Ecclesiastes 9:12

Ecclesiastes 9:12

I. There are many cases in which to our weak eyes the love of God is apparently most questionable, in which men and women seem absolutely abandoned to tyrannous circumstances, to the wicked wills of others, to their own weakness, without a grain of help being afforded them. This is one of the torturing religious problems; and though I believe there is an answer to it, I do not say that we have found it yet. Some light may be thrown on the matter when we think of a Divine Father of men, revealed as the Redeemer in Jesus Christ of the whole race from evil. Only we must add to the ordinary theological conception the assertion that the fate of no one is decided in this world, that our short space of thirty or sixty years is but a moment in the long education which God is giving to every soul, and that the end of that education is inevitable good, never inevitable evil. If that be true, we can look with some hope upon the problem of these victims.

II. But on the whole the cases in which we can clearly say men and women are victims are exceptional ones, and the wisest thing to do is never in practical life to assume that any are victims. That they exist is plain; but we have no right to say to any one till his death that he cannot get rid of weakness, much less to assume that we cannot do so ourselves. Our tendency, indeed, is to give way, to throw the reins on the neck of our fancies, our passions, and our appetites, and let them carry us where they will; but the very definition of a man is one who is born to subdue the tendency to give way to every impulse, and to make his qualities tend towards right and noble things. Not to strive to fulfil this is to cease to be a man. Our true life is found in resistance in its pain, and afterwards in its sublime and victorious joy.

S. A. Brooke, Sermons,2nd series, p. 178.

Reference: Ecclesiastes 9:13. J. Hamilton, The Royal Preacher,p. 181.