Nothing New Under the Sun

There are times in life when nothing seems to be going the way we want it to. Gas prices are up, food prices are up, wages are stagnant, and home values are down. At times like these politicians and reporters are heard trying to conjure the ghost of the Great Depression. Now, you and I both know that America’s current troubles are small potatoes compared to the horror of the Civil War, the scale and scope of the Great Depression, or the capacity for suffering of World War II. We’ve been through far worse. Likewise, church leaders are often fond of comparing our current moral situation to the Last Days, claiming that we’ve gone over the abyss as a people and there is no turning back. We’ve been through worse moral times too. There was a time that churches across America condoned or promoted slavery, times when American Indians were thought of us expendable, and the days before the Great Awakening were worse than these as well.
Everyone wants to believe that the time they live in is somehow unique, that things have never been like this before. As Christians, we are buoyed by the words of Solomon in Ecclesiastes 3:15, “Whatever is has already been, and what will be has been before; and God will call the past to account.” The wisdom in Solomon’s statement is timely for us as well; whatever troubles we face have been faced by God’s people before; whatever needs we have, God has answered for his people in the past; whatever mistakes we make, God has forgiven his people those same mistakes already. There is nothing new under the sun, we may not have been here before, but the Lord has, and that makes all the difference to us all.