Straightforwardly, History Repeats Itself

Donald Rumsfeld once stated a truism that to this day rings as true as it did in the past and will continue to do so in the future. “There are known knowns: the things you know. There are known unknowns: the things you know you don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns: the things you don’t know you don’t know.”

The last-mentioned category can be the most perilous, in war and in life. Israel didn’t know that it didn’t know that Palestinian nationalist Sunni Islamist's military wing was preparing for the October 2023 incursion that killed more than a thousand Israelis and changed the course of the Middle East. Hezbollah didn’t know that it didn’t know Israel was weaponizing pagers to kill many of its pugnacious Hamas myrmidons and aspiring underlings. The U.S. didn’t know that it didn’t know al Qaeda would execute a massive terrorist attack on 9/11.

It's bad enough when we don’t know what we need to know. It’s worse when what we think we know turns out to be wrong, such as Israel’s certainty that Hamas did not have the capability to stage the October 7 invasion. And it’s even worse when we know parts of the truth and are therefore inaccurately but categorically convinced that we know the truth. 

A true expression of freedom is not acting on self-seeking impulse but committing our lives to serving the greater good and standing up for what is right. Freedom consists not in doing what we like, but in having the right to do what is necessary or appropriate.

Does not the Word of God lend credence that validate the mentioned truism? Looking through the lens of Ecclesiastes 3 and Ecclesiastes 1:9 we see an illustration that shows the breadth and depth of God's sovereignty over time and the events of life. To picture this more clearly, we must perceive time as a moving reality. It is as though it is coming toward us and moving away from us simultaneously.

Though time is involved in this statement, the emphasis is more on the events that happen within time rather than time itself. We can perhaps understand this verse better as saying that what is happening right now, already happened in the past, and what will happen has already happened. It is a way of saying that, in one sense, time cannot be broken into parts. Time and the events happening within it, of and by themselves are a whole. Thus, the Word of God is essentially saying, “Past, present, and future are bound together.” In what way is this so? Time and the events happening in it are parts of a continuous stream. Solomon's point is again that only God is in perfect control of both time and its events, and He can seek out and bring back into existence in the present what happened in the past. Thus, Solomon's comment in Ecclesiastes 1:9 is a parallel: “What has been, what will be, and what has been done is what will be done, and there is nothing new under the sun.”  Straightforwardly, history repeats itself.