Daily Manna, Year Two · Day 155 · June 4
Nothing New
“The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.”
You found out this week that the thing you have been carrying has a name. Other people have had it, further back than you would have guessed, and there are books about it. The discovery has landed on you as a demotion.
So here is the verse people hand to someone in your position, and it is worth more than the tone it usually gets said in. The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun. Four verses ahead of it the Preacher has been laying out a closed circuit: the sun hasting to his place where he arose, the wind whirling about continually, the rivers running into the sea, yet the sea is not full.
He is honest about what it costs. There is no remembrance of former things. Being one of many is no compliment in this book. There is also a mercy in it that he does not stop to point out, and Paul does: There hath no temptation taken you but such as is common to man. What is on you has been carried before by people whose names you will never learn, and they did not all go under.
Notice the boundary he puts around his own claim, repeated on nearly every page. Under the sun. He is reporting the view from inside the circuit and says so. The last book in the Bible has a sentence from outside it, spoken from a throne: Behold, I make all things new. That sits in the same Bible as Ecclesiastes and does not cancel what the Preacher saw.
Let the line stop landing on you as a sentence passed. The ordinariness of your trouble is relief if you will take it that way, since it means the road has been walked before. And there is another sentence still to be said over you, by the one who was never under the sun in the first place.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year one reading for day 155 is Desire Satisfied (Psalm 145:16).