Thursday, August 05, 2004
Mark Shea's latest
And so the whole history of Israel is set on foot. Through it all earthly fortunes rise and mostly fall. Success slides into failure over and over again. Hope is endlessly dashed in a pathetic cycle of human folly till Ecclesiastes writes of this idiotic round of futility, "Vanity of vanities! All things are vanity!" Abraham's descendants received the land of Canaan all right and they multiplied all right. But the question arises, "So what? What's the point? Where do we go from here?" All the things promised to Abraham appear to have been fulfilled, but their fulfillment seems absurd, for the whole of earth (including that bit of real estate called the land of Canaan) seems pointless and "a chase after wind."
