Bible Commentaries
James Nisbet's Church Pulpit Commentary
Ecclesiastes 3
A BEAUTIFUL WORLD
He hath made every thing beautiful in His time.’
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.
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.
Bishop Phillips Brooks.
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