Nothing New Under the Sun

“There is nothing new under the sun,” wrote the Preacher in Ecclesiastes a little over 3,000 years ago. People have been quoting him ever since, and the manifest accuracy of his statement is both reassuring and humbling for the Christian in search of truth.

Humbling, because it implies that none of the ideas that come to us as we read the word of God and discover great ‘new’ things about it are actually original to us. Someone always got there before us; we just don’t necessarily know whom. Reassuring, because the fact that others have walked the same path before us and come to exactly the same conclusions about scripture provides confirmation that we are correct in our understanding of it.

Orthodox and Heretical Agreement

I am assuming, of course, that our thoughts are less than perfectly original because we are orthodox; we understand the scripture accurately, as the Spirit of God intended, together with those who read those words long before we did and pored over them seeking enlightenment. But errors of various sorts can also be quite unoriginal. There is nothing new about the vast majority of the heresies I’ve come across in my last decade and a half of Bible study. Still, once in a very long while I find myself shocked by the weirdness of an interpretation I’ve never heard before. Perhaps I have finally come across an original thinker! Sadly, he’s original only because he’s so uniquely, spectacularly wrong.

In any case, there is comfort in shared understanding of the truth, and I always find it a joyous occasion when I come across someone who has traveled an entirely different path and wound up in the same place I have. Praise the Lord for that. What’s a little amusing is when the guy who got there before you turns out to be your own father, and you’ve never discussed that particular subject.

Guarded in All Our Ways?

A little more than five years ago, I wrote a post entitled “91 and 19” on the subject of whether Christians can legitimately claim Psalm 91 (“He will command his angels concerning you to guard you in all your ways”, and so on) and apply it to their own experiences. Can we appeal to this well-known passage of scripture for comfort and assurance in times when nasty diseases like COVID-19 are circulating and large numbers around us are getting sick? I don’t think I spelled this out at the time I wrote the post, but it was a reaction to a forum I’d just watched online in which several respected Bible teachers discussed the crisis. One fellow was asked whether Christians could claim the psalm’s promises and answered, “Yes, we can!” Nobody called him on it.

I hadn’t done a lot of research into the background of the psalm at that time, but I immediately started scrambling for my Bible and my Strong’s. His answer just felt wrong to me, for a number of reasons that jumped out as I read and re-read its words. I knew, for one, that the writer of that psalm did not pen it with a Christian audience in mind, though we can always learn much about the Lord and his ways from truths that he has not directly addressed to us. However, in this case I felt a strong sense that the psalmist wrote these promises for other believers in other times and places to claim, which is to say people not living in the Church Age. Further study of the passage strongly confirmed that conviction.

An Outlier with Other Outliers

I had no doubts about what I found, yet when I wrote the post, I still felt myself a bit of an outlier. I’ve heard plenty of other Christians claim the promises of Psalm 91 too, just not in connection with COVID. So imagine my amusement early one recent Sunday morning when I played an old sermon of my father’s from 1983 and found he had come to the very same conclusions I had about the psalmist’s intended audience forty-plus years or more before I painstakingly picked my way down the same route.

I mentioned that finding we are unoriginal is both confirming and humbling. It’s also humbling when someone enunciates the same thought you labored to express so much more elegantly and concisely, so I thought I’d share a few quotes from that Sunday evening message probably taken in by an audience of less than sixty at the time.

“Just to grab everything in the Psalms and say, ‘That’s for me’ is a very dangerous form of exposition, a very dangerous form of application of the scripture.

You know, there was a man, a very godly man. His name was Anthony Norris Groves. Anthony Norris Groves was a pioneer of the missionary movement today, a man of God, a man who went to Europe. While he was in Europe, during the time of a great plague, he read Psalm 91 and he claimed these verses for himself … and watched his family die around him. Yet, does it not say, ‘You shall not be afraid of the pestilence that stalks in darkness or of the destruction that lays waste at noon’? That hit his faith with a tremendous sledgehammer blow. That man had trusted God — as he thought — for the fulfillment of this promise, and it almost seemed as if God was letting him down, breaking his word.

What was he to do? He came to the conclusion that he was reading someone else’s mail; that this promise was not directly, specifically given to him.”

I did not know the Groves story, which I found both powerful and sad. Also ironic, because there’s a man who also got to the same place in understanding Psalm 91 many years before Dad. Nothing new under the sun, right?

Of Whom?

My father finished with this:

“There’s a tension between what is written in the Psalms and our own experience. The two things do not necessarily fit. That doesn’t mean God has failed, nor does it mean that I am unspiritual — though that might be true. I’ll leave you to be the judge of that. But it does mean that we need to understand that when we read promises, when we read statements in the word of God, we need to say to ourselves, ‘Of whom is the prophet speaking? What is he specifically talking about?’ ”

The Ethiopian eunuch asked Philip a great question: “About whom, I ask you, does the prophet say this, about himself or about someone else?” We will understand the Psalms a great deal better if we keep it in mind as we read them.