Ecclesiastes 7:8 Commentary and Bible Study

These are deep principles when applied to the spiritual life. If this principle is true – which it most certainly is – then what is called for is patience. Man does not look far enough ahead. He is a short-term thinker, and he measures everything by what he can see now. This principle tells us that the road to good things is not necessarily easy. It is no good judging whether we are on the right road by how hard it is on the feet. It is no good deciding that a course of study is not worth continuing because it involves disciplined study. But far more significantly, neither is it good to judge the Christian life by the difficulties we meet with along the way. It is where we are going that matters.To leave the world’s side and to come to the Lord Jesus Christ for life is a great matter and it will not be accomplished without the utmost striving, and the exertion of all the strength that God gives us. The seeker is warned that he will meet with many obstacles, but he must not turn back and give up. To seek the things of God is hard because the seeker immediately faces three new enemies: the world, the flesh and the devil. During the course of his seeking, he must accept reproof, and in response to this a proud spirit will be tempted to say, ‘This is too much; why should I put up with this?’ But patience will enable him to bear these things and look for the gift of God, whatever price he has to pay for it. Of course, salvation is free and nothing that we do can pay for it in even the smallest degree, but it cannot be obtained without dying to sin; we must be willing to lose the things we count dear and which are in reality worthless and destructive if we are ever to complete our journey to life.The end of the painful self-denying process of turning our backs on the world is better than the beginning and this is the main thought of the verse, but so also is the end of the kingdom of God better than its beginning. When the master of the feast spoke to the bridegroom after Christ had turned the water into wine, he said, ‘Every man at the beginning sets out the good wine, and when the guests have well drunk, then the inferior. You have kept the good wine until now!’ (John 2:10). This miracle embodied a principle about the kingdom of God in general. When we first set out on the path of discipleship, we are far from fully understanding how wonderful is the destination to which it leads. The things of God do not disappoint but go on revealing ever greater depths of power and beauty. Their inauspicious start is like a grain of mustard seed which is smaller than all the seeds on earth, and grows up to become a sizeable tree. This is not true of the things of the world. They commend themselves by revealing all that they have at once and after this there is nothing left. They pretend to have more to offer but after they have sold themselves to us, we find them to be empty.