Ecclesiastes 3:15

That which hath been is now.

The impotency of time; or, the eternally permanent amidst the constantly fluctuating

“Impotency of time!” Why, time is anything but impotent! Is not its history a record of stupendous achievements? Are not the whole scene of our observation and sphere of our knowledge covered with tokens of its power? “Time impotent,” indeed! Its hand is on all things, and all things yield to its touch; it is the mighty sea that bears all things to our shore; and, anon, bears all away. Albeit, contrary though it may seem to our common ideas and feeling, a little thinking on the subject will convince us that the power of time is seeming, rather than real; and that there are high and practical senses in which it may be regarded as impotent. Time has not done much, notwithstanding all; “for that which hath been is now.” This language will apply--

I. To all the elements of material existence. The forms of the material world are constantly changing. Whole islands emerge from the ocean, whilst broad acres, once tilled by busy man, are entombed beneath its waves. The herbs, and flowers, and trees of the plantal realm, and the million tribes of air, and earth, and sea, belonging to the animal dominion, have changed many a thousand times since the days of Noah, and are changing every hour. But the elements of which the first types of all were formed are the same. Time, through all its mighty revolutions, cannot destroy an atom. The language of the text applies--

II. To all the spirits of mankind. Argument, we think, is not wanting to prove that all the human souls that ever have “been, are now.” On what do I base the conviction, that all the souls that ever have lived, are living still, and will live for ever? Purely on the testimony of Christ and His apostles. In the nature of the case there is but one way of knowing how long may creature is to live, and that is, by ascertaining what is the will of the necessary existing one in relation to Him. If He has willed that man shall live a year--however constitutionally strong--he shall live a year and no more; or if He has willed that he shall live for ever--however constitutionally weak--he shall live for ever. To know the limits of any being’s existence, I must know the will of God respecting it. All depends on His will. But has He revealed this in relation to human existence? He has. Christ comes forth to testify of this will; and He tells us, in language most unmistakable, that God has willed that man’s existence shall have no termination (Matthew 10:28; Luke 16:19, etc.; 20:38; John 5:24; John 8:51; John 12:24; John 14:2; John 14:8; 2 Corinthians 5:1; 2 Timothy 1:10; 1 Thessalonians 4:18; Philippians 1:23; 1 Peter 4:6).

III. To all the general types of human character. The same types reappear in all times. Your herods and hamans, your Athenians and Pharisees--indeed, every character in the Bible, and every character in history, seem to be living again in every age

IV. To all the principles of the Divine government. The forms of God’s dealings with humanity have passed through various changes. There was once simple Patriarchalism; then came gorgeous Judaism; and now we have spiritual Christianity; but the same principles are seen in each and all. Because of this un-alterableness, the physical philosopher can prophesy of things to come centuries hence; he can tell to the hour when an eclipse shall take place, when the tide shalt overflow its boundary, and when another comet shall sweep the horizon; and because of this, the moral philosopher, too, can predict with an unerring certainty, that if minds continue under the influence of certain principles of depravity, most terrible storms of anguish await them; but if under the influence of holy truth, their path shall be as the shining light, “that shineth more and more unto the perfect day.” And because of this, moreover, the good people who rightly appreciate the influences of the last economy, can appreciate in full the heart-language of the good people who rightly appreciated the influences of the first. Asaph can express his feelings in the language of Job, and Paul in the language of David, and the good of this age in the language of either or all.

V. To the grand design of all things. What is the great design of all things? On the assumption that the author of all is moral mind--distinguished by rectitude and love, and that all intelligent beings are His offspring--is it not lawful to conclude that the grand design in all must be the holy development of creature minds in gratitude, reverence, love, and assimilation to Himself? What we might thus, a priori, infer, all the facts of nature, history, consciousness, and the Bible contribute to establish.

VI. To the recollections of the human memory. Every sentence and every verse of providential history are written on the disembodied souls of the generations that are gone. The history of man is recorded, not in books, but in souls; and will be seen and studied in the great eternity.

VII. To all the conditions of man’s well-being. Look at the condition of man’s physical well-being. Is it not true that on wholesome food, fresh air, and proper exercise the health of the human body has ever depended? Look at man’s intellectual well-being. Is it not true that on observation, comparison, research, and reflection the progress of the human mind has ever been suspended? Look at his spiritual well-being. Have not repentance towards God and faith in our Lord Jesus Christ been always the necessary condition of human salvation? In relation to all these things we may say, with the greatest truth, that “that which-hath been is now.” It has ever been thus, that the man who violated the physical laws of his being has lost his health and sunk to the grave; it has always been, that he who neglected the conditions of intellectual improvement has never risen beyond the level of the brute; and it has always been, that he who did not “repent” has perished; and that he who did not believe has been damned. (Homilist.)

Stability amidst change

This apothegm is not to be taken without some limitation. It intends not to assert that there is absolutely no change, no variety, no progress or improvement in any direction, from time to time; but it sententiously expresses the truth, or truths, that over all change there presides a law of permanence; that amidst all variety there exists a standard of uniformity; that much which seems to be new is in fact old; that the main features of the past are reproduced in the present, and will be again reproduced in the future; that the great principles of human nature and of the Divine government remain the same in all ages. In this view of the text, it gravely opposes its wisdom to those manifestations, now of Vanity, and now of discontent, which are evinced in the disparagement and rejection of what has hitherto been received, cherished and reverenced. We often hear that the world has outgrown such and such opinions, habits or modes of action. Occasionally the assertion is made considerately, and is true. It is made concerning cruelties, superstitions, and puerilities which the world ought to outgrow, and which a part of the world has partly outgrown, as any observer may see. But the trouble and annoyance is that the same assertion is used by half-sighted and confident men to signify the supposed triumph of their own fancies, and with regard to things which the world ought not to outgrow, and has not in reality outgrown, because they are good and durable in themselves. No sooner do a few individuals learn to neglect and despise certain religious forms, than they declare that the world has outgrown them. We do not outgrow a thing, in the true sense of becoming too wise for it, simply because we neglect and forget it in a season of indifference, or cast it away from us in a time of strife and excitement. The whole French nation once thought that they had outgrown religion, when in fact they had only renounced it, and renounced a great good; and they never acted so madly as during that period of delusion. We are often told that the world is outgrowing, or has outgrown, forms. How far is this true? Only to a limited extent. All life and all nature and all art are full of forms, are hardly anything but forms. In every form there is a spirit, which is its life. Sometimes the spirit departs from it, and then it dies. Sometimes the form which envelops the spirit is made too cumbrous by superfluous foldings, and then the form must be reduced, in order that the spirit may have breath. But the spirit survives, in the same form renewed, or in some other. In some instances the spirit may act without a form, or in a form so reserved as to be imperceptible to common eyes. Masses for the dead are not outwardly celebrated by ourselves, But the spirit of that form is the desire springing from irrepressible affection to do something by the way of intercession for the departed souls of those whom we have loved. It may be our doctrine that the state of those souls is now fixed and unchangeable, but it is our feeling that something may yet be done for them by earnest supplication; and there must be many a one who, though he would not think of asking for a requiem from the Church, yet puts up his own prayers for his own dead in the silent church of his own bosom. It is evident that there are forms which, by their spirit, are so connected with our eternal affections that, however they may be varied, they can never be outgrown. Meanwhile, let us be satisfied that the essential things remain, and will remain, and that the world cannot outgrow them. Religion remains; for the nature of man requires it. Faith in Christ remains; for He is the Mediator between God and man, revealing the will of God, and manifesting the glory of the Father; and man must go to Him for the words of eternal life. The Bible remains; for it is spread through the world, and guarded by its own sanctity and man’s gratitude. Prayer remains, for man must speak to his Maker, and the language of his communion is prayer. And things which appear to some less essential and permanent than these, will still remain. Not only will religion remain in spirit, but in external form; for man has senses as well as a soul. Forms may be modified, but form will remain. Ordinances will remain; for religion demands manifestation; and especially will those two ordinances remain, which the Saviour enjoined, and which the Church from the very first has continued. Music will accompany worship, and elevate piety, while man has an ear for harmony. Churches will be reared with the best graces of architecture, while man has an eye for fitness, proportion, and beauty. Let us not fear the occasional outcries of destructiveness, or be troubled by the whispered fears of timidity. The things which we love and have reason to love, and which have helped us and made our solace, will not be outgrown. If they have engaged love, true and pure love, they are worthy and lasting. If they have touched and opened the inmost fountains of feeling, they are real and durable. Let us not fear for them nor distrust them, but be true to them, and they will be true to us. (F. W. P. Greenwood, D. D.)

God requireth that which is past.--

Life an organic unity

We may render the clause more literally and intelligently: “God taketh account, maketh inquisition, for that which has fled away.” No part of life is isolated, but each period is connected with what has gone before and with what comes after; all are combined to make a vital, organic whole, so that in judging of the present we are really judging the past, as in the day of final adjudication the acts of the bygone years will come up for approval or condemnation before the Judge of all the earth. We are to-day what we are by means of the past, and the future is conditioned on the present. Life evolves itself out of the present; as the stream at the mouth bears a constant relation to all the streams that have watered the hills, so age is related to youth. As the crest of foliage lifted by the trees bears its relation to the root, so does life’s flower and fruitage stand related to early years of culture and of growth. We know this. When we are censured or reproved we know that it is not the present alone that is judged, but the past. Knowledge is not extemporaneous. It is not a sudden acquisition, any more than a ship, or palace, or a city with its splendid mansions, spacious avenues or extended commerce, are extemporized by nations. We sometimes listen to one in conversation and are tempted to credit him with intuitive sagacity, with native wisdom, whereas his rich and ready speech pours its golden opulence only as molten metal gushes out from the open furnace when it has felt the purifying fires within. Research and experiment, successes and failures, have wrought together to make his knowledge accurate, compact, available. So in art, the painter is not what he is by mere spontaneous, involuntary impulse. Study, practice, patient and protracted toil have given him skill. So the poet, the musician, the advocate, the physician or the orator is what he is to-day only by virtue of the past. The past has been the arena of toilful struggles, and it is that which is judged. Sometimes it has been too brief for adequate preparation, and failure follows. Again, in the customs by which our life is governed or inspired or limited we see the same principle at work. By resistance or by yielding to various influences brought to bear upon us we come to be what we are, strong against temptation or weak before its alluring power. Paul’s retirement in Arabia was a part of his training. Every contest and conquest taught him. As he bore the chain on his hand he learned patience. As he looked on the soldiers that guarded him, or on the household of the emperor, or as he contemplated the crown which he himself would wear in heaven, he learned more of himself and his Saviour. The fanaticism of Pharisee, the scepticism of philosopher, and the bigotry of the Jew all taught him. In that one moment when he lifted up his last prayer before he suffered was reflected a lifetime of noble consecration and self-discipline. In the special states of mind which control our judgment the same fact reappears. One person is habitually gloomy, another gay and frivolous. Thus life comes out of the past. Its habits and states of feeling to-day reflect the habits of other years. Here is the philosophy of history. It is not a series of isolated events, a concatenation of unprophesied occurrences, but a continuous unity. The theme teaches us the solemnity of life. (R. S. Storrs, D. D.)

Review of life

I. A review of past means and privileges. By these, I mean your having been born in a land of vision where the Saviour of the world is known. I mean, your having had the Word of life, not only to read, hut also to hear. I mean, your having had ministers to call you to repentance, to warn you of your danger, to beseech you in Christ’s stead to be reconciled unto God. I mean, the various ordinances of the sanctuary, and all the helps to seriousness and devotion which the goodness of God has afforded you. What influence have all these had upon your minds? Are you crucified to the world? Are you denying yourselves, and taking up your cross, and following the Saviour? Are your affections more spiritual, your principles more powerful, your minds more enlightened?

II. A review of past mercies. How many times has He lulled you to sleep in His arms; fed you at His table; clothed you from His wardrobe! How often has He supplied your wants, and wiped away tears from your eyes! When brought low, has lie not helped you? When in jeopardy, has He not defended you? When sickness has alarmed your fears, has He not led you back from the gates of the grave? When accidents have been ready to destroy, have not “all your bones said, who is a God like unto Thee?” If we had indulged a person year after year all through life, should we not require him to think of it; to be sensible of our kindness, and to behave towards us in a manner becoming his obligations? There is nothing perhaps we feel more painfully than the ungrateful reception of the favours we bestow: and a very few instances of unthankfulness are sufficient to induce us to discontinue our benefits. What, then, does God think of us?

III. A review of our past sorrows and distresses. It is an awful thing to come out of trouble; for iii always leaves us better or worse than it finds us. We should therefore ask with peculiar concern--“What benefit have I derived from such a visitation of Divine Providence? The rod spoke--did I hear its message? The physician has been employed--is my distemper even beyond the reach of medicine? I have lost the life of my friend--and have I lost his death too? My relation has entered the joy of his Lord--I have one reason for loving earth less, and do I love it more? one reason for loving heaven more, and do I love it less?”

IV. A review of past sins. Many of these have grown out of our privileges, our mercies, and our trials. They have been attended with singular aggravations. They are more in number than the hairs of our head. In many things we offend all, This review is painful--but it is useful, it is necessary. It will lead us to admire the longsuffering of God, in bearing with us year after year. It will be a call to repentance. It will humble us. It will promote charity. We shall be tender towards others, in proportion as we deal honestly and severely with ourselves. It will be a spur to diligence. You have much lost time to redeem, and much lost ground to recover. (W. Jay.)

Past years returning

We say in popular language of a departed year, that it is gone. But in truth it is not gone. Nothing in it is lost--lost to itself, to the universe, or to any who have lived through it. “God requireth that which is past.”

I. The law of memory shows that God requires the past. All that ever hath been, so far as humanity is concerned, is now living in the memory of all the individual men that ever lived. Memory has now its resurrections. Scarcely an hour departs, in which some grave does not open, and the ghost of some long-buried event does not start up to life. As ocean prints her undulations on the shore, memory prints our actions and events on the soul--a tablet, this, not, however, like sand; but like eternal adamant.

II. The law of moral causation shows that God requires the past. There is nothing living on which you can fix your eyes that is not to-day the effect of all the causes and influences that have been operating on it from the beginning of its existence. This is true of the globe itself. Its condition to-day is the result of all the forces that have been acting upon it through the most distant periods of geological calculation. This is true of the intellect. The state of my intellect at this hour is the result of all the thoughts that have over coursed their way through my soul. This law holds true in relation to character, Nothing that man does ever dies: no act terminates in itself, it makes an everlasting impression, it becomes an element in the moral existence of its author, it sends its vibrations along the lines of the endless future.

III. The law of conscience shows that God requires the past. Conscience, both in the savage and the sage, foreshadows the scene of coming retribution. It had heard the trumpet blast; it has seen the Judge enthroned, the prisoner arraigned, the books opened, the witnesses examined; has heard the sentence pronounced and marked the final delivery of the culprit into the everlasting custody of justice. The structure of the human eye does not more clearly imply the existence of light, than the forebodings of a guilty conscience the existence of future retribution. (Homilist.)

God requireth that which is past

In what senses does God require the past?

I. God requires that which is past in the way of natural law.

1. The matter of the past God requires to-day. The mighty primeval forests which reared their lofty heads and waved their huge branches, and the earth’s elements which rolled in fiery flood ages before the human era, God requireth now in this age of advanced civilization, and they answer the requirement, the one by furnishing coal, the other by supplying granite and metals for the use of man. And as of the remote past, so of the nearer. The leaves which a day or two back we saw chased hither and thither by the spirit of the wind will contribute their due portion to the vegetation of the coming year.

2. What is thus true of nature is true also of society. The year has been what it has because of what it has received from the past, and in turn it will hand down to the coming years its vast inheritance of the past increased with its own individual contribution.

3. As also by natural law God requires the evil and the good that are past. You see a nation as Greece, or as Spain, once so great, now without physical energy or moral vigour; it is the judgment exacted or required by natural law for the vices and follies of the fathers and forefathers. You see certain weakly or diseased children; the wickedness of the generation before them is therein required of them. The excesses of the youth by natural law God will sooner or later require in the man’s disordered physical system, or in his undermined constitution succumbing to some disease. But it is more true of the good than of the evil that God requireth the past. Has Abraham’s faith perished? Has Jacob’s wrestling prayer died? Have David’s psalms and prophets’ word, and, above all, have the truth and grace of the good Lord Himself wrought so long ago perished? Our mighty dead are with us in the saintlier lives, in the freer thought, in the ampler work of the Church go-day. No; the past is not gone. Time does not triumph over us. By natural laws God preserves the past. God requireth that which is past. In requiring, however, the past through natural law, there is no appeal to the human will.

II. We pass now to the sphere of will, and say that a second chief way in which God requireth that which is past is by means of the moral law. Here God appeals go man to render somewhat suitable to his past. Here, ere the requirement of God can be met, man must consent and co-operate.

1. In this sphere God requireth that which is past by requiring thankfulness for past mercies. No state of heart is so happy as that of thankfulness, as no state is so conducive go the right use of God’s gifts. Be ye thankful.

2. But while we have received mercies many, who, as he looks over this year, is not conscious of sin? and for the sin which is past God requireth penitence.

3. But God has given us time and place here, and has so constituted our life that it puts us through a wise discipline; and for this discipline of the past God requireth character and service. Have we fashioned the limbs of the moral man--honesty, sincerity, justice, honourableness--into greater strength and beauty? Have we produced any of the finer lines of gentleness, lowliness, meekness, devoutness, which are so glorious in our Divine model?

III. God requires the past in the way of future judgment. God, at the judgment, will require that. The modern mode of conceiving of past time differs from the ancient mode. We think of past time as something left behind us; the ancients thought of past time as something gone before them. Tempus fugit (time flies) was the common expression of classic thought; the notion being that time was ever moving forward, requiring therefore prompt action to use it, and suggesting that when past it had fled not behind but before us. In like manner in Arabic philosophy, and in the Koran, authorities inform us that past deeds are conceived of not as left behind but as gone on before, waiting in yonder great future go confront their doers. It is this conception of past time that the original of our text presents. And this view is just. The moral feeling of all races anticipates judgment to come. Though pride and unbelief will beat down the feeling, yet, naturally, the bad man instinctively dreads the future, and the good man instinctively hopes. There is a judgment-hall within us where conscience sits; her judgments, however, are often slighted, drowned sometimes in the clamour of a rabble of worldly considerations; in such circumstances she anticipates and appeals go the future judgment to confirm and enforce her despised judgment. The unrepented evil will be known and declared. That undiscovered lie, that secret immorality, that unknown fraud, that godlessness of the heart, that enmity of the mind, that unbelief of the spirit; all will stand clearly revealed, anal judgment just will be passed. We cannot deceive Him the Omniscient, nor elude Him the Omnipresent. There is no escape from that supreme judgment. From the sentence of that judgment what vast issues will flow! Eternal life or the second death! Heaven or Gehenna! Let us, then, prepare for that judgment by requiring from ourselves our past. (A. Goodrich, D. D.)

The indelibility of the past

I. The fact that there is a sense in which the past is never done away with, will appear at once, from many considerations, to any one who reflects upon the subject. There is nothing which we are more likely to forget than the truth which St. Paul expressed when he said, “A man cannot live unto himself.” To go no farther, every man must have some influence upon his immediate relatives. The parent has some influence upon his children. But it is not only as regard others--important and awful though that be--that “that which hath been is now.”

II. Even if all the injury we may have done to others by a course of which we have now repented, still the past will leave its marks upon ourselves; marks which no repentance will blot out. Just as there are dangerous wounds which, long after they have been healed, leave a tenderness in the part which they affected, or, at all events, leave a sear which never can be removed; just as there are diseases which leave behind them a delicacy, or of which, even after they are thoroughly eradicated, there remain in the robust frame the everlasting marks; so a course of sin, even when it does not--and I believe this is the exception--even when it does not cause a permanent delicacy, still leaves behind it the marks of its once putrefying wounds and bruises and sores, long after they have been healed by the Great Physician. We have been saved from death, but great and unceasing care is henceforth absolutely necessary. Our sickness is over, but our countenance is changed. Mortification has been checked by the timely amputation of a limb; we are in full health, but we never get the limb back again. There are, no doubt, those who, by God’s grace, attain, as nearly as possible, to the character of those who had never yielded themselves deliberately to courses of sin or carelessness. There are prodigals who are not only forgiven and received with readiness and joy, but in whom tile traces of wantonness and degradation or selfishness have become almost, if not altogether, imperceptible; between whorl and the son who had “ever been with his father” no man can observe the difference. Still, even to such, the past is not a blank. It cannot but be that the gloomy recollection will often cross his mind of those who have passed away now from his influence, and whom he once influenced for evil; and who will say that as such a memory blends with the anticipation of the time when they shall meet again, and suggests, as it will suggest, the judgment of the Great Day--who will say that the past of the pardoned and accepted penitent is not painfully required of him? (J. C. Coghlan, D. D.)

The permanence of the past

In God’s great universe there is no absolute past. Time and space are the same. They have no true reality, but are mere modes of contemplation--conditions by which objects are rendered perceptible to us. Before God, endowed with the powers which we lack, the whole history of the universe appears immediately and at once. The extension of time and the extension of space cannot be distinguished from one another. The relations of past and future disappear; they form one magnificent whole. He fills at once the boundless infinitude of His being. He is the Alpha at the same time that He is the Omega. With Him beginning and ending coalesce and enclose everything intermediate.

I. God requireth the past throughout the universe. What are our sciences but memories of the pasty Astronomy is the memory of the universe; geology is the memory of the earth; history is the memory of the human race. There is nothing forgotten or left behind. The past is brought forward into the present, and out of the past the future grows. Each material form bears in itself the record of its past history; each ray of light carries the picture of that from which it has come. Owing to the wonderful improvement that has taken place in the construction and study of the spectroscope, we are learning more and more to read the secrets, not only of the present, but also of the past history of the stars. The astronomer can not only calculate their future movements, but also recall their former phenomena. Then what a faithful testimony has our own earth kept of the changes through which it has passed! The geologist, from the unmistakable signs which he sees in the rocks, can reconstruct in imagination the seas and shores that vanished untold ages ago. Memory is not a faculty peculiar to mind, it exists in each nerve-centre, whether of sensation or motion, as is proved by the fact that each nerve-centre can be educated to respond to impressions. It is a property of every tissue of the body. The scar of a wound is the recollection by the tissue of the injury which it has received; and the marks of the small-pox are an evidence that the whole system remembers the attack of the disease. There is such a thing, too, as ancestral memory; and the hereditary traits and peculiarities which successive generations exhibit testify to its permanence. Many of the strange instincts, mysterious associations, and shadowy recollections for whose origin in our own experience we cannot account, and which Wordsworth in his famous “Ode” alludes to as intimations of a Divine home recently left, may be traces in us of the memory of our forefathers which we have inherited. What are the phenomena of rejuvenescence in plants but a reminding--a grasping anew amid the old withered decaying forms of life of the ideal or type--a going back to the first fair condition! Nature never forgets. Nothing perishes without leaving a record of it behind. The past history of the universe is not only preserved in the memory of God, but is also inscribed upon its own tablets.

II. God requireth the past for our present consolation. He takes up all we have left behind in the plenitude of His existence. The friends who have gone from us live in Him; the days that are no more are revived in Him. He is intimately acquainted, not only with our present thoughts, but also with the whole of our past experience. The images of the past that haunt our own minds are ineffaceably impressed upon His also. In converse with Him, in whom thus all our life is hid, upon whose mind the whole picture of our existence is mirrored, we feel that, though lonely, we are not alone--though the perishing creatures of a day, we are living even now in eternity.

III. God requireth the past for its restoration. As the context indicates, it is a law of the Divine manifestation, a mode of the Divine working in every department, that the past should be brought forward into the present, the old reproduced in the new. In nature and religion the progressive and the conservative elements are combined. Each new stratum of rock is formed out of the ruin of the previous strata. In man himself the characteristics of each age are carried along with him through every advancing stage of life, and the child-heart may be retained in extreme old age. In the history of nations the past overshadows and forms the present, and the modifications which existing institutions undergo are based upon the solid advantages of old institutions; while “freedom broadens slowly down from precedent to precedent.” In like manner in Scripture every advancing event is marked by new powers and destined for higher ends; but with these are always essentially recapitulated all things that have been previously employed. The system of truth contained in the successive dispensations of religion is one and the same. God, in His house not made with hands, is not doing as we do when our household goods are old and worn out and we replace them by things altogether new. He is not continually refurnishing the earth. He is causing the same flowers and trees and streams to appear season after season. He never wearies of repeating the old familiar things. He keeps age after age, generation after generation, year after year, the same old home-feeling in His earth for us. And is not this a strong argument that lie will keep the old home-feeling for us in heaven; that we shall find ourselves beyond the river of death in the midst of all the former familiar things of our life, just as when we get out of the winter gloom and desolation of any year, we find ourselves in the midst of all that made the former springs and summers so sweet and precious to us? I love to think of heaven as a recollection, and to believe that the kingdom of God in its highest sense is the restitution of all things. Wasted, toiling humanity, after the great circumnavigation of human history is over, will return to its early purity and glory. The tree of life will bloom again, and the river of life will flow through the paradise regained. The New Jerusalem will descend from God out of heaven, “not in the unearthly splendours of an unknown apocalypse, but as a lark descends from the skies to the nest she had dwelt and loved in.”

IV. But closely connected with the brightness of such thoughts as these is the shadow of the solemn one that God requireth the past for judgment. The stars of heaven witness and retain the scenes and events of our earth. The pictures of all secret deeds that have ever been done really and actually exist, glancing by the vibration of light farther and farther in the universe. We are continually endowing the inanimate earth with our own consciousness, impressing our own moral history upon the objects around us; and these objects react upon us in recalling that history. The sky and the earth are thus books of remembrance that witness against us, and God will open them on the great day. “He shall call to the heavens from above and to the earth beneath, that He may judge His people.” In ourselves, too, there are indelible records of our former history. The whole past of our lives is with us in the present, and accompanies us into the future; and whatever we have done or suffered or been has entered into our deeper being, and we have only to go there to find it. Memory is indestructible. We cannot undo the past and begin afresh. We have to take the past as the starting-point and determining element of the future. We are what the past has made us; and the memory of former things is indelible. But the Gospel reminds us that what cannot be obliterated may be transmuted by Divine grace. In Christ Jesus we may become new creatures; and in the eternal life that we begin, in union with Him, all old things, so far as there is any condemning power in them, pass away, and all things in the transfiguring light of heavenly love become new. (H. Macmillan, D. D.)

Overhauling the past

There is in law what they call a release. If you have an incumbrance upon your property, by the payment of a certain sum of money on your part the person to whom you are obligated gives you a document freeing your property from any incumbrance. That is a release. Well, when a man becomes a Christian, for and in consideration of what Christ has paid in his behalf, God grants him a full release, and all his old sins go down into the very depths of the ocean, never to be brought up again, neither in the crises of this world nor in the Day of Judgment; but until that arrangement is made, “God requireth that which is past.” There are in our lives, however insignificant, a multitude of events for which we must give account.

1. In the first place, God will require of us all our past unrecognized blessings. Oh, God has been very good to you. Have you been good to God? “God requireth that which is past.” More than Chat, He saw you dying, and sent an angel to redeem you. Did He? No. He sent His only Son. Why? To heal your wounds, and to wipe away your tears, and to carry your burdens, and to die your death, and to save your soul; and for these last ten or twenty years He has been asking of you one little thing, and that is that you would let Him just stand inside the door of your heart. Oh, have you done it?

2. Again, God will require of you, and does require of you, the warnings that were unheeded all your life. Did any of you have narrow escapes? He has made a record of them, and “He requires that which is past.” So God will require of you all the warnings that came to you through sickness. So, also, God will require of you all those warnings that came to you through the sudden decease of your friends. I suppose that there have been thirty or forty startling providences in your life, when you were impressed with the fact--more or less impressed with it--that life was uncertain, and that at any moment eternity might move in upon your soul. How did you feel about it? Did you put the warnings that God gave you to any practical application, or has it been proved that there is no power in God’s providences to move and arouse and arrest your soul? There are three points at which “God requires that which is past.”

(1) One is now. God is saying to you so loudly you cannot stop your ears against it: “O man, where is thy father’s God? O man, where are thy dying mother’s entreaties? O man, where have you spent your nights since you have been in town? O man, if you should die in your seat to-night, where would you go to? O man, how long will you live?”

(2) There is another point at which God makes requisition, and that is the last hour we live on earth. What are the voices of the past saying to that unrepentant man as he is going out of life? Those voices are saying to him: “What about those Sabbath-breaking rides? What about those words blasphemous or unclean? What about those malpractices in trade? What about those million bad thoughts during your life, of envy, or hatred, or lust, or pride? Come to resurrection all ye days, and months, and years; come to resurrection.” And they come. What is God doing with that dying man? He is “requiring that which is past.”

(3) There is one other point at which God will make requisition that is, in the great final day. Without a single exception, all the unforgiven sins of our past life will come up before us, and before an assembled universe we will be questioned about them. (T. De Witt Talmage.)

The past

It is by no means an uncustomary thing for a traveller passing through a certain country to make his pauses and to reflect upon the path he has already travelled, and to map out before him the path he has to travel, and to decide in his own mind upon the course he shall take most calculated to bring him with safety to his journey’s end. He doubtless recalls some of the scenes he has passed through, whether of stirring interest or otherwise. And while doing this he is impressed with a consciousness of enlarged experience; and if he is not a fool he will make this experience serve him for his advantage in the future. Even so with the Christian traveller, he has his pauses in the journey of life. He brings before his mind the memory of the past when he comes to the close of an old year, and looks onward to the beginning of a new one. It becomes us all to examine ourselves, to trace back our past lives, and to look forward to the future, for the very reason assigned to us by the words of Solomon, “God requireth that which is past.”

1. We find the text borne out according to the requirements of the natural world around us. Nothing of the past is absolutely lost, but, in some form or other, ever connected with the passing present.

2. We often speak of forgetting a thing, as ii by its banishment from the memory it were lost, gone, and perished. But there is nothing forgotten: for “God requireth that which is past.” “The winds travel on their course, and seem to sweep past us, but they do a work which never perishes. The waves flow high, and seem to steal away, but each wave contributes a donation to the business of creation which never perishes. The sun rises, and shines, and sinks away again, but leaves behind him an alms-offering to the charities of fruition and of sustenance which never perishes. Men are born, and live, and toil, and die, and are by men forgotten; but their work never perishes.”

3. Consider these words as they refer to our individual influence upon others.

4. The text reminds us all of the impossibility of escaping from our responsibilities.

5. The text, while thus binding the past, present and future together in Deity, acts as an excellent monition for our future guidance. It tells us that the past can be improved upon, and, while gone beyond our reach and never to return to us again, we can nevertheless seize the passing moment, and so, from its warning, enter with renewed courage and with renewed hope upon the scenes of life lying before us, untravelled and unknown. (W. D. Horwood.)