Ecclesiastes 12:1-14 - "Of making many books there is no end, and much study is a weariness of the flesh." What is the Preacher warning us about here? Is he saying at the end of his book that study is a bad thing? In verse 13 he states that all has been heard. In other words there is no new thing under the sun. Though it seems strange to say it, he's wrong, or rather ignorant, of the new thing under the sun. What he is calling out for again and again, we have already seen. Jesus Christ came into the world. God does a new thing. Apart from him all things are indeed vanity or meaningless, but in Christ there is newness, hope, purpose.
John 11:1-16 - God's love is a hard thing for us to grasp. I don't mean that love is hard for us to grasp, I mean God's love. We're conditioned in our culture to feel entitled to love. "Why shouldn't God love me?" Yet if we understand God's love in that way, then we do not understand God's love. By all accounts we are creatures who regularly reject our Creator. We do despicable things to one another, and we live as if we are the stars of our own movie. Yet God loves us. This is why Jesus' action toward Mary and Martha is so hard for us to understand. Because he loved them, Jesus waited around and didn't come to help Lazarus before he died. We would think that love wouldn't have allowed the death in the first place. But Jesus is showing them something greater, and in fact pointing the way toward his own death, a death borne out of love.
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