MacLaren on Time

I particularly liked MacLaren's commentary on 1 Chronicles 29:29-30.   Time is such a slippery concept--the correct use of it, the loss of it, the critical nature of seizing the moment as it ripens:   

"Note “times” which make up each life. By “the times” the writer does not merely mean the

succession of moments. Each life is made up of a series, not merely of successive moments, but of well-marked epochs, each of which has its own character, its own responsibilities, its own opportunities, in each of which there is some special work to be done, some grace to be cultivated, some lesson to be learned, some sacrifice to be made; and if it is let slip it never comes back any more. The old alchemists used to believe that there was what they called the “moment of projection” when, into the heaving molten mass in their crucible, if they dropped the magic powder, the whole would turn into gold; an instant later and there would be explosion and death; an instant earlier and there would be no effect. And so God’s moments come to us, every one of them—a crisis.

I. The power that moves the times. How dreary a thing it is if all that we have to say about life is, “The times pass over us,” like the blind rush of the stream, or the movement of the sea around our coasts, eating away here, and depositing its spoils there, sometimes taking and sometimes giving, but all the work of mere aimless and purposeless chance or of natural causes. There is nothing more dismal or paralysing than the contemplation of the flow of the times over our heads, unless we see in their flow something far more than that. The passage of our epochs over us is not merely the aimless low of a stream but the movement of a current which God directs. “My times are in Thy hand.”

III. How eloquently the text suggests the transiency of all the “times.” They “passed over him” as the wind through an archway, that whistles and cometh not again. How blessed it is to cherish that wholesome sense of the transieney of things here below! The times roll over us, like the seas that break upon some isolated rock, and when the tide has fallen and the vain flood has subsided the rock is them. If the world helps us to God, we need not mind though it passes and the fashion thereof.

IV. The transitory “times that went over” Israel’s king are all recorded imperishably on the pages here. The record, though condensed, lives for ever. It takes a thousand rose-trees to make a vial full of essence of roses. The record and issues of life will be condensed into small compass, but the essence of it is eternal. We shall find it again, and have to drink as we have brewed, when we get yonder." (A. M Maclaren, D. D.)