Sermon Bible Commentary
Ecclesiastes 3:11
I. This truth becomes more manifestly true in things in proportion as their nature rises. Everything in the world must be in its true place and time, or it is not beautiful. That is true from the lowest to the highest, only with the lowest it is not easy to discover it. It does not seem to matter where the pebble lies, on this side of the road or on the other. It may indeed do sad mischief out of its place, but its place is a wide one. The things of higher nature are more fastidious in their demands. This law holds between different kinds of men. The highest natures are most dependent upon timeliness and fitness. They must act at the right moment. When the great feast was ready at Jerusalem, and the brethren of Jesus were going up from Nazareth, as they went every year, they urged Jesus to go with them; and His answer was, "My time is not yet come, but your time is always ready." There was something so sad and so noble in His words. They, with no recognised mission, might go when and where they would. They, with no burden on their shoulders, might walk freely over the whole earth. But He, with His task, His duty His Father's name to glorify, His brethren's souls to save, the kingdom of heaven to set up He must wait till the door opened. He could walk only where the way was wide enough for Him to pass with His burden.
II. All the events of. life, all of God's dispensations, get their real beauty, or ugliness from the times in which they come to us or in which we come to them.
III. There are continual applications of our truth in the religious life. Each experience of Christian life is good and comely in its true place, when it comes in the orderly sequences of Christian growth, and only there, not beautiful when it comes artificially forced in where it does not belong.
IV. This truth is at the bottom of any clear notion about the character of sin. We say that we are sinful, but really we are always passing over the essential sinfulness into the things around us. It is these wicked things that make us wicked. But here comes up our truth that there are no wicked things; that wickedness is not in things, but in the displacement and misuse of things: and there is nothing which, kept in its true place and put to its true use, is not beautiful and good.
Phillips Brooks, Twenty Sermons,p. 244.
I. 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 life's labour man sits as the Son of man once sat by well-sides weary, and, while others can slake their thirst with that water, he needs a living water; while others go into cities to buy meat, he has need of and finds a sustenance that they know not of.
II. The truer and the nobler man is, the more certainly he feels all this, the more keenly he realises eternity in his heart. There are none of us, however, who do not feel it sometimes. Try to crush it with the weight of mere worldly care; try to destroy it with the enervating influences of passion or of pleasure; try to benumb it with the cold, calculating spirit of greed: you cannot kill it. God hath set eternity in our hearts. He has given us a hunger which can be satisfied only with the Bread of Life, a thirst which can be quenched only by the living water from the Rock of Ages.
III. Eternity is in our hearts; and there is a strange contrast between it and the world in which we all are, for which alone some of us are living. To do our duty here, to trust calmly in a future with God, where all our higher cravings shall be satisfied that was the conclusion at which the Preacher arrived as the sustaining power amid the wrongs, and weariness, and inequalities of life. We stand with that great teacher in the twilight, but ourfaces are turned towards the rising Sun. God hath set eternity in our hearts. Are we living worthy of 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 unto the light of truth by His Gospel.
T. Teignmouth Shore, The Life of the World to Come,p. 23.
The word rendered "world" is a very frequent one in the Old Testament, and never has but one meaning; and that meaning is eternity. "He hath set eternity in their heart." Here are two antagonistic facts. There 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.
I. Consider eternity set in every human heart. This may be either a declaration of the 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. We are the only beings on this earth who can think the thought, or speak the word, eternity. Other creatures are happy while immersed in time; we have another nature, and are undisturbed by a thought which shines high above the roaring sea of circumstance in which we float. 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. 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 disproportion between this our nature and the world in which we dwell. 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. "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.
III. These thoughts lead us to consider 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. 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." 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 ispossible for us to have that deep thirst slaked, that longing appeased. 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.
A. Maclaren, Sermons Preached in Manchester,3rd series, p. 209.
References: Ecclesiastes 3:11. Homiletic Quarterly,vol. iv., p. 426; H. J. Wilmot-Buxton, Waterside Mission Sermons,1st series, p. 38; W. Park, Christian World Pulpit,vol. xxviii., p. 259; G. Matheson, Moments on the Mount,p. 184.