His breath goeth forth, he returneth to his earth.
The philosophy of death
The text refers to--
I. The destiny of all.
1. A special day--the day of death.
2. A striking view of death.
3. Man’s last earthly home.
4. The cessation of mental activity.
II. The peculiar privileges and happiness of a certain description of character.
1. Sustained by the God of Jacob.
2. Expecting all good in and from God.
3. The blessedness of this character. (J. Burns, D. D.)
The mortality of human thought
I. All hypothetical thoughts are mortal. They are like the leaves of the forest, whilst some of them begin to wither and fall ere autumnal winds have touched them, they all fall dead at last. The heaps of dead leaves which the gardener every day in autumn sweeps up from the well-wooded swards under his care are emblems of these hypothetical thoughts. Do I undervalue such thoughts? No! Each of these rotting leaves had its charm and has its use. At first it quivered with life and sparkled in the sun; and its decay, no doubt, plays a useful part in the economy of nature. Hypothetical thoughts! Do not despise them. Who can tell the quickening impulses, the beneficent sciences and arts that have come out of them, and will come again? Albeit they must all perish as they touch reality. As the grandest billow, when it breaks on the rocky shore, falls to pieces, so the most majestic hypotheses of men are wrecked as the mind touches the stern realities of eternity.
II. All sensuous thoughts are mortal. In the Scriptures we read of the “fleshly mind,” “fleshly wisdom,” and of those who “judge after the flesh.” How much of human thought is started, shaped, and swayed by the senses! Their springs of movement are in the senses. Their horizon is bounded by the sensuous. Now, such thoughts are mortal. They must perish. They are dying by millions every moment, and they must all die at death. “In that very day his thoughts perish.”
III. All mercenary thoughts are mortal. I mean those thoughts that are taken up with the question, “What shall I eat, what shall I drink, and wherewithal shall I be clothed?” Thoughts that are concerned entirely with man’s material interest in this world, and are limited entirely to time. The worldly schemes and plans of men are all perishing and perishable. Were all the wrecked purposes of all the business men in London for one day fully registered, we could almost say the world itself would not contain the books. (David Thomas, D. D.)
Lost thoughts
At death a man sees all those thoughts which were not spent upon God to be fruitless. A Scythian captain having, for a draught of water, yielded up a city, cried out, “What have I lost? What have I betrayed?” So will it be with that man when he comes to die who hath spent all his meditations upon the world; he will say, “What have I lost? What have I betrayed? I have lost heaven, I have betrayed my soul.” Should not the consideration of this fix our minds upon the thoughts of God and glory? All other meditations are fruitless; like a piece of ground which hath much cost laid out upon it, but it yields no crop. (I. Watson.)