal being-is condemned to the treadmill of transitory revolution. Nothing continueth in one stay, ‘For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life, is not of the Father, but is of the world. And the world passeth away, and the lust thereof.’ It is limited, it is changeful, it slips from under us as we stand upon it, and therefore, mystery and perplexity stoop down upon the providence of God, and misery and loneliness enter into the heart of man. These changeful things, they do not meet our ideal, they do not satisfy our wants, they do not last even our duration.
‘The misery of man is great upon him,’ said the text quoted a moment ago. And is it not? Is this present life enough for you? Sometimes you fancy it is. Many of us habitually act on the understanding that it is, and treat all that I have been saying about the disproportion between our nature and our circumstances as not true about them. ‘This world not enough for me!’ you say-’Yes! it is; only let me get a little more of it, and keep what I get, and I shall be all right.’ So then-’a little more’ is wanted, is it? And that ‘little more’ will always be wanted, and besides it, the guarantee of permanence will always be wanted, and failing these, there will be a hunger that nothing can fill which belongs to earth. Do you remember the bitter experience of the poor prodigal, ‘he would fain have filled his belly with the husks’? He tried his best to live upon the horny, innutritious pods, but he could not; and after them he still was ‘perishing with hunger.’ So it is with us all when we try to fill the soul and satisfy the spirit with earth or aught that holds of it. It is as impossible to still the hunger of the heart with that, as to stay the hunger of the body with wise sayings or noble sentiments.
I appeal to your real selves, to your own past experience. Is it not true that, deep below the surface contentment with the world and the things of the world, a dormant but slightly slumbering sense of want and unsatisfied need lies in your souls? Is it not true that it wakes sometimes at a touch; that the tender, dying light of sunset, or the calm abysses of the mighty heavens, or some strain of music, or a line in a book, or a sorrow in your heart, or the solemnity of a great joy, or close contact with sickness and death, or the more direct appeals of Scripture and of Christ, stir a wistful yearning and a painful sense of emptiness in your hearts, and of insufficiency in all the ordinary pursuits of your lives? It cannot but be so; for though it be true that our natures are in some measure subdued to what we work in, and although it is possible to atrophy the deepest parts of our being by long neglect or starvation, yet you will never do that so thoroughly but that the deep-seated longing will break forth at intervals, and the cry of its hunger echo through the soul. Many of us do our best to silence it. But I, for my part, believe that, however you have crushed and hardened your souls by indifference, by ambition, by worldly cares, by frivolous or coarse pleasures, or by any of the thousand other ways in which you can do it-yet there is some response in your truest self to my poor words when I declare that a soul without God is an empty and an aching soul!
These things which, even in their time of beauty, are not enough for a man’s soul-have all but a time to be beautiful in, and then they fade and die. A great botanist made what he called ‘a floral clock’ to mark the hours of the day by the opening and closing of flowers. It was a graceful and yet a pathetic thought. One after another they spread their petals, and their varying colours glow in the light. But one after another they wearily shut their cups, and the night falls, and the latest of them folds itself together, and all are hidden away in the dark. So our joys and treasures, were they sufficient did they last, cannot last. After a summer’s day comes a summer’s night, and after a brief space of them comes winter, when all are killed and the leafless trees stand silent.
‘Bare, ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.’
We cleave to these temporal possessions and joys, and the natural law of change sweeps them away from us one by one. Most of them do not last so long as we do, and they pain us when they pass away from us. Some of them last longer than we do, and they pain us when we pass away from them. Either way our hold of them is a transient hold, and one knows not whether is the sadder-the bare garden beds where all have done blowing, and nothing remains but a tangle of decay, or the blooming beauty from which a man is summoned away, leaving others to reap what he has sown. Tragic enough are both at the best-and certain to befall us all. We live and they fade; we die and they remain. We live again and they are far away. The facts are so. We may make them a joy or a sorrow as we will. Transiency is stamped on all our possessions, occupations, and delights. We have the hunger for eternity in our souls, the thought of eternity in our hearts, the destination for eternity written on our inmost being, and the need to ally ourselves with eternity proclaimed even by the most short-lived trifles of time. Either these things will be the blessing or the curse of our lives. Which do you mean that they shall be for you?
III. These thoughts lead us to consider the possible satisfying of our souls.
This Book of Ecclesiastes is rather meant to enforce the truth of the weariness and emptiness of a godless life, than of the blessedness of a godly one. It is the record of the struggles of a soul-’the confessions of an inquiring spirit’-feeling and fighting its way through many errors, and many partial and unsatisfactory solutions of the great problem of life, till he reaches the one in which he can rest. When he has touched that goal his work is done. And so the devious way is told in the book at full length, while a sentence sets forth the conclusion to which he was working, even when he was most bewildered. ‘The conclusion of the whole matter’ is ‘Fear God and keep His commandments.’ That is all that a man needs. It is ‘the whole of man.’ ‘All is’ not ‘vanity and vexation of spirit’ then-but ‘all things work together for good to them that love God.’
The Preacher in his day learned that it was possible to satisfy the hunger for eternity, which had once seemed to him a questionable blessing. He learned that it was a loving Providence which had made man’s home so little fit for him, that he might seek the ‘city which hath foundations.’ He learned that all the pain of passing beauty, and the fading flowers of man’s goodliness, were capable of being turned into a solemn joy. Standing at the centre, he saw order instead of chaos, and when he had come back, after all his search, to the old simple faith of peasants and children in Judah, to fear God and keep His commandments, he understood why God had set eternity in man’s heart, and then flung him out, as if in mockery, amidst the stormy waves of the changeful ocean of time.
And we, who have a further word from God, may have a fuller and yet more blessed conviction, built upon our own happy experience, if we choose, that it is possible for us to have that deep thirst slaked, that longing appeased. We have Christ to trust to and to love. He has given Himself for us that all our many sins against the eternal love and our guilty squandering of our hearts upon transitory treasures may be forgiven. He has come amongst us, the Word in human flesh, that our poor eyes may see the Eternal walking amidst the things of time and sense, and may discern a beauty in Him beyond ‘whatsoever things are lovely.’ He has come that we through Him may lay hold on God, even as in Him God lays hold on us. As in mysterious and transcendent union the divine takes into itself the human in that person of Jesus, and Eternity is blended with Time; we, trusting Him and yielding our hearts to Him, receive into our poor lives an incorruptible seed, and for us the soul-satisfying realities that abide for ever mingle with and are reached through the shadows that pass away.
Brethren, yield yourselves to Him! In conscious unworthiness, in lowly penitence, let us cast ourselves on Jesus Christ, our Sacrifice, for pardon and peace! Trust Him and love Him! Live by Him and for Him! And then, the loftiest thoughts of our hearts, as they seek after absolute perfection and changeless love, shall be more than fulfilled in Him who is more than all that man ever dreamed, because He is the perfection of man, and the Son of God.
Love Christ and live in Him, taking Him for the motive, the spring, and the very atmosphere of your lives, and then no capacities will languish for lack of either stimulus or field, and no weariness will come over you, as if you were a stranger from your home. For if Christ be near us, all things go well with us. If we live for Him, the power of that motive will make all our nature blossom like the vernal woods, and dry branches break into leafage. If we dwell in Him, we shall be at home wherever we are, like the patriarch who pitched his tent in many lands, but always had the same tent wherever he went. So we shall have the one abode, though its place in the desert may vary-and we shall not need to care whether the encampment be beneath the palm-trees and beside the wells of Elim, or amidst the drought of Marah, so long as the same covering protects us, and the same pillar of fire burns above us.
Love Christ, and then the eternity in the heart will not be a great aching void, but will be filled with the everlasting life which Christ gives, and is. The vicissitude will really become the source of freshness and progress which God meant it to be. Everything which, when made our all-sufficient portion, becomes stale and unprofitable, even in its time, will be apparelled in celestial light. It shall all be lovely and pleasant while it lasts, and its beauty will not be saddened by the certainty of its decay, nor its empty place a pain when it has passed away.
Take Christ for Saviour and Friend, your Guide and Support through time, and Himself, your Eternity and Joy, then all discords are reconciled-and ‘all things are yours-whether the world, or life, or death, or things present, or things to come; all are yours, and ye are Christ’ s, and Christ is God’s.’
Alexander MacLaren, Expositions of Holy Scripture (1904–1910) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
unfoldingWord translationNotes 2017 · CC BY-SA 4.0 God has made everything suitable for its own time
God has made everything suitable for its own time
"God has fixed a time that is right for everything to happen" or "God has set a time that is right for each thing to happen:
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placed eternity in their hearts
Here the word "their" refers to human beings. Here the "hearts" of the people represent their thoughts and desires. AT: "placed eternity in the hearts of human beings" or "caused people to think about eternal things" (See: Metonymy)
from their beginning all the way to their end
This refers to the beginning and the end and all that is in between. (See: Merism)
translationWords
eternity
heart
works
unfoldingWord translationNotes — © Distant Shores Media and the Door43 World Missions Community, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0. Source: git.door43.org/Door43/en_tn.
Tyndale Open Study Notes 2022 · CC BY-SA 4.0 3:11 God has made everything beautiful for its own…
3:11 God has made everything beautiful for its own time: We can sometimes see this beauty in our work and in the world, but many times people cannot see: God reserves for himself the understanding of how everything fits together (cp. Rom 8:22-28). • God has planted eternity, an awareness of the infinite, within each of us—enough for us to be in awe of him who is infinite and eternal, and enough to hope for eternal life after death.
Tyndale Open Study Notes — © Tyndale Open Resources, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0. Text via the HelloAO Bible API.