A generation goes and a generation comes,
but the earth remains forever.
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.
All things are wearisome;
more than one can say.
The eye is not satisfied by seeing
or the ear filled with hearing.
What has been is what will be,
and what has been done is what will be done;
there is nothing new under the sun.
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. (Ecclesiastes 1:4-10)
King Solomon was a wealthy and wise king of Israel who succeeded his father, King David. Solomon’s reign was from 970 to 931 BC, and was the builder of the First Temple in Jerusalem, beginning in the fourth year of his reign, using the vast wealth he had accumulated.
Solomon was the wisest person to have lived in his lifetime, and was also very wealthy and powerful. When he was connected to God and really pursuing Him, God developed incredible works through him that can be found in Proverbs, Song of Songs (Song of Solomon) and Ecclesiastes.
As king of a golden age, Solomon had access to the history and knowledge of the vast eons of the past. In his vast wisdom, he knew that discoveries of earlier times were forgotten. They seem quite new when revived; but closer investigation proved their previous existence. Not knowing of a future King who would offer eternal life, Solomon declared: “Everything is meaningless.”
In this message, we will explore revolutions, cycles, and eternity:
Revolutions
Hear the word of the Lord, people of Israel,
for the Lord has a case
against the inhabitants of the land:
There is no truth, no faithful love,
and no knowledge of God in the land!
Cursing, lying, murder, stealing,
and adultery are rampant;
one act of bloodshed follows another.
For this reason the land mourns,
and everyone who lives in it languishes,
along with the wild animals and the birds of the sky;
even the fish of the sea disappear. (Hosea 4)
Rivers of blood, invasions of frogs, lice, locusts, pestilence, devastating storms… The ten plagues which beset Egypt over the course of one year are horrifying to contemplate. Lives and livelihoods were being lost. People were forced to lock themselves in their houses to avoid annihilation… Is it beginning to sound terrifyingly familiar?
For the past twelve months the entire world has been buffeted about by one cataclysmic catastrophe after another. The Corona virus, which has earned the infamous honor of being the most destructive of all the plagues which have been visited upon humanity over the past year, has wreaked unprecedented havoc on the modern world. But a quick review of events over the past year reminds us that natural disasters, political violence and mob anarchy have all darkened our days and night. Governments have been toppled. Presidents have been felled. How have we arrived at this Egyptian-like nadir in history?
Should we be surprised that a revolution seems to be in the works? Interestingly, in general, few civilizations or Empires remain dominant for more than 500 years, but usually it is only 300 to 400 years.
Sir John Bagot Glubb (1897-1987), a highly honored British general and historian better known as Glubb Pasha, wrote about the collapsed empires of the past. In his 1978 book “The Fate of Empires and the Search for Survival” he described a common pattern fitting the history of some fallen empires. They went through a cycle of stages as they started, expanded, matured, declined and collapsed.
Does the pattern apply to America today? Has the United States entered this cycle’s ending stages? If so, shouldn’t Americans critically examine the current state of their culture to see what could be done to prevent the same grim fate?
By knowing history better, we can better project our likely national futures. As the great British Prime Minister and noted historian Winston Churchill observed, “The farther backward you can look, the farther forward you are likely to see.”
Glubb learned that different empires had similar cultural changes while experiencing a life cycle in a series of stages that could overlap. He generalized about empires having seven stages of development, identifying these successive ages as follows:
1. The age of outburst (or pioneers).
2. The age of conquests.
3. The age of commerce.
4. The age of affluence.
5. The age of intellect.
6. The age of decadence.
7. The age of decline and collapse.
What are some common features of an empire’s culture in its declining period? Glubb describes developments like these:
1. Rampant sexual immorality, an aversion to marriage in favor of “living together” and an increased divorce rate all combine to undermine family stability.
2. Many foreign immigrants settle in the empire’s capital and major cities. The mixture of ethnic groups in close proximity in these cosmopolitan places inevitably produces conflicts.
3. Both irresponsible pleasure-seeking and pessimism increase among the people and their leaders. The spirit described in 1 Corinthians 15:32 spreads throughout society: “Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die!”
4. The government provides extensive welfare for the poor.
Does this list sound familiar?
The largest, richest, and most powerful empire in world history was the British Empire. Over a span of some three centuries Great Britain brought lands on every continent and islands in every ocean under its rule. At its height the colonies and other territories of the empire encompassed nearly one-quarter of the world’s land surface and more than one-quarter of its population. It was a common saying that the sun never set on Britain’s dominions.
Unable to put down the warfare between Arabs and Jews in Palestine, Britain in 1948 resigned its mandate over the area. It had granted independence to the Arab state of Jordan in 1946. It relinquished control over India in 1947, dividing the subcontinent into India and Pakistan. In 1948 it gave Burma (now Myanmar) and Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) independence. In 1949 Ireland was separated from the Commonwealth and became the Republic of Ireland.
The Gold Coast became the first sub-Saharan African colony to gain independence (as Ghana) in 1957. The movement of Britain’s remaining colonies in Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean toward self-government gained speed after 1960 as international pressure mounted (especially at the United Nations) and as the idea of independence spread in the colonies themselves. At the same time, the British public accepted that the empire’s days were numbered.
The last significant British colony, Hong Kong, was returned to Chinese sovereignty in 1997. By then, virtually nothing remained of the empire.
Cycles
Perhaps the oldest empire we know of is represented by the discoveries in Turkey:
Israeli Archaeologists Find Hidden Pattern at ‘World’s Oldest Temple’ Göbekli Tepe / Haaretz, April 28, 2020
The enigmatic monoliths built some 11,500 years ago at Göbekli Tepe have been puzzling archaeologists and challenging preconceptions about prehistoric culture since their discovery in the 1990s. Chiefly, how could hunter-gatherers with a supposedly primitive societal structure build such monumental stone circles on this barren hilltop in what is today southeastern Turkey? How could a largely nomadic society at the dawn of agriculture marshal the resources and know-how to create what its discoverers have dubbed the oldest known temple in the world?
If anything, a discovery by Israeli archaeologists suggests the Göbekli Tepe construction project was even more complex than previously thought, and required an amount of planning and resources thought to be impossible for those times. Their study of the three oldest stone enclosures at Göbekli Tepe has revealed a hidden geometric pattern, specifically an equilateral triangle, underlying the entire architectural plan of these structures.
Thus, thousands of years before the invention of writing or the wheel, the builders of Göbekli Tepe evidently had some understanding of geometric principles and could apply them to their construction plans, concludes the study published in January in the Cambridge Archaeological Journal.
“The initial discovery of the site was a big surprise and we are now showing that its construction was even more complex than we thought,” says Haklay, an Israel Antiquities Authority archaeologist and a PhD candidate at Tel Aviv University.
How and why Neolithic hunter-gatherers would mobilize the massive resources needed to build Göbekli Tepe and other sites like it is the subject of much speculation. While some researchers have interpreted the structures as residential spaces, most archaeologists see little evidence of this and consider the sheer monumentality of the complex and the richness of its iconography as evidence of a ritual purpose.
As Solomon stated:
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.
The Genesis story describes an extinction level event, just like many that are documented to have occurred in Earth’s history, including Noah’s flood. We don’t know what caused the event, but it could have been a comet:
Extraordinary Biomass-Burning Episode and Impact Winter Triggered by the Younger Dryas Cosmic Impact ∼12,800 Years Ago / The Journal of Geology, March 2018
The paper’s 24 authors include KU Emeritus Professor of Physics & Astronomy Adrian Melott and Professor Brian Thomas, a 2005 doctoral graduate from KU, now at Washburn University.
“The work includes measurements made at more than 170 different sites across the world,” Melott said.
The KU researcher and his colleagues believe the data suggests the disaster was touched off when Earth collided with fragments of a disintegrating comet that was roughly 62 miles in diameter — the remnants of which persist within our solar system to this day.
“The hypothesis is that a large comet fragmented and the chunks impacted the Earth, causing this disaster,” said Melott. “A number of different chemical signatures — carbon dioxide, nitrate, ammonia and others — all seem to indicate that an astonishing 10 percent of the Earth’s land surface, or about 10 million square kilometers, was consumed by fires.”
Death from Above: Mass Extinctions Tied to Comet Strikes / Space.com, November 3, 2015
Many of Earth’s mass extinctions over the eons have been caused by comet strikes, a new study suggests.
Over the past 260 million years, cratering rates on Earth have peaked every 26 million years or so, in tune with a previously noted cycle of mass-extinction events, researchers found. Furthermore, five of the six largest impact craters known from the last quarter-billion years — including the 112-mile-wide (180 kilometers) crater associated with the demise of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago — were gouged out at roughly the same time that a mass extinction occurred.
“The correlation between the formation of these impacts and extinction events over the past 260 million years is striking and suggests a cause-and-effect relationship,” study lead author Michael Rampino, a geologist at New York University, said in a statement. “This cosmic cycle of death and destruction has without a doubt affected the history of life on our planet.”
The finding, which was published online last month in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, lends support to the venerable but much-debated “death from above” hypothesis set forth to explain the periodicity observed in Earth’s mass extinctions.
Every 26 million years or so, the idea goes, our solar system travels through the Milky Way galaxy’s dense midplane, and the resulting gravitational jostles send comets that normally reside in the distant Oort Cloud barreling toward Earth and other planets close to the sun.
Much of the gravitational perturbation, according to this hypothesis, is caused by mysterious dark matter, which far outweighs “normal” matter but neither emits nor absorbs light and is therefore difficult to study. And dark matter may further contribute to mass extinctions, Rampino suggested in a controversial study published earlier this year, by heating up Earth from the inside, leading to huge, climate-altering volcanic eruptions.
While Rampino and Caldeira identified 10 mass extinctions in the last 260 million years, some other metrics recognize just five such events in the past 450 million years or so. (It depends on how high above background rates an extinction event must be to qualify as “mass.”)
The worst of these “Big Five” events occurred about 250 million years ago, at the end of the Permian geologic period. During this event, known as “The Great Dying,” about 90 percent of Earth’s species was lost. For comparison, scientists estimate that the dino-killing event 65 million years ago took out 50 to 75 percent of all species.
Can one say about anything,
“Look, this is new”?
It has already existed in the ages before us.
Eternity
There is no doubt that most of the world is suffering with crisis fatigue from the biggest public health crisis in a century, the worst economic downturn in generations and the largest civil unrest since the 1960s. The narrative of the media is driven by a global “Deep State” leftist clandestine network.
These nonelected government officials and private entities control almost everything you see and read, and run state policy behind the scenes, while the democratically-elected officials are merely figureheads. They live to create a One World reset to usher in their utopian New Age. Their plan is total control, and few can see it.
In these desperate times of suffering, there is so much we simply do not have the capacity to understand, but the Lord is in control!
We only know our point of view, and need a larger perspective. We need the viewpoint of Eternity:
Praise the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavens. For He chose us in Him, before the foundation of the world, to be holy and blameless in His sight. In love He predestined us to be adopted through Jesus Christ for Himself, according to His favor and will, to the praise of His glorious grace that He favored us with in the Beloved.
We have redemption in Him through His blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses, according to the riches of His grace that He lavished on us with all wisdom and understanding. He made known to us the mystery of His will, according to His good pleasure that He planned in Him for the administration of the days of fulfillment—to bring everything together in the Messiah, both things in heaven and things on earth in Him.
We have also received an inheritance in Him, predestined according to the purpose of the One who works out everything in agreement with the decision of His will, so that we who had already put our hope in the Messiah might bring praise to His glory. When you heard the message of truth, the gospel of your salvation, and when you believed in Him, you were also sealed with the promised Holy Spirit. He is the down payment of our inheritance, for the redemption of the possession, to the praise of His glory. (Ephesians 1:3-14)
I pray that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the glorious Father, would give you a spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of Him. I pray that the perception of your mind may be enlightened so you may know what is the hope of His calling, what are the glorious riches of His inheritance among the saints, and what is the immeasurable greatness of His power to us who believe, according to the working of His vast strength.
He demonstrated this power in the Messiah by raising Him from the dead and seating Him at His right hand in the heavens— far above every ruler and authority, power and dominion, and every title given, not only in this age but also in the one to come. And He put everything under His feet and appointed Him as head over everything for the church, which is His body, the fullness of the One who fills all things in every way. (Ephesians 1:17-23)
And you were dead in your trespasses and sins in which you previously walked according to the ways of this world, according to the ruler who exercises authority over the lower heavens, the spirit now working in the disobedient.
We too all previously lived among them in our fleshly desires, carrying out the inclinations of our flesh and thoughts, and we were by nature children under wrath as the others were also. But God, who is rich in mercy, because of His great love that He had for us, made us alive with the Messiah even though we were dead in trespasses. You are saved by grace!
Together with Christ Jesus He also raised us up and seated us in the heavens, so that in the coming ages He might display the immeasurable riches of His grace through His kindness to us in Christ Jesus. For you are saved by grace through faith, and this is not from yourselves; it is God’s gift— not from works, so that no one can boast. For we are His creation, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared ahead of time so that we should walk in them.
So then, remember that at one time you were Gentiles in the flesh—called “the uncircumcised” by those called “the circumcised,” which is done in the flesh by human hands. At that time you were without the Messiah, excluded from the citizenship of Israel, and foreigners to the covenants of the promise, without hope and without God in the world.
But now in Christ Jesus, you who were far away have been brought near by the blood of the Messiah. For He is our peace, who made both groups one and tore down the dividing wall of hostility. In His flesh, He made of no effect the law consisting of commands and expressed in regulations, so that He might create in Himself one new man from the two, resulting in peace.
He did this so that He might reconcile both to God in one body through the cross and put the hostility to death by it. When the Messiah came, He proclaimed the good news of peace to you who were far away and peace to those who were near. For through Him we both have access by one Spirit to the Father.
So then you are no longer foreigners and strangers, but fellow citizens with the saints, and members of God’s household, built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus Himself as the cornerstone. The whole building, being put together by Him, grows into a holy sanctuary in the Lord. You also are being built together for God’s dwelling in the Spirit. (Ephesians 2)
We will join all of the angels and the saved in singing His praises:
Worthy is the, Lamb who was slain
Holy, Holy, is He
Sing a new song, to him who sits on
Heaven’s mercy seat
Holy, Holy, Holy
Is the Lord God Almighty
Who was, and is, and is to come
With all creation I sing
Praise to the King of Kings
You are my everything
And I will adore You
Clothed in rainbows, of living color
Flashes of lightning, rolls of thunder
Blessing and honor, strength and glory and power be
to You the only wise King
Holy, Holy, Holy
Is the Lord God Almighty
Who was, and is, and is to come
With all creation I sing
Praise to the King of Kings
You are my everything
And I will adore You
Filled with wonder, awestruck wonder
At the mention of your name
Jesus your name is power
Breath, and living water
Such a marvelous mystery
Yeah…
Holy, Holy, Holy
Is the Lord God Almighty
Who was, and is, and is to come, yeah
With all creation I sing
Praise to the King of Kings
You are my everything
And I will adore You
Revelation Song, Phillips, Craig & Dean (2009)
If you are not sure that you are saved, you can accept Christ into your life right now, by praying:
“Lord Jesus, I believe you are the Son of God. Thank you for dying on the cross for my sins. Please forgive my sins and give me the gift of eternal life. I ask you in to my life and heart to be my Lord and Savior.”
Reader Comments:
I really enjoyed this article. I believe that America’s downfall has begun and that we’re on the brink of the Rapture and after that the Tribulation.
All falling into place.
morningstar, January 22, 2021
Rapture and End Times 