Thought for Today
Ecclesiastes 1:9 What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done; there is nothing new under the sun.
Isaiah 43:19 I am about to do a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it? I will make a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert.
John 3:16 For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.
Acts 17:21 Now all the Athenians and the foreigners living there would spend their time in nothing but telling or hearing something new.
Earlier this morning, Greta called out to me to ask about a noise she heard outside. I had not heard the noise, but when I went to look outside, there were workmen in the street and some construction equipment. Soon afterward, I heard the sound of a jackhammer breaking up the street a few houses down from our home. Exasperatingly, no one from the town or the power company had warned any of us in advance.
Finally, after what seemed like hours but was probably only a few minutes, one of the workmen did ring the doorbell, apologize and explain that they were digging a trench from the transformer on one side of the street to lay a new line to the other side of the street. One of our neighbors was doing some sort of upgrade that required additional power. My assumption is that the whole thing has to do with someone installing an electric car charging station.
What struck me this morning, especially given that this past Saturday commemorated D-Day is how much our world has changed during my lifetime. I often remind everyone who will listen, we never live in the world in which we grew up. The same is probably true for every generation. As I think about all of the ‘new things’ in our modern world, I always remember that my beloved maternal grandfather was born shortly after the last railroad tracks linking the east and west coasts of the U.S.A. were being connected. My Pop was born in 1883. “The U.S. transcontinental railroad was built between 1863 and 1869, with its completion marked on May 10, 1869, when the Union Pacific and Central Pacific railroads met at Promontory Summit Utah.” (Copilot Search) Pop died in January 1969. “The historic Apollo 11 mission, conducted by NASA, achieved the first crewed lunar landing on July 20. 1969 . . .” (Copilot Search)
Maybe Qoheleth exaggerated a bit, or at least overstretched his argument. There are some things ubiquitous in our lives today that were only imagined by science fiction writers in the 1940s. I spent almost half of my working career as an engineer without any access to a computer. Today, I am writing this on my computer, sharing via the internet with all who read it. If we could drive our car across the now torn up street, we would be driving a car with a plethora of computers. “Modern cars typically contain between 30 and over 100 computers, known as electronic control units (ECUs).” (Copilot Search)
The changes in geography and on world maps since the days of WWII are immense. There are countries and nations today that did not exist in the 1940s. Maps have been redrawn, boundaries have changed. There is even a lost sea, the Aral Sea is no more. “The Aral Sea was a large inland saltwater lake in Central Asia that has largely dried up due to river diversion for irrigation, creating one of the world’s most dramatic ecological disasters.” (Copilot Search)
Not to belabor the obvious, but all of those Copilot Searches above could not have been quoted in 1940. Our modern, electronic, computer age is vastly different from the world of my youth. But, there are some things that have not changed. People are still people. The same wants, needs and concerns of the 1940s for food and shelter remain today.
Has Creation remained essentially static since “Genesis 2:7 the LORD God formed man from the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and the man became a living being?” No, the prophet Isaiah was correct. Isaiah did foresee a new thing. John captured the truth of that new thing in vs. 3:16.
That new thing was done long before D-Day, long before the jackhammering still going on outside. Our modern world still reverberates to the impact of that new thing. As much as we are products of that new thing, we are also agents of change in the implementation of changes wrought by God’s gift to Creation, Jesus, the Christ.
Stay safe, be an agent of change, trust God,
Pastor Ray