Nothing New Under the Sun 

But Still a King on the Throne

As I read the news last week that Andy Burnham’s government is introducing a ban on imports from Israeli settlements in the West Bank, alongside wider measures targeting settlement expansion, I found myself thinking less about the politics of the announcement itself and more about the pattern behind it.
 
Once again Israel and the Palestinian territories are at the centre of international attention, governments are taking positions and counter-positions, leaders are speaking with great confidence about what should happen next, and nations are attempting to exert what influence they have over the future of this tiny, deeply contested piece of land.

What has been will be again

And somewhere in the middle of reading it all, I found myself coming back to something Solomon wrote thousands of years ago: “What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.” (Eccles 1:9).
 
The more that I read Scripture, the more incredible that verse becomes, because Solomon wasn’t saying that nothing new would ever happen. He was recognising something far deeper about humanity. Generations change, governments change, empires rise and fall, and the names and faces of those holding power are continually replaced, yet beneath all of that the condition of the human heart remains remarkably familiar. We still crave control, build kingdoms, trust our own wisdom and become impressed by our own strength. Perhaps most dangerously of all, we still have a tendency to take authority that has been permitted to us for a moment and behave as though it ultimately belongs to us.

We still have a tendency to take authority that has been permitted to us for a moment and behave as though it ultimately belongs to us.

Once you see that pattern, you begin to find it everywhere in Scripture, and suddenly some of the things happening around us don’t feel quite as unprecedented as the headlines would have us believe.
 
Psalm 2 asks, “Why do the nations rage, and the peoples plot a vain thing? The kings of the earth set themselves, and the rulers take counsel together, against the Lord and against His Anointed.” There is something extraordinary about the perspective of that Psalm because it allows us to look at earthly power from heaven’s viewpoint. From where we stand, governments can appear enormous. Decisions made in rooms most of us will never enter can affect millions of lives; markets can move with a few words; sanctions can be imposed; borders debated and nations brought into conflict. Yet Psalm 2 pulls the curtain back and shows us the same scene from heaven, where none of this has ever caused God to relinquish His throne.
 
“He who sits in the heavens shall laugh.”
 
Not because God is indifferent to human suffering. Scripture gives us no basis for that whatsoever. God sees the frightened child, the grieving parent, the hostage, the displaced family and every innocent person caught in circumstances they did not create. The laughter of Psalm 2 is directed at something else entirely: the extraordinary arrogance of created men believing that they can frustrate the purposes of their Creator.
 
We have seen that before.

Pharaoh takes on the God of Israel

Pharaoh looked at Israel in Egypt and believed their future was his to determine. He controlled their labour, restricted their freedom and even attempted to decide whether their sons would live or die. By every visible measure Pharaoh held the power and Israel had almost none, but there was something Pharaoh couldn’t see when he looked at those enslaved people: God had made a promise.

Human beings can resist the purposes of God, but they cannot ultimately overturn them.

Long before Pharaoh arrived, God had spoken to Abraham about his descendants. He had already said they would become strangers in another land, that they would be oppressed and that afterwards He would bring them out. So when Pharaoh resisted Moses, he wasn’t simply resisting a man standing in his palace asking him to release a workforce. He had placed himself in opposition to something God had already spoken, and Exodus becomes this extraordinary demonstration of a truth that runs throughout the Bible: human beings can resist the purposes of God, but they cannot ultimately overturn them.
 
I think we know the ending of Exodus so well that sometimes we miss what it must have felt like to live through it. Israel eventually found themselves with Pharaoh’s army behind them and the Red Sea in front of them, and if they had interpreted God’s faithfulness only through what their eyes could see, they might reasonably have concluded that His promise had led them into a dead end. Yet the very thing that appeared to prevent their escape became the place where God demonstrated His power.
 
There is something deeply encouraging in that for all of us, because God doesn’t always prove His faithfulness by removing the impossible thing standing in front of us. Sometimes He takes us directly through it, and what looked like the end becomes the place from which we will spend the rest of our lives testifying to His faithfulness.

Nebuchadnezzar arrogance

The pattern appears again in Daniel when Nebuchadnezzar stands looking over Babylon and says, “Is not this great Babylon, that I have built… by my mighty power?” It is such a revealing sentence because you can hear what has happened inside him. The authority God had permitted him to exercise had slowly become, in his own mind, evidence of his own greatness.
 
While those words were still in his mouth, God answered him.
 
Nebuchadnezzar eventually came to understand something that every ruler, every government and ultimately every one of us must understand: “He does according to His will in the army of heaven and among the inhabitants of the earth. No one can restrain His hand.

The authority God had permitted him to exercise had slowly become, in his own mind, evidence of his own greatness.

There is enormous peace in understanding what that actually means. Scripture isn’t promising that people won’t oppose God, because clearly, they do, nor is it saying governments will always act justly, nations won’t rage or believers will never experience circumstances that appear completely contrary to what God has spoken. It is telling us something far more reassuring: opposition does not equal sovereignty. Resistance does not mean God has lost control, and delay does not mean God has forgotten what He promised.

Jesus and Pilate

Then we arrive at the New Testament and perhaps the most astonishing example of the illusion of human power appears in the conversation between Jesus and Pilate.
 
Pilate is standing there as the representative of Rome, with soldiers, political authority and the machinery of an empire behind him. Jesus, from every outward appearance, is the powerless one, a prisoner awaiting a decision about His life. Pilate eventually says to Him, “Do You not know that I have power to crucify You, and power to release You?”
Jesus replies, “You could have no power at all against Me unless it had been given you from above.”
 
That exchange completely changes the scene once you understand who is actually standing before whom. Pilate believes Jesus is standing before his authority, while in reality Pilate is standing before the One through whom all things were created. The governor believes he is deciding the fate of Christ, yet the authority he is exercising exists only because God has permitted him to exercise it. His authority is real, but it is borrowed.
 
That is worth remembering as governments and peoples once again wrestle with questions of land, sovereignty and what the future of this region should look like. Human authority is real and its decisions have real consequences, sometimes devastating ones, which is why we should care deeply about justice, peace and innocent human life. We should care about Israeli families and Palestinian families because every person bears the image of God. But we should never confuse the ability of human beings to affect history with the ability to ultimately control it.

Principalities and powers

This is where Ephesians 6:12 adds another important dimension, because Paul writes, “For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this age, against spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places.

Evil is deeper than politics, deception is deeper than ideology and the answer to darkness will never ultimately be another human kingdom.

The more I sit with that verse, the more I think it has to affect the way we respond to what we see happening around us. Scripture does not permit us to turn people into the enemy simply because we disagree with what they are doing. Our battle is not ultimately against a politician, a government, a nationality or another human being. There is a spiritual reality running beneath the visible one, and if we forget that, we can become so consumed fighting people that we completely miss where the real battle lies.
 
That doesn’t mean attaching a demon to every political decision we dislike or pretending to understand every spiritual dynamic behind world events. Scripture requires more humility than that. It means recognising that evil is deeper than politics, deception is deeper than ideology and the answer to darkness will never ultimately be another human kingdom.
 
And this is where the gospel becomes so incredibly important, because Ephesians 6 tells us that our struggle involves principalities and powers, but Colossians 2 tells us what Christ has already done to them. At the cross, Jesus “disarmed principalities and powers” and “made a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them”.
 
Think about the depth of that for a moment. The cross looked like the exact opposite of victory. Jesus had been betrayed, arrested, beaten and crucified, His disciples had scattered, Rome had carried out the sentence and eventually a stone was rolled across the entrance to His tomb. If you had stood there on Friday and judged God’s faithfulness entirely by what you could see, you might have believed everything Jesus had promised had failed.
 
Yet what appeared in the natural to be the moment darkness won was, in the spiritual, the moment Christ triumphed over it. The grave wasn’t evidence that God’s plan had failed; it was part of the place where His victory was being accomplished. Sunday was already coming.

We are living between the victory of the cross and resurrection and the day when the fullness of Christ’s Kingdom will be seen by everyone.

The victory has been won

That changes how I read the news because Christians are not people anxiously waiting to discover whether Jesus will eventually manage to win. The decisive victory has already taken place. We are living between the victory of the cross and resurrection and the day when the fullness of Christ’s Kingdom will be seen by everyone.
 
That matters particularly when we think about Israel and the promises of God. Paul asks directly in Romans 11, “Has God cast away His people?” and answers just as directly, “Certainly not!” Later in the same chapter he says, “For the gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable.”
 
That word matters because Paul is making an extraordinary statement about the constancy of God’s purposes: His gifts and calling are not simply withdrawn because human beings fail. It doesn’t mean Christians are required to defend every action of an Israeli government. Scripture itself makes that impossible, because some of the strongest rebukes Israel ever received came from God through His own prophets. Loving Israel does not require abandoning truth, justice, compassion or discernment. What it does mean is that human failure does not make God unfaithful.

Covenant faithfulness

And that reaches much further than geopolitics. The story of Israel is, from Genesis onwards, one enormous testimony to the covenant faithfulness of God. People wander, kings fail, nations invade and circumstances appear impossible, yet God remains faithful to what He has spoken. If God’s faithfulness depended upon ours, none of us would have any hope.
 
And this is where God’s faithfulness towards Israel becomes deeply encouraging for every believer. We are looking at the character of the same God who has made promises to us in Christ. He doesn’t forget what He has spoken, become confused by changing circumstances or suddenly need to rewrite His purposes because powerful men have made decisions He didn’t anticipate.

Remembering what God has already done changes the way we interpret what we cannot yet understand.

Perhaps that is why Scripture repeatedly tells God’s people to remember. Remember Egypt. Remember the wilderness. Remember what God did at the Red Sea. Remember His covenant and remember His faithfulness, because remembering what God has already done changes the way we interpret what we cannot yet understand.

No end to his reign

So, when I look at what is happening in the world, I don’t want my first instinct to be fear, outrage or panic. I want it to drive me back into Scripture, because there really is nothing new under the sun. Pharaoh believed he could determine Israel’s future, Nebuchadnezzar mistook borrowed authority for personal greatness, Pilate stood before Jesus believing the power was in his hands, and at Calvary darkness appeared for a moment to have won. Yet the Red Sea opened, Nebuchadnezzar eventually acknowledged the Most High, the tomb was emptied and Christ rose victorious.
 
Revelation then allows us to look beyond the moment we are living in and see where history is ultimately heading: “The kingdoms of this world have become the kingdoms of our Lord and of His Christ, and He shall reign forever and ever.”
 
That is where I want to keep my eyes fixed, because every earthly kingdom has an expiry date. Governments change, rulers relinquish their authority, ideologies eventually give way to others and empires mankind once considered untouchable become chapters in history books. Yet there will never be a headline announcing the end of the reign of Jesus Christ.
 
So, I will pray for Israel and for the peace of Jerusalem because Scripture tells me to. I will pray for Israeli and Palestinian families, for innocent people caught in suffering, for hostages and grieving families, and for leaders to govern with wisdom, justice and the fear of God. Above all, I will pray for Jewish and Arab hearts alike to encounter Yeshua, because no political agreement can accomplish what only the Prince of Peace can ultimately do.

Christ has overcome

That is the perspective I want to carry into these days. Not complacency, because suffering matters, and not arrogance, because we don’t understand everything God is doing. Certainly not hostility towards people, because our battle is not against flesh and blood. What I want is that deep, settled confidence that comes from knowing the character of God, seeing His faithfulness woven through thousands of years of Scripture and understanding that the God who has carried His purposes through every generation of human rebellion has not suddenly lost control of them now.

Yet there will never be a headline announcing the end of the reign of Jesus Christ.

We don’t know every detail of what happens between this moment and eternity, and I don’t think we need to pretend that we do. We know the One who holds it, and Scripture has already allowed us to see enough of the ending to know where our confidence belongs. Christ has overcome, Christ is reigning and Christ is coming again; every knee will bow, every tongue will confess and every earthly kingdom will ultimately give way before the Kingdom that cannot be shaken.
 
And this is where ‘there is nothing new under the sun’ takes on a different meaning for us as believers. Not cynicism or resignation, but perspective. Not cynicism or resignation, but perspective. The patterns of human pride, power and resistance may repeat themselves through history, but there is something far more enduring running through Scripture: the extraordinary faithfulness of God. What He has spoken is not made uncertain by the changing decisions of men, and His sovereignty is not diminished because, for a time, the world appears to be moving in another direction.
 
So rather than allowing the headlines to consume our attention, we can allow them to turn our eyes higher, drawing us back to Scripture, into prayer, and to the reminder that the throne has remained occupied through every generation of human history. The nations will continue to rage and earthly kingdoms will continue to rise and fall. But above them all remains the One that Revelation calls “KING OF KINGS AND LORD OF LORDS”. History is not ultimately moving towards the triumph of human power, but towards the return and reign of Jesus Christ.
 
That is where our confidence belongs and where our hope remains. Whatever comes next, we know who sits on the throne.
 
All hail King Jesus.

Hannah Damary-Thompson. Hannah is Commercial Director at Specialist Wind Services, working across the UK’s onshore and offshore wind sector. She is a mother of four, attends Powerhouse Church in Doncaster, and is currently writing her first book, Diary of a Disciple.