Ecclesiastes 3:15 That which has been is now; and that which is to be has already been; and God requires that which is 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.) Parallel Verses KJV: That which hath been is now; and that which is to be hath already been; and God requireth that which is past. |
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