Of the Making of Books . . .

. . . there is no end!  (Ecclesiastes 12:12)  From where I sit, I have only to look up to see a shelf full of books, most of them new releases.  This Christian bookstore where I volunteer has scores of books -- books on missions, books on family, books on prayer, devotion books, kids' books, old classics, new classics, fiction of all sorts, and on and on.  And this bookstore has only about a dozen shelves.  I visited a used bookstore last week with scores of shelves and probably thousands of books.  Sadly, the vast majority of them were not worth reading.  And nearly as sad, in another way, is the fact that there is not enough time in life to read all the books that are worth reading.  With so many books in the world, and enough good ones to keep a reader busy for a lifetime, why on earth would we ever need one more?  Surely every subject has been discussed and dissected thoroughly by now, and furthermore, there is nothing new under the sun to be discussed.  (Ecclesiastes 1:9)

These verses in Ecclesiastes struck me with a sort of resigned discouragement from the notion of ever writing a book.  So what if I write -- everybody writes, about the same stuff, over and over.  But in thinking about it, I realized that these verses are merely stating the obvious, and my object ought to be to know why these statements are true, not to draw conclusions they don't intend.  Why, first of all, is there nothing new under the sun?  One reason I would suggest is that God has revealed as much truth as will ever be available to us this side of heaven -- we will never invent or discover more than He has already shown us in His Word and in nature.  Once in a great while a "new" idea may appear, but it is always only a different perspective of an age-old truth.

However, truth -- Truth Himself -- is so infinite, it is entirely possible to find fresh angles all the time.  Hence, the endless making of books.  Yes, the same old concepts may be discussed countless times, more or less skillfully, but we will never really get to the bottom of fathomless, timeless, divine truth.  Even now in our privileged time of history, with the accumulation of thousands of years of authors' labors, those countless volumes are not nearly enough to proclaim it.  That is overwhelming in quite a different way!  Adding to the praise of God's glorious truth is indeed an endless endeavor, more endless than the making of books.

And there are many other things that Jesus did, which if they were written one by one, I suppose that even the world itself could not contain the books that would be written.

Amen.

John 21:25