Nothing New Under the Sun - Ecclesiastes 1-2

Ecclesiastes 1:9-11 (ESV)

9 What has been is what will be,

and what has been done is what will be done,

and there is nothing new under the sun.

10 Is there a thing of which it is said,

“See, this is new”?

It has been already

in the ages before us.

11 There is no remembrance of former things,

nor will there be any remembrance

of later things yet to be

among those who come after.

In my leadership business I teach a leadership cohort.  The leadership coaching last for an entire year but the group is told at the beginning of the class that our last session is on innovation.   They are required at the start to come up with an innovative idea to present to their cohorts at the end of the leadership sessions.  So they get one year to think about and incubate an idea, only they have thought of.  At the end of the class they present their idea and we vote on which one is truly innovative.   Imagine their surprise when the above verse is shown to them.   Solomon, with all his money, wealth and power, wrote this entire book of Ecclesiastes to discover what this worldly life has to offer.   You really can’t read the book without reading, first, his conclusion to the entire research project:

Ecclesiastes 12:13-14 (ESV)

The end of the matter; all has been heard. Fear God and keep his commandments, for this is the whole duty of man. For God will bring every deed into judgment, with every secret thing, whether good or evil.

His conclusion is that the fear of the Lord is the ONLY thing that matters.  As he pursued innovative travel, toil, tools and toys he discovered there was a nothing new under the sun.   What we think was new was already tried in the past.   What we produced now will be forgotten and later it will be looked at as new.  But it won’t be new, it will just be new to someone else.   We might have a hard time squaring this with our experiences.   We see new stuff all the time that even Solomon didn’t see.   I think what is meant by Solomon’s thoughts is that we might come up with new ways to accomplish something but the something we want to accomplish is always the same.   Solomon’s point is that the earth remains the sam. He is teaching that as one generation is forgotten, it is replaced by another, who repeats the previous generations exploits and experiences.  His point of the book is to show the futility of mankind without God.   There are new things but they simply repeat the desire in man to be self sufficient and autonomous from God that the previous generation pursue.   Nothing is new from one generation to the next.  They keep trying to find new ways to satisfy the same inward desire.   The above lines are a poem and are not to be taken literally that there is nothing new.   They are to be taken spiritually that there is nothing new, invented by man, that can satisfy the longing in the hearts of man from one generation to the next.  NOT ONE THING!   Except, Solomon concludes, to fear the Lord.