Reinventing the Wheel

The church doesn’t need to reinvent the wheel. Might need to change a flat, or pump some air into the tires, but the wheels are fine.

“There’s no use reinventing the wheel.”

Found plenty of occasions to say that, haven’t you?

What you mean, of course, is that in dealing with whatever problem you are confronting, you need not spend time looking for a new solution when a perfectly good one already exists.

But consider the statement literally. It implies that the wheel, one of our oldest inventions for moving heavy weights a linear distance across an irregular surface, works so well that it has not been superseded.

Indeed, the wheel has been around a long time. Genesis mentions both wagons and chariots. First Kings includes a detailed description of wheels crafted for the bronze stands used in the temple. Each stand had four wheels, and “the height of a wheel was a cubit and a half. The wheels were made like a chariot wheel; their axles, their rims, their spokes, and their hubs were all cast” (1 Kings 7:32-33).

But we know about wheels even more ancient than those in the Bible. The...