Is there anything new under the sun?

The Preacher’s phrase “under the sun” marks out his field: the world as we can observe it, the round of nature and of human life. The verses just before set out that round. One generation goes and another comes (1:4); the sun rises and sets and hurries back to where it rose (1:5); the wind goes round on its circuits (1:6); the rivers run into a sea that is never full (1:7). Within that round nothing is truly new. People do the same things again, and what looks new “hath been already of old time” (1:10). Barnes’ Notes, on 1:9, explains ‘the thing that hath been’ as what happens in the course of nature and ‘that which is done’ as what is done by man. It is an observation about nature and about “all the works that are done under the sun” (1:14), not a claim about what God can do.

Isaiah and Paul speak of what God does from outside that round. Isaiah 43:19 is God’s promise to bring his people home from exile, a rescue so great that they were told, “Remember ye not the former things”, not even the crossing of the Red Sea (43:16–18). Paul’s ‘new creature’ is God’s work: “all things are of God, who hath reconciled us to himself by Jesus Christ” (2 Corinthians 5:18). The promise “Behold, I make all things new” is spoken by “he that sat upon the throne” (Revelation 21:5). These are acts of the Creator, not products of the world’s cycles. Gill, on Ecclesiastes 1:9, makes the same distinction: the saying is about natural things, and miracles, the coming of Christ and the works of God’s grace are to be excepted.

The Preacher himself looks beyond what is ‘under the sun’. He knows that “whatsoever God doeth, it shall be for ever” (3:14), and he ends with God bringing every work into judgement (12:14). His book shows how empty life is when viewed apart from God. The prophets and apostles announce what God does to renew it. Both are true.