What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; There is
nothing new under the sun. Is there anything of which one can say, “Look! This
is something new.” It was here always, long ago. It was here before our time. There
is no remembrance of men of old and even those who are yet to come will not be
remembered by those who follow. ~Ecclesiastes 1:9-11
You turn men back to dust, saying, “return to dust, O sons of men.” For a thousand years in your sight are like a day that has just gone by, or like a watch in the night. You sweep men away in the sleep of death. They are like the new grass of the morning: though in the morning it springs up new, by evening it is dry and withered. ~Psalm 90:3-6
The grass withers and the flowers fall, but the Word of our LORD will stand forever. ~Isaiah 40:8
This whole idea that Solomon presents that there is nothing new under the sun, was brought home to me the other day as I was doing my daily Bible reading. Have you ever been tempted to think that, surely, it can’t have ever been as bad as it is now? It’s tempting to think that with our technology and faster pace of life, there is no way that the world has ever experienced this degree of evil that we see before us today.
Yesterday, I was reading in 1 Kings 18, the contest on Mt. Carmel. I’m sure you remember it. There were 850 prophets of Baal and Asherah, pitted against little old Elijah in a contest to prove who is the true God. The prize was supposed to be, which ever God won would be the one that the people would choose to serve. So, the 850 prophets gave it their best shot. They wailed and pleaded and danced and cut themselves and really made a show of their devotion to Baal, to no avail.
Then, Elijah stepped up, had his sacrifice drenched with water, a precious commodity in a drought, and then prayed a simple, quiet prayer to God and, God responded with a dramatic fire that lapped up the sacrifice, the water and the altar. As a result, the people responded by killing the false prophets. But soon, went back to their ordinary lives, their familiar objects of worship.
What Elijah had been hoping for, a revival, didn’t happen because, like today’s culture of the post truth era, the people acknowledged, yes, there is truth, yah, there really is a real God, but we don’t care. We prefer our comfort zones. The post truth era was alive and well 800 years before Christ!
“There is nothing new under the sun.” Truly, as you study history, you learn that all philosophies, and pagan religious practices may be varied a bit, or repackaged, but they are not new, just new to us. “There is nothing new under the sun.” There is a quote that says something to the effect: “Those who forget history are destined to repeat it.” This is not a new phenomenon.
After WWII, the world was determined to remember the holocaust and never repeat it. Now, three generations later, there are holocaust deniers and, anti-Semitism is way more rampant throughout the world than the race issues that we are dealing with here in America. Three generations later, people are forgetting the horrors of the past and at a safe distance in time, their guard to remember is let down, priming the pump for history to repeat itself again.
There was a reason that God ordered the Children of Israel to pass their history on from generation to generation. They were never supposed to forget that they had once been slaves and that God had freed them in miraculous ways. There was a reason that God instructed His people to be intentional about passing along their faith. If they didn’t remember, they were destined to repeat it, as did happen when they were hauled off to Babylon to live there for two generations at least. It’s either cycles or lessons. Learn the lesson and move on. Forget the lesson and you repeat the cycle.
There is nothing new under the sun. “In the future, when your son asks you, “What is the meaning of the stipulations, decrees and laws the Lord our God has commanded you?” Tell him: “We were slaves of Pharaoh in Egypt, but the Lord brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand. Before our eyes, the Lord brought miraculous signs and wonders—great and terrible—upon Egypt and pharaoh and his whole household. But He brought us out from there to bring us in and give us the land that He promised on oath to our forefathers. The Lord commanded us to obey all these decrees and to fear the Lord our God, so that we may always prosper and be kept alive, as is the case today. And if we are careful to obey all this law before the Lord our God, as He has commanded us, that will be our righteousness.” (Deuteronomy 6:20-25) The Lord even embedded in the cycle of their year the annual feasts, ordained by God to help them remember.
Yesterday, we talked about God being the Keeper of Time. That is true. God is over time, but we must remember that we are only a few minutes of His time here on earth. For a limited time only, we have the chance and responsibility to pass on what we know about our history, our faith and our wisdom to the next generation, or the next few minutes of time. Like the baton that is passed in a relay race, our opportunity is limited to pass on what we know to others.
“What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again.” A relay race is a pretty good description. The track is round or oval, so the race goes round and round, but each runner only gets one chance to carry the baton. Then, all that is left is to cheer on the rest and hope you did a good enough job to advance your team.
Disney referred to it as “the circle of life,” in the movie, “The Lion King.” It’s easy to think of life that way, with the circle of seasons that we experience. Satan doesn’t even need a new play book because we humans tend to forget. We thwart his efforts, however, when we try to help the next generation remember, and encourage them to run God’s race instead.
We are here and gone and time marches on. Ideas of man come and go, ebb and flow, get repackaged and surface again as “the new and improved.” Through it all, time marches on. We see what is in our brief contemporary world, but we do not see the whole picture, only our brief part of it. God however sees it all and is over it all. “The grass withers and the flowers fall, but the Word of our LORD will stand forever.”
We are like the grass. Our thoughts are like flowers. They are vivid for the moment but forgotten before the Summer is over. When we cling to God and His Word, we are clinging to something beyond ourselves, something grander than we could ever hope to be. If we can remember that the things and people we fear are like us, vivid only for a moment, then fading as well, but that the God we are clinging to goes on forever, it adds a perspective and hope to our life today that we need to remember.
“There is nothing new under the sun.” It’s only new to us. God has seen it all before and knows how to deal with it best. When we trust His wisdom, and focus on Him, not the fading troubles, we will know how to deal with it too.
Prayer: Thank You Lord for causing all the great Truths and facts that answer our deepest questions to be written down in Your Word, so that all we have to do is read it to remember. And help me Lord to live faithfully by Your Word, with many opportunities to pass it on as well, and run with perseverance the race marked out, In Jesus’ name, amen.
Song: Find us Faithful
You turn men back to dust, saying, “return to dust, O sons of men.” For a thousand years in your sight are like a day that has just gone by, or like a watch in the night. You sweep men away in the sleep of death. They are like the new grass of the morning: though in the morning it springs up new, by evening it is dry and withered. ~Psalm 90:3-6
The grass withers and the flowers fall, but the Word of our LORD will stand forever. ~Isaiah 40:8
This whole idea that Solomon presents that there is nothing new under the sun, was brought home to me the other day as I was doing my daily Bible reading. Have you ever been tempted to think that, surely, it can’t have ever been as bad as it is now? It’s tempting to think that with our technology and faster pace of life, there is no way that the world has ever experienced this degree of evil that we see before us today.
Yesterday, I was reading in 1 Kings 18, the contest on Mt. Carmel. I’m sure you remember it. There were 850 prophets of Baal and Asherah, pitted against little old Elijah in a contest to prove who is the true God. The prize was supposed to be, which ever God won would be the one that the people would choose to serve. So, the 850 prophets gave it their best shot. They wailed and pleaded and danced and cut themselves and really made a show of their devotion to Baal, to no avail.
Then, Elijah stepped up, had his sacrifice drenched with water, a precious commodity in a drought, and then prayed a simple, quiet prayer to God and, God responded with a dramatic fire that lapped up the sacrifice, the water and the altar. As a result, the people responded by killing the false prophets. But soon, went back to their ordinary lives, their familiar objects of worship.
What Elijah had been hoping for, a revival, didn’t happen because, like today’s culture of the post truth era, the people acknowledged, yes, there is truth, yah, there really is a real God, but we don’t care. We prefer our comfort zones. The post truth era was alive and well 800 years before Christ!
“There is nothing new under the sun.” Truly, as you study history, you learn that all philosophies, and pagan religious practices may be varied a bit, or repackaged, but they are not new, just new to us. “There is nothing new under the sun.” There is a quote that says something to the effect: “Those who forget history are destined to repeat it.” This is not a new phenomenon.
After WWII, the world was determined to remember the holocaust and never repeat it. Now, three generations later, there are holocaust deniers and, anti-Semitism is way more rampant throughout the world than the race issues that we are dealing with here in America. Three generations later, people are forgetting the horrors of the past and at a safe distance in time, their guard to remember is let down, priming the pump for history to repeat itself again.
There was a reason that God ordered the Children of Israel to pass their history on from generation to generation. They were never supposed to forget that they had once been slaves and that God had freed them in miraculous ways. There was a reason that God instructed His people to be intentional about passing along their faith. If they didn’t remember, they were destined to repeat it, as did happen when they were hauled off to Babylon to live there for two generations at least. It’s either cycles or lessons. Learn the lesson and move on. Forget the lesson and you repeat the cycle.
There is nothing new under the sun. “In the future, when your son asks you, “What is the meaning of the stipulations, decrees and laws the Lord our God has commanded you?” Tell him: “We were slaves of Pharaoh in Egypt, but the Lord brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand. Before our eyes, the Lord brought miraculous signs and wonders—great and terrible—upon Egypt and pharaoh and his whole household. But He brought us out from there to bring us in and give us the land that He promised on oath to our forefathers. The Lord commanded us to obey all these decrees and to fear the Lord our God, so that we may always prosper and be kept alive, as is the case today. And if we are careful to obey all this law before the Lord our God, as He has commanded us, that will be our righteousness.” (Deuteronomy 6:20-25) The Lord even embedded in the cycle of their year the annual feasts, ordained by God to help them remember.
Yesterday, we talked about God being the Keeper of Time. That is true. God is over time, but we must remember that we are only a few minutes of His time here on earth. For a limited time only, we have the chance and responsibility to pass on what we know about our history, our faith and our wisdom to the next generation, or the next few minutes of time. Like the baton that is passed in a relay race, our opportunity is limited to pass on what we know to others.
“What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again.” A relay race is a pretty good description. The track is round or oval, so the race goes round and round, but each runner only gets one chance to carry the baton. Then, all that is left is to cheer on the rest and hope you did a good enough job to advance your team.
Disney referred to it as “the circle of life,” in the movie, “The Lion King.” It’s easy to think of life that way, with the circle of seasons that we experience. Satan doesn’t even need a new play book because we humans tend to forget. We thwart his efforts, however, when we try to help the next generation remember, and encourage them to run God’s race instead.
We are here and gone and time marches on. Ideas of man come and go, ebb and flow, get repackaged and surface again as “the new and improved.” Through it all, time marches on. We see what is in our brief contemporary world, but we do not see the whole picture, only our brief part of it. God however sees it all and is over it all. “The grass withers and the flowers fall, but the Word of our LORD will stand forever.”
We are like the grass. Our thoughts are like flowers. They are vivid for the moment but forgotten before the Summer is over. When we cling to God and His Word, we are clinging to something beyond ourselves, something grander than we could ever hope to be. If we can remember that the things and people we fear are like us, vivid only for a moment, then fading as well, but that the God we are clinging to goes on forever, it adds a perspective and hope to our life today that we need to remember.
“There is nothing new under the sun.” It’s only new to us. God has seen it all before and knows how to deal with it best. When we trust His wisdom, and focus on Him, not the fading troubles, we will know how to deal with it too.
Prayer: Thank You Lord for causing all the great Truths and facts that answer our deepest questions to be written down in Your Word, so that all we have to do is read it to remember. And help me Lord to live faithfully by Your Word, with many opportunities to pass it on as well, and run with perseverance the race marked out, In Jesus’ name, amen.
Song: Find us Faithful
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