Déjà vu all over again!

What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun. Ecclesiastes 1:9

I stand on the shoulders of thousands of preachers of thousands of sermons, thoughts, ideas, illustrations and I completely understand the writer of Ecclesiastes.  There is no new thought, there is no new sermon, and there is no new study of scriptures that has not been done before.  There is little that we encounter in our studies of God that is different. 

There is transience about the human existence on this earth.  There is little that brings us face to face with something absolutely new. Nothing really changes except for the faces and the names.  History repeats itself over and over again.  We are born.  We live.  We die. The elevations are built up and the elevations are brought down.  History is repeated over and over again.  No great thing emerges from “under the sun” that would change our fleet moment on this earth.  The world is a very repetitive place.  Solomon was stating the obvious.  Nothing ever changes.

Any search for meaningfulness, any grasping out for thing that would excite our souls of the new has to come from somewhere else.

In this hopeless weariness we wait for the people around us to come up with something new.  We crave something new to make our existence more relevant. But Solomon is telling us “It isn’t happening”.  Here “under the sun” our world is always looking and listening, attempting to be satisfied, but always wanting more.  Each succeeding generation seeks to find what was not discovered before and fail.

In the current society we always want something to be different. Every technology screams to us “I am new”. iPod, iPhone, iTunes, TV sets the size of small cars, YouTube, Xfinity, Netflix, blogs, FaceBook, Twitter, Instagram, and yet our eyes and our ears are not satisfied.  We want more.  The overwhelming information that assaults our senses are but symptoms of the lack of change.  There will always be one more show to watch, one more game to play, one more song to hear, one more update from people we hardly know. So we keep on text-messaging, webcasting, Facebooking, Twittering, Flickering, uploading, downloading, and spewing the same ideas that someone else has said a thousand times.  But what have we gained? What have we accomplished?  Is there any profit?

Now before you get really depressed at the monotony of existence, the key understanding here is found when you understand “there is nothing new under the sun”.  Here at ground level everything is pretty much the same. Yogi Berra may have said it well: “déjà vu all over again!”  Meaningfulness is knowing and knowing without a doubt that there is a God in heaven who rules OVER the sun.  Meaningfulness can only be found in the context of Him.  When we come to the realization God in our lives does it make life here tolerable, even delightful, and making ultimate perfect existence possible, through Jesus Christ. All those things that make life here so weary and boring can have new meaning, when you understand who God is, what Christ did and you connect yourself to the genuineness of being a child of God. “Fear God and keep his commandments, for this is the whole duty of man,” (Eccl. 12:13).