The Vanity of the Past

Rightly Using the Days Gone By to Help With the Present

Good Morning!

As most of you know since the beginning of the Covid times back in March of 2020 I’ve been blessed to be able to deliver packets which contain a sermon outline, verses that underlie the preaching, the songs we sing on the Lord’s Day, a bulletin, and the Thursday catechism lesson. Several folks also get a DVD of morning and evening worship along with Sabbath School. My favorite part of the “trip around the world” as my kids (who take turns tagging along) call it is seeing our community, its ebbs and flows, its changes and more importantly its past. So many older houses and barns that elicit wonders as to what this place looked like sixty years or more ago when cotton was still king and textiles were the name of the game.

I know some of y’all remember those days, when the gin was operating, and American Thread and Bowling Green Spinning Mill were hopping places rather than a hulking empty shell and a kudzu playground. Sometimes thinking about that kind of thing can bring pain, nostalgia of the ways things used to be. Funny part is that time is not overly considered about our feelings. It keeps rolling on one day to the next. In today’s prayer and worship help we are going to think a little about how to process the changing of the seasons without getting steamrolled in the process. There’s a lot going on in the world today and we need to know how to handle it.

Starting this next Lord’s Day we’ll be in the book of Ecclesiastes in Sabbath School. Now, one day in the future I’d love to preach through that book, and we’ll get to that in due time. In the seventh chapter Solomon has this to bring forward, “Do not say, ‘Why were the former days better than these?’ For you do not inquire wisely concerning this. Wisdom is good with an inheritance, and profitable to those who see the sun.” There is an old saying that hindsight is 20/20, but what the son of David is intimating here is that in reality it’s more like 20/200. We have a tendency to not only sugarcoat the past, but invite memories of it that aren’t quite right. That’s not to say in some aspects (maybe a lot) the past was better, it likely was, but the reality is we ain’t going back there. Time machines will never exist, and we know that because they don’t. Part of the focus of what we read above from Ecclesiastes is that an undue looking at the past primarily causes us to miss what is happening before our eyes.

We don’t even need to think about cities and towns and farms and the like, or society for that matter. We do it all the time with people. As we look at a neighbor, a relative, a spouse our mind wanders to when things were nicer, they were nicer. Remember when that person wasn’t so grumpy? So irritable, thankless, etc...? Well, again it may be true but thinking about it won’t change who they on July 25, 2022. Contemporary life means dealing with the here and now.

That being the case what is it that we can do, outside of sitting around wondering about the past, at the moment to improve the situation we might find ourselves in. I know this goes against, or at least seems to, what I’ve been writing for the past couple hundred words, but bear with me for a minute. The best way to deal with the present is to remember the inheritance of what has come before. Solomon says what he says because his former life has taught him much about how to handle what is taking place today. You see there is a big difference between wishing the past was the present and using the past to improve the present.

That’s where the sun motif comes in from the verses we quoted. Light is often used in the Scriptures to denote the Lord’s work in bringing us forward in life and health. David in Psalm 36 notes:

… You give them drink from the river of Your pleasures. For with You is the fountain of life; in Your light we see light. Oh, continue Your lovingkindness to those who know You, and Your righteousness to the upright in heart.

Here we see the solution. First of all part of taking care of the present is remembering there is a present. Engendering a feeling of thanksgiving in and of God’s mercy is a central part of dealing with heartache and disappointment. It’s not a myopic “things could be worse” kind of attitude. The idea is that as we look at the person, or place, that has us pining for former times that we understand that the Lord in His providence has brought this moment to be for His purpose, and likely that reason involves you, the stronger brother/sister, to help the weaker sibling be built up in faith and love through the witness of the light which comes from above. Second, remembering how Jehovah has had forbearance in your own life will bring much comfort in dealing with those whose turn it is to receive your forgiving seventy times seven. The hardest part of life is being the one with the broad shoulders who was made for such a time as this, but the good news is that God has not brought you into it to leave you hanging by the thread of your own strength and power. Look again at Psalm 36. Who is the fountain of life and source of lovingkindness and righteousness which in turn gives endurance to the upright in heart?

Now is the time to give the easy answer every preacher wants to hear.

Jesus.

In closing, Solomon’s little quip can be quite helpful to us if we’ll listen to him, and by extension the Holy Spirit who inspired him. No one had fallen as hard and as far from his former glory than he had, and no one knew vanity like the product of David and Bathsheba. Broken by his sins and transgressions the Lord in His magnificent mercy gave him an opportunity to pen a gentle warning to all who came after to give ear to the master of grace. The past was good, better even, but it wasn’t the present. The past can’t fix the present. However, it contains the answer on how to handle what we are going through now, that inheritance of truth is worth its weight in gold.

Another thought on this:

https://www.reformationscotland.org/2021/11/25/when-is-nostalgia-sinful/

Blessings in Christ,

Rev. Benjamin Glaser

Pastor, Bethany ARP Church