I. The Bible does not prohibit pleasure. What the Bible forbids is excess in the use of pleasure, untimely pleasures, and pleasures that arise from sin or that lead to sin.
II. In prohibiting such pleasures, the Bible proceeds upon a principle of benevolence.
III. The principle is benevolent because it accords with the constitution of our nature. There is a point at which pleasure becomes pain. It is the law of our being that if pleasure is to remain pleasure, it must be enjoyed moderately and intermittently.
Parker, City Templevol i., p. 11.
I. I hold that pleasure is a necessity of our nature, that we are made to enjoy, and that the goodness of God, which hath made our complex constitution, our many-sided manhood, so marvellously capable of pleasure, hath made bountiful provision for full satisfaction and delight, In all true physical delights, then, the Christian finds honey; and to him the good God says, "Hast thou found honey? Eat it."
II. But man's physical being is only a portion of his noble and superior constitution. As with the physical, so with the intellectual, the Christian's capability runs on all fours with that of the unbeliever in the direction of any mental honey of pleasure and delight that can be found; and the royalty of mind is at least as kingly and imperial when it bends before the crowned Christ as when reason binds the lordly symbol round its own presumptuous brow.
III. There is the moral and spiritual man, whose existence cannot be ignored. Nobody will dispute that there is honey in doing right, that there is pleasure in goodness and truth, and that, unless the conscience is utterly dead, there is a bitterness in doing wrong. There is nothing in religion that can deprive us of all the real enjoyment, the true pleasure, the satisfying honey, the rational delights, which are possible to anybody in all God's wide world.
J. Jackson Wray, Light from the Old Lamp,p. 171.
References: Proverbs 25:17. Clergyman's Magazine,vol. vi., p. 59. Proverbs 25:21; Proverbs 25:22. New Manual of Sunday-school Addresses,p. 35; W. Arnot, Laws from Heaven,2nd series, p. 323.Proverbs 25:23. Clergyman's Magazine,vol. ii, p. 41.