What profit do you get out of your labor?
What profit hath he that works in that wherein he has labored? ( Ecclesiastes 3:9 ) It was really being expressed in a very life-gets-so-tedious, don't it? Therefore he concludes. It isn't, "Oh, the glorious time to love and a time to plant," you know, as we make it very romantic today. And the Hebrew idea is that of the monotony of life. Life seems to be ordered in these things. There is a time and a season, a time and a purpose under heaven to everything: there is a time to be born, a time to die a time to plant, a time to pluck up that which is planted a time to kill, a time to heal a time to break down, a time to build up a time to weep, a time to laugh a time to mourn, a time to dance a time to cast ( Ecclesiastes 3:1-5 )Īnd that's the idea of the Hebrew. "A time to love," and it's been made very beautiful, but in the Hebrew idea, it was monotony. This has been used poetically as something that is very beautiful. Compare Ecclesiastes 7:13 Ecclesiastes 8:17.Ĭhapter 3 Now we get into the weary, monotony of life. 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. 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. 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. 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.
The word, translated “world” in the text, and “eternity” in this note, is used seven times in Ecclesiastes. e., the heart of the sons of men, Ecclesiastes 3:10).
Rather, He hath made all (the travail, Ecclesiastes 3:10) beautiful (fit, in harmony with the whole work of God) in its time also He hath set eternity in their heart (i. Their realization of this keeps them in a state of fear before God (14-15). They can change nothing events will go on repeating themselves according to God’s fixed purposes. People can only accept whatever God sends them and find pleasure in it (10-13). The writer is confident that God does everything perfectly according to his plan, but he is also frustrated because he does not know what that plan is. Human beings may have a desire to know God and the realities of the unseen eternal world, but they still cannot understand God’s ways. In view of this, all human effort to improve life is useless. It appears to him that everything happens at the time God has decided it will happen. Now (ignoring for the moment the conclusions he has just outlined in 2:24-26) he considers the fixed order of events in the world. In 1:1-11 the author considered the ceaseless toil and repetition in the natural world and decided that life was useless. And it is only in eternity that man will be able to discover what God has designed by the various works he has formed.Įvents controlled by God’s fixed order (3:1-15) 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. He hath set the world in their heart - העולם haolam, that hidden time - the period beyond the present, - ETERNITY. The most finished works of art are bungling jobs, when compared with the meanest operation of nature. Nothing of this kind can be said of the works of man. 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. Beautiful in his time - God's works are well done there are order, harmony, and beauty in them all.
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