Golden Scars

Father, I am broken;

pieces of me are old and gold

while others are young and shattered,

yet evermore so bold in control.

The young boy, insecure and afraid,

lashes out in anger and selfishness,

vying for what he believes

he’ll never have.

He wages war against golden

knowledge and wisdom;

truth is abolished

in his tornado of feelings.

He spins and cycles,

ripped and tossed to and fro

by wind and sea and waves.

He languishes in the trough he’s carved out;

he believes himself safe in the depths.

All the while, the man of healed

golden wisdom and knowledge

hauls at the anchor

placed in faulty hope.

Day after day, he loses.

Night after night, he weeps.

Despair overtakes him because

the boy’s hope is in himself.

Yet, light shines over the dark of the expanse,

and the sea is calmed.

Trough and peak draw closer momentarily.

The Son appears; hope comes.

A piece of the boy is hauled up,

removed from the shadowed trench

and set on the highest mountain.

One worry is removed; the anchor lightens.

The Son brings the boy to the man—

“This is My son whom I love;

his hope is now in Me.

Nurture him, and his gold

shall aid you in your fight.”

The Son takes the man by the hand—

“You are My brother;

What is Mine is yours.

Keep up your battle,

for I will be your calm.

My Spirit will be your help.”

~Nathaniel G. Evans

Doing is Learning

Jonah is a book that we often reference as an example of what happens when you run away from God and His plan, but, and I speak mostly from anecdotal experience here, we rarely talk about why Jonah ran. And, personally, I find that odd because the reason Jonah ran, and the work God was doing in that time, is probably more important than the lesson to not run.

If you haven’t heard Jonah’s story, the summary is this: Jonah was tasked to go to Nineveh by God to deliver the message of their impending destruction for their evil acts, but he refused to go, instead attempting to run as far in the opposite direction as he could by sea. When a storm arose and threatened to sink the ship he was on, he directed the sailors to throw him overboard to calm the seas so they might live, and when he landed in the waters, he was swallowed by a whale or a giant fish, depending on your translation. After three days and nights, the whale/fish spat him up onto shore and he traveled to Nineveh where he prophesied their destruction, and the entire city repented at once.

Now, typically, we stop there when we tell Jonah’s story, but I believe the rest tells us so much more about God and how He works in our lives.

 Jonah’s Hatred of Assyria

Firstly, we need to understand the reason Jonah did not want to travel to Nineveh. It wasn’t because he didn’t want to make the journey, nor was it to avoid his responsibility as a prophet, necessarily. Jonah didn’t want to go to Nineveh because he hated the Ninevites. The people of Nineveh were diametrically opposed to everything God stands for. God is love; Nineveh was hate. God is peace; Nineveh was war. God is just; Nineveh was cruel.

Assyrians, the people of Nineveh, had a reputation as a warmongering people. They were a cultural and military power in the area because they were ruthless and evil. Everywhere they invaded, they caused widespread destruction, captured, tortured, and raped the people who lived there, and took those who survived as slaves. And as much as Jonah hated the Ninevites, the Ninevites hated Israel; the two nations had mighty conflicts frequently throughout biblical times. And it was for all these reasons Jonah hated them.

If you paid attention while reading through Jonah 1, however, you might still be questioning why Jonah refused to go to Nineveh. After all, God told Jonah to prophesy about their destruction, and surely Jonah would be fine and dandy with that since he hated them so much, right? And that’s the right question to ask. Once you get there, you start to understand just how well Jonah knows God as His prophet and just how deep his hatred for the Ninevites runs. And to see the whole picture, we’ll have to skip around in the book a little bit.

Why Jonah Refused to Prophesy

Jonah 1:1-2 says, “Get up! Go to the great city of Nineveh and preach against it, because their wickedness has confronted Me.”

Jonah 3:4 tells us that he did just that, eventually, though his sermon was quite lackluster by most accounts. He might’ve even take some form of sadistic glee in delivering his five word message (in Hebrew). “Jonah set out on the first day of his walk in the city and proclaimed, ‘In 40 days, Nineveh will be demolished!’”

And to wrap it up, Jonah himself tells us why he didn’t want to prophesy to the Ninevites in Jonah 4:1-2.

“But Jonah was greatly displeased and became furious. He prayed to the Lord: ‘Please, Lord, isn’t this what I said while I was still in my own country? That’s why I fled toward Tarshish in the first place. I knew that You are a merciful and compassionate God, slow to become angry, rich in faithful love, and One who relents from sending disaster.”

To be very clear, Jonah knew who God is. He knew very well that the reason God sent him to Nineveh was not so Nineveh would be aware of their destruction so they could keep marching toward it, but so that they could repent and be saved from doom. Jonah refused to go because he didn’t want the Ninevites to be saved. He wanted them destroyed, dead, eternally. That was the depth of his hatred.

God Cares for All His People

After Jonah reveals the nature of his thoughts in prayer to God, however, is where the real theme of the book of Jonah reveals itself, and it all comes from a shade tree.

Jonah 4:4-9 says, “The Lord asked, ‘Is it right for you to be angry?’

Jonah left the city and sat down east of it. He made himself a shelter there and sat in its shade to see what would happen to the city. Then the Lord God appointed a plant, and it grew up to provide shade over Jonah’s head to ease his discomfort. Jonah was greatly pleased with the plant. When dawn came the next day, God appointed a worm that attacked the plant, and it withered. As the sun was rising, God appointed a scorching east wind. The sun beat down so much on Jonah’s head that he almost fainted, and he wanted to die. He said, ‘It’s better for me to die than to live.’

Then God asked Jonah, ‘Is it right for you to be angry about the plant?’

‘Yes,’ he replied. ‘It is right. I’m angry enough to die!’”

There are a few incredibly important things to point out in these verses, the first of which is God’s dual response to Jonah’s anger. He asks the same things both times Jonah admits to being upset with his situation: “Is it right for you to be angry?” At first glance, it seems to be a relatively innocent question with little connection between the two occurrences, but it becomes apparent in Jonah’s response to the plant providing shade for him what the purpose of the question is.

 God Cares for All His People

Verse 6 tells us that Jonah was greatly pleased with the plant, which he did not grow, but benefited from greatly, and it is in the understanding of this where God begins to reveal the purpose of having Jonah deliver the prophecy to Nineveh and the purpose of this book for us.

Verses 10-11 say, “So the Lord said, ‘You cared about the plant, which you did not labor over and did not grow. It appeared in a night and perished in a night. Should I not care about the great city of Nineveh, which has more than 120,000 people who cannot distinguish between their right and their left, as well as many animals?”

The Dual Nature of God’s Work

If you paid close attention to this book, you might notice that in God’s actions to move Jonah to Nineveh, He prompts two distinct outcomes in the people who experience them. The first example of this is when He brings about the storm while Jonah is at sea. When Jonah is tossed off the boat as a result of this storm, the sailors who threw him overboard know that they have experienced the one true God, and chapter 1 tells us they turned away from their pagan gods and to Yahweh, sacrificing and making vows to Him. The second result of this is in Jonah, who repents of his actions and chooses to go to Nineveh as he was asked.

This establishes an important standard for how events play out in the book of Jonah. Essentially, the formula is, wherever Jonah goes, God does two things: He impacts the people around Jonah, and He teaches Jonah a lesson about who He is.

Thus, Nineveh, where God impacts all the Ninevites, turning them to Him. But rather than learn his lesson this time, Jonah spits God’s character into His face, angry at God for being who He is. So God uses the plant to knock the lesson into Jonah’s thick skull: all people are His creation, and He is allowed to care for them all equally, to have mercy for them all equally. After all, He made them, labored over them, and knows them all individually.

 The Lessons for Us

And that’s two of the three main lessons we’re supposed to learn here, too. Firstly, it is that God cares for all His creation because He is jealous for them, invested in them. He created every single person and loves each one, and because of that, He chooses to save them. Secondly, we didn’t do any of those things, so our feelings shouldn’t negatively impact our mission to point them to God. We don’t get a vote in who God chooses for us to deliver His message because we had no part in making them; we just go deliver the message.

And finally, the third lesson comes in the revealed theme: when God calls us to do something, the benefit isn’t only for the people we’re called to help. Twice, Jonah’s actions helped others, and twice, God revealed more of Himself to Jonah through those actions. Jonah learned about God’s character: how He saves those who turn to Him, and how He cares and has mercy for all of His creation.

So the next time God calls you to do something for someone else, think about why He’s given you that task. Don’t just do it to do it, but truly seek God in the doing of it. You might find that you benefit from your actions just as much as the people you help.

Harshness of Sins

If you grew up going to church, it’s likely that, at some point in your life, you were told all sins are equal, for the wages of sin is death (Romans 6:23). And that is fully true; I’m not here to discount that fact in the slightest. All sin leads to death—a final, eternal death followed by everlasting torment in Hell. The Bible is frequently very clear on that subject. But this known fact presents an interesting moral quandary—at least it does to me.

The Moral Quandary of Sin Equality

When you only acknowledge that all sins are equal because they all lead to death, you create some interesting thought patterns. All of a sudden, you must determine whether you treat all sins as harshly as murder or rape, or as lightly as a white lie. For if all sins are equal, they must all be treated the same, as the reasoning follows. With this follow-through, you can’t treat a murderer as any worse than a liar, and you can’t treat a liar as any better than a murderer.

For me, this completely fails to satisfy the innate morality impressed upon me by the image of God I am made of. And I believe that if you seriously consider it, we can all come to agreement on this. The nature of this sinful world is actually that all sins are equal. It’s built into phrases like “the ends justify the means,” which dictate that, so long as the end goal is accomplished, whatever is done to make it to that goal is perfectly allowable.

But God’s character doesn’t work that way. For God, the means justify the end, such that what is done on the journey leads to the final result. That is precisely why we cannot work our way to Heaven—our means are not good enough to get us to the end. Only by the means of Jesus’s death and resurrection are we justified to the end.

One Sin Cannot be Forgiven

If you truly pay attention to the Bible, you can find many instances when one sin was regarded as a less grievous offense than another, but let’s start with the biggest.

Matthew 12:31-32 says, “Therefore I tell you, every sin and blasphemy will be forgiven people, but the blasphemy against the Spirit will not be forgiven. And whoever speaks a word against the Son of Man will be forgiven, but whoever speaks against the Holy Spirit will not be forgiven, either in this are or in the age to come.

It really doesn’t get clearer than this. All sins can be forgiven except blasphemy against the Holy Spirit. But that does mean there is a distinction among sins—some can be forgiven, and one cannot be. (There are different people who interpret what, exactly, blasphemy against the Holy Spirit is. It’s not the purpose of this article, but in my opinion—based on the character of God—blasphemy against the Holy Spirit likely means a rejection of the Spirit, i.e., a rejection of the gift of salvation. That’s literally the only thing that will keep you from Heaven.)

Distinction Among Sins in the Old Testament

There are further distinction among the severity of sin offenses, too. Some of the clearest levels of sin distinction appear in Exodus and Leviticus as God lays down laws for the Israelites to follow, and more importantly in this case, how to profess repentance and find forgiveness for breaking those laws.

Exodus 21:12-14 describes a difference between planned murder and an accidental death. To murder was to invite the death penalty as punishment, but if it happened by accident, punishment was exile.

Fighting someone and injuring them required one to pay for lost work time and provide for the recovery of the person who was injured, as stated in verses 18-19. There are far more distinctions in chapters 21-23, but you’ll have to read those on your own time.

In Leviticus, God requires the Israelite people to provide different sacrifices depending upon the severity of the crime they committed against Him. Leviticus 4:3, 22-23, 27-28 and chapter 5:14-15 detail different sin sacrifices one must offer up based on their position within the people and the sins they committed.

We can even find direct contrasts of sins in situations like Abraham lying to Abimelek about Sarah being his sister and not his wife. There’s an argument to be made that Abraham was not lying because Sarah was technically his half-sister but lying by leaving things out is just as much a lie as directly stating incorrect information. Yet, Abraham did not receive punishment worth mentioning in the Bible for his lie, whereas we are told Abimelek would’ve been punished harshly had he been intimate with Sarah.

A Hierarchy of Commandments

God is incredibly purposeful in how He does everything He does, so it should be no surprise to any of us that the numbering of the Ten Commandments was more than just a way to keep track of how many there are. They’re listed in order of importance, the first being “Do not have any other gods beside me,” from Exodus 20:3.

Jesus reaffirms this in Matthew 22:34-38. The greatest commandment: Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind. The second: love your neighbor as yourself.

And if there is a hierarchy of laws, it stands to reason there is a hierarchy of transgressions against the law. Thus, the worst sin would be to not love God. The second worst would be to not love others, and so on.

The Greatest Conundrum

I could go on and on listing sins and their punishments for thousands of words, but I leave it up to you to continue doing research in your own reading of the Bible, but it really all boils down to this: we believe all sins are equal because one price was paid for them all: Jesus’s death on the cross. But if you truly believe a murderer is no worse than a liar, then I challenge you to view Jesus’s sacrifice for sins not as one massive sacrifice, but as many, many trillions of sacrifices, each one equal to a sin that was, or will be, committed.

See, the sacrifice wasn’t just His death. It was the experience of separation from God He took on for every transgression against God. For the murderer, Jesus would’ve experience the punishment for murder. For a liar, He would’ve experienced the punishment for lying. For sexual immorality, the punishment for it, etc. For a God who is just, who outlines justice in His very character, who loves what is good and hates, detests, what is bad, there is distinction.

We see things as black and white or varying shades of gray far too often. Instead, many things are both. Character, morality, sin, and the law are both black and white and shades at the same time. There is a distinct line separating what is good and what is bad. Of that there is no doubt in the Bible. But there are things on the bad side that are farther away from the line. Liars stand much closer to the line of the law than murderers.

How Should We Treat Sin?

That is a far easier question than, “Is all sin equal?” The Bible is far, far clearer on this subject. In John 8:7, Jesus says, “Let he who is without sin among you be the first to throw a stone at her.”

When it comes to your own sins, let your understanding of God’s character be the drive for your own choices—know that, even though some sins are more grievous than others—for the thousandth time I’ll state that it is far worse to murder than to lie—they are all, indeed, punishable by an eternity of separation from God. If you are a follower of Christ, seek to be like God, seek to emulate His character, and you’ll find that you worry less about how to avoid grievous sins and more about how to pursue righteousness. Hate your sin and resist temptation to escape from its grasp. Whether your sin is as harsh as murder or as small as a lie, you still sinned, and you still require redemption. As a liar, you are no better than a murderer in that regard.

When it comes to the actions of others, hate all sin. If you find you have a harsher reaction to murder or rape than thievery in your heart and mind, don’t worry for your salvation, your thoughts, or your heart and their place with God. But do remember that you do not get to mete out justice to those who commit sins against God. God has His holy system, as well as Earthly systems, in place to do that, and it’s not our business to act outside of those.

But truly, when it comes right down to the question of how we should treat sin, there is only one answer: Love your neighbor as yourself. Don’t deny someone the chance to seek Jesus because of their transgressions and your hatred. Until someone dies, they always have a chance to be redeemed, for all sins can be forgiven but one. If God loves them enough to give them a chance by continuing to breathe the breath of life into them, you have no right to take away that chance.

God of Metaphors

Our God is a God of metaphors. Whenever you can’t understand something about His nature, character, choices, actions, etc., it’s fairly likely that you will be able to find a metaphor in the Bible or in His creation, Earth, to help you grasp that part of God.

Metaphors are pretty unique because they excel at turning the abstract into concrete, along with other forms of comparison, such as similes and analogies. And when it comes to God, you can find millions of concrete existences that serve to reveal a small part of the picture of who God is.

My favorite is the marriage/family metaphor because the further you dig into it, the more it reveals of God’s nature. You can literally go as far down the rabbit hole as you like, and you’ll always be finding revelation after revelation. And I loved it even more when I discovered how it applies to free will.

To start from the top, let’s acknowledge and prove that marriage is an earthly representation of the divine relationship we are to have with God.

God, through Paul, states this in Ephesians 5:23, 25. “For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church. He is the savior of the body. (25) Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave Himself for her.”

There’s a reason marriage is a holy institution, and that is solely because it is meant to represent a holy relationship on Earth. When you apply the selfless love of Christ in the context of marriage, you get a godly relationship in which a man sacrifices himself to provide and care for his wife, and a wife sacrifices herself to love her husband and follow him.

This is the ideal relationship of Christ and church. Christ sacrificed Himself in fully selfless love for his bride, the church, and He provides for us, taking care of our needs. In exchange, we need only sacrifice ourselves and wholly commit ourselves to following Him.

Let’s move beyond marriage, then, and turn to the family structure. The family structure flows from the divine marriage structure, and it then becomes an example of something divine as well. The relationship of parents to kids is literal inasmuch as it is figurative.

In the literal sense, children are just that, children. They are the children of their parents, and they are also children of the church. In both manners, they are meant to be raised and taught about Christ as they grow. A community of believers is meant to come together and train and teach children (Deuteronomy 6:4-9).

But the figurative begins to stretch and define the relationship we are to have with God. When we become believers, we become children of God, and our relationship with God then functions like a child’s relationship with his/her parents does.

When we examine it from the side of faith, we are to look to God as children look to their parents. Like children view their parents as having no ability to do wrong, we are to look to God. Children have the utmost faith in their parents; it’s practically unshakable. We are to have that same faith in God, as Jesus implies in Mark 10:13-15.

From a discipline point of view, we can gather how God disciplines us for doing wrong and rewards us for doing what is right. I think this one is one of the simplest because it’s fairly clear. When a child breaks a rule, the parent provides a consequence, and especially when the child is young, teaches them something in the process. The parent provides this consequence, not out of anger, but from love so the child does not do something they may regret later.

To put the metaphor into another metaphor, let’s say a parent tells their four-year-old not to touch the stove. The child doesn’t listen, touches the stove, and nearly burns their hand after turning it on. The parent, then, stops the child from touching the stove, and puts the child in timeout after explaining what they did wrong and why it was bad. The parent doesn’t take this action just to punish the child, but to keep the child from getting hurt.

Sometimes, even, God allows us to experience the consequences of our own actions to teach us rather than do it Himself. Some parents may choose, in lieu of punishing the child afterward, to allow the child to briefly touch the stove while it’s hot. They do this not to cause the child pain but because they know that’s the only way their child will truly learn the lesson. We’re stubborn people, and sometimes the only way God can be sure we learn to avoid sin is to let us experience the consequences of sin.

If we take the parent/child relationship yet another way, we can discover how free will works in alignment with God’s plan. Typically, parents have plans for their children when they are born. Whether their plans are just as simple as a name or as complex as having everything they want their child to do planned out through high school, parents don’t wing it when it comes to their children. They’re too precious to do that to.

Likely, parents plan out where their kids go to school, what sports they play, who they interact with around home and with family and family friends, where they go to church, what they get to do at home, etc. I think you get the point. But kids are not perfect little angels who are willing to do everything at their parents’ behest. As they grow into their own person, there will be times they go against the will of their parents. They’ll make friends they shouldn’t, do things they shouldn’t, skip church a few times, skip school just as much.

Likewise, God has a plan laid out for each of us before we are born. He knows who He wants us to know, where we should go to school, what friends we should make, what career we should choose, who we should witness to, everything. But we’re not perfect little angels, either. As we go through life, we’ll inevitably choose to go against God’s plan sometimes. We’ll make friends with the wrong people, not witness to someone we needed to, skip church a few too many times, choose the wrong career for us.

See how perfectly that fits? There’s a ton more, too, but I don’t have space in this post to fit it in. God is incredibly complex—He is literally more than our minds are able to comprehend in so many ways—but when you take a look around, you can turn parts of Him into simple, easy to understand ideas so that you can get to know Him better.

I challenge you to look around the next time you find yourself struggling to understand God or why He would do something one way or the other. You may find that the answer is in something as small as the flower by your front porch or as convenient as your best friend.

Understanding the Trinity

The Trinity is something that we disagree on more than we should. Some groups believe it’s a thing, and some don’t. This is another one of those big God things that we humans with our infinitesimally small brain power struggle to comprehend because it is, in and of itself, a paradox on the same level as “Can God make a rock so large he can’t lift it?”

But I think if we frame the Trinity in a way to make it not a paradox, it becomes easier to understand. So, I’m going to do it with a metaphor representing God as light. When my old youth pastor explained how Jesus could be God and man at the same time, he used paint, and that works, too, but I am irrationally delighted by the idea that I’m using God to represent God—since God is light, and I’m using light as the comparison in the metaphor (Okay, I’m probably the only one who cares about that, but anyway…).

To start, let’s get a light breakdown. First of all, light is the only reason we can see color. Without the radiation bouncing off of objects and into our eyes, we would be blind. Second, there are 7 main wavelengths of light that make up the visible spectrum. You may recognize them: Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo, and Violet—rainbow colors! Third, any wavelength of light can be seen separately from the others. And fourth, they can all be seen together.

Now, I’m no color scientist, so that’s as deep as I’m going to go on this, but just keep the last two statements in mind as we move on to the real metaphor. I’m simplifying the light spectrum down to something that we humans have developed and use pretty much every day: The RGB color model. This model is used to display images on pretty much all of your electronic devices. It’s made up of three basic wavelengths of light: Red, Green, and Blue. These three wavelengths of light work together to display pretty much any color you could ever want, up to 16,777,216 colors, which is awesome!

But the amount of colors it can display isn’t what I want to talk about. The great thing about color, and the great thing about light, is that while white light is light, the parts that make white light: red, green, and blue, are still light as well. The wavelength of light that makes the color red is still red when it’s with green and blue to make white. They don’t form together to create a super wavelength. It’s like doing a math equation where you add 100 + 100 + 100, but you get 100.

Let’s really get into this metaphor, then. Let’s say that God the Father is Red light, God the Son is Green light, and God the Holy Spirit is Blue light. If you take Red light away from Blue and Green light, that Red light is still light, right? As in, you wouldn’t see red light and say “well, that isn’t light because it’s not white,” right? Or, you don’t say, “Well, that’s less light because it’s blue light,” right? Of course not. A red spotlight is just as much light as a white spotlight. The same for Blue and Green. Separately from each other, they’re still light.

When you put them together, though, they don’t become more light, right? Nope! Red, Green, and Blue light together are just light. It’s not mega-light. It’s not super-light. It’s still just light.

And another thing about that, too, those colors of light still exist separately to the light you’re seeing when they’re together. That’s how seeing color works with natural light. When you see a red object, what’s really happening is that the object you’re seeing has absorbed all the other individual wavelengths of light and has reflected the red wavelength back to your eyes. If the red wavelength disappeared to make light happen, then no objects would be red. Things could literally only be white—lit up—or black—not lit up.

So, taking this back to God. God the Father exists separately from the Son and the Holy Spirit, but He is still God. Just like Red light is still Red light when not with Blue and Green. God the Son is still God when He is separate from the Father and the Spirit, and the Spirit is still God when He is separate from the other two persons of the Trinity. Yet, when you put them together, their definition doesn’t change. They’re still God just like light is still light when you put it together or take it apart.

God is still God whether He’s with the other persons of Himself or not. He’s not a fraction where 1/3 + 1/3 +1/3 = 1 God. He’s light, so He’s light when He’s only a certain wavelength of light, and He’s light when He’s all of light. He doesn’t become less light, and He can’t become more light. He’s just light.

Earth is Pointless

Ecclesiastes is my favorite book of the Bible because it has an absurd amount of experiential wisdom. It’s the troubleshooting guide for life, at its essence, because it cuts past all the clutter of living and gets straight to the point. It’s the book wherein Solomon says, “Look, I’ve tried to find satisfaction in literally every way you could possibly attempt. There is not a single thing on this planet that can satisfy you.”

Consider the things we believe will satisfy us: money, relationships, a career, aggrandizement, knowledge, pleasure, happiness, etc. Solomon tried all of that, and best of all, he wrote about how pointless it was so we wouldn’t waste our lives trying them, too.

Verse 2 says, “‘Absolute futility,’ says the Teacher. ‘Absolute futility. Everything is futile.’”

The ESV and KJV have “vanity” in place of futility here, but Strong’s Hebrew Concordance says that the word can be translated as emptiness, vanity, transitory, or unsatisfactory, and futility fits that definition just as clearly as vanity can. Futility means useless, pointless, and ineffective.

So, Solomon says that everything is pointless, and then he asks a question. Verse 3, “What does a man gain for all his efforts that he labors at under the sun?”

Take a moment to think about that, and don’t try to be optimistic about it. Solomon wasn’t being optimistic here. What do you really get for waking up early in the morning and working hard all day? You get some money, but what’s that worth? You’re just going to spend it. No, you don’t get money. You get to wake up and do it again the next day just to survive. It’s pointless. Even if your goal is to set up your children for their own life, it’s pointless. Why?

Verse 4, “A generation goes and a generation comes, but the earth remains forever.” Even if you set up your children for a little better life on Earth, they’re going to do the same thing you did: wake up every morning and work all day, then go to sleep and do it again the next day. And their children will do it, and their children’s children will do it.

This is the bleak reality of this world. What you’re doing is going to repeat ceaselessly because what is here is the same forever. It’s an unbreakable cycle because there is nothing to add and nothing to take away. You can apply that to almost everything you do: help someone? Sure, you’ll feel good about it, but there are always more people to help, and that good feeling goes away, soon. It’s depressing, it really is, but that’s the point!

Solomon breaks this down with a few metaphors in verses 5-7, “The sun rises and the sun sets; panting, it returns to its place where it rises. Gusting to the south, turning to the north, turning, turning, goes the wind, and the wind returns in its cycles. All the streams flow to the sea, yet the sea is never full. The streams are flowing to the place, and they flow there again.”

Verse 5 refers back to verse 3. You work hard, like the sun, to do your daily routine, then you return home to rise and do it again.

Verse 6 is another reference to the repetition and pointlessness of everything. If you know anything about weather patterns, you’ll know that wind has its cycles and seasons. There are occasional variations, just like our lives occasionally have some energy injected into them via unscripted, irregular events, but in the end, they always go straight back to where they came from. That’s the thing about spheres: no matter which way you go around it, you’ll always end up right back where you started.

The point that Solomon makes with verse 7 is simple, in essence, and it’s that nothing that you do in this life will fill you up. If you’re the ocean in this metaphor, then the things you pour out into—the money, the friends, the career—are pouring back into you. But, as with the oceans and rivers of Earth, you don’t become more full as those things you’ve emptied yourself into pour back into you because you empty into them at the same rate they give their return. It’s a net gain of zero.

It’s a wearisome prospect, as Solomon says in verse 8. “The eye is not satisfied by seeing or the ear filled with hearing.” Think about that for a second. Your eyes and ears were literally designed to see and hear, and yet they’re not satisfied by doing their job. Neither are you. But as 8a describes, “All things are wearisome; man is unable to speak.” This problem we have can’t even be put into words. I think the closest we get is when we get fed up with it all and say “I’m tired.”

Verses 9-11 are Solomon affirming what I mentioned at the beginning of this article. “What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done; there is nothing new under the sun. Can one say about anything, ‘Look, this is new,’ It has already existed in the ages before us. There is no remembrance of those who came before; and of those who will come after there will also be no remembrance by those who follow them.”

Take a moment to think about a circle: it’s one continuous line bent around to meet itself. It has no definable starting or ending point. In fact, it’s pointless. Now think of a sphere: what is a sphere except an innumerable amount of circles put together to create a 3-D object? That’s us and Earth. We’re in a cycle on this sphere where everything on it and in it has been tried before, but just as we finish going around in our lives, another generation will follow and do the same thing.

Every generation of the human race has tried and tries the same things available to us on Earth to achieve satisfaction, not knowing that it’s all been done before, and it has never worked and never will. The sins and behaviors that plague us today are the same ones that plagued the people in Biblical times because we’re all walking in circles looking for pointless things because we’re missing the point.

I said earlier that Ecclesiastes is the troubleshooting guide for us because it has all the attempted fixes in it. But the final step of the guide is a finger pointing to the rest of the Bible, to Christ, because He is the only one who can satisfy us. So skip to the back page of the guide, don’t try all the things of this Earth. You won’t find satisfaction here. Skip straight to Christ.

Our Free Will

Have you heard the song “Already There” by Casting Crowns? If not, there’s a link to it at the bottom of this article, so go give it a listen.

This song tackles the omniscience of God and how He sees His plans for us compared to how we do, but I think many of us Christians understand this well enough to use it as a skipping point to a much more complicated subject that’s hinted at in this song, too, and that’s God’s presence existing outside of time and how we are to rationalize that with the concept of our ability to decide what we do.

We know God existed before time, in the beginning of time, in the past, the present, the future, and He also exists currently outside of time. It’s hard to wrap our heads around a God who can play with time like we do Play-doh, stretching it out and squishing it together. I know I struggle with it a lot, but I had to at least come up with some way to think about it because I had to tackle the topic of free will to answer a query presented to me by someone struggling with the concept.

Take the lyrics for the chorus of “Already There”: “To You my future is a memory / Cause You're already there.” It’s a little weird to think about God knowing what we’ll do before we do it. I think to some it sounds like He knows what we’re going to do because he’s destined us to do it, and there are a few Bible verses taken out of context that can make it sound like we’re destined to believe or not believe in God, to be saved or not be saved.

Of the verses I’ve seen taken out of context in this manner, here are just a few: Jeremiah 1:5, Ephesians 1:5, and Colossians 3:12. But those verses don’t necessarily mean that God made all humans, picked, for example, 50% of them and said, “these people will be the ones I choose to be saved.” To believe in such an idea changes the very character and nature of God. But what those verses do mean is that God knows something we don’t.

The simplest way I used to rationalize God’s omniscience with my little-iscience, my limited, fallible brain power, was that whether God knows you’re going to say yes to His gift of salvation, He still chooses to offer it to you.

And that’s an important conclusion, but it only addresses a small part of the question: how does free will work? So, let’s apply this to a much larger scale—the scale of one lifetime. You see, the thing that was bothering the girl who got me to consider this in a deeper way was concerned with how to live her life and fulfill her desires when she knew that God wants us to fulfill His desires over our own.

And we could get into the whole discussion about how our desires work in relation to God’s desires for us, but that’s a topic for another day and another article. So, the way to really think about this is to take a look at how God’s omniscience works and then try to compare it to something a little easier to think about.

See, if we’re doing this relationship with God right, then part of what we have is the deepest friendship we could ever have with someone. It’s one where our friend knows us so well He can tell what we’re thinking. That friends knows us so well that He could see us presented with any situation and know exactly what we’d do every single time.

For example, you’re presented with a choice of three flavors of ice cream: chocolate, vanilla, and strawberry. Your friend is with you as you’re given the chance to choose which one you want, and right before you reach out and take your preferred flavor, chocolate, your friend leans over and says “I bet you’re going to pick chocolate.” So, you reach out and grab the chocolate ice cream and eat to your heart’s content.

Does the fact that your friend told you that you would pick chocolate change that you would have picked chocolate anyway? Did it suddenly eliminate the other two options? Did it change how much you enjoyed the ice cream? Of course not. You picked chocolate because you like chocolate more than vanilla and strawberry, and you enjoyed it because you like it. It’s actually pretty simple, all things considered.

Someone else knowing that you’re going to choose a certain way doesn’t automatically make the other options disappear, and it doesn’t mean that you’re going to like the option you chose any less than if they didn’t know.

It’s the same thing with God. Just because He knows you’re going to choose career Y over career Z doesn’t mean you didn’t get to choose career Y. Just because He knows you’re going to choose to serve in a certain way doesn’t mean the option wasn’t there for you to serve in another way. Don’t let your fallible mind’s inhibitions keep you from doing what God wants you to do. You might end up pulling a Jonah and Nineveh situation, and that’s just not as pleasant as doing what you would find the most joy in anyway.

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