The Wisdom of the Finish Line Text: Ecclesiastes 7:8-10
Introduction: The Marathon of Faith
The book of Ecclesiastes is a divine gift to us, a bracing splash of cold water in the face of our sentimental, shallow, and frequently foolish age. The Preacher, Solomon, is not a cynical nihilist, as some suppose. He is a man who has run to the end of every earthly road, tasted every pleasure, acquired every possession, and exhausted every project, only to find that every path under the sun leads to the same place: vanity. Hevel. A chasing after the wind.
But this is not a counsel of despair. It is a counsel of realism, designed to drive us out of ourselves and into the arms of a sovereign God. The Preacher is not telling us that life is meaningless. He is telling us that life is meaningless if you try to make it meaningful apart from God. He is stripping away all our false hopes and flimsy idols so that we might find our joy, our meaning, and our contentment in the only place it can be found, which is in the fear of the Lord.
In our text today, the Preacher gives us three sharp, practical, and deeply counter-cultural pieces of wisdom. He addresses our impatience, our anger, and our romantic discontentment. These are not three separate problems, but rather three symptoms of one root disease: a proud and foolish heart that refuses to trust the sovereign goodness of God in the unfolding story He is writing. Our culture is obsessed with beginnings, with new initiatives, with fresh starts, with the next big thing. But God, who declares the end from the beginning, teaches us to value the finish line more than the starting block. He calls us to be a people of patience, of sober spirit, and of present faithfulness.
The Text
Better is the end of a matter than its beginning;
Better is patience of spirit than haughtiness of spirit.
Do not be eager in your spirit to be vexed,
For vexation rests in the bosom of fools.
Do not say, “Why is it that the former days were better than these?”
For it is not from wisdom that you ask about this.
(Ecclesiastes 7:8-10 LSB)
The End is Better Than the Beginning (v. 8)
We begin with a fundamental principle of godly perspective.
"Better is the end of a matter than its beginning; Better is patience of spirit than haughtiness of spirit." (Ecclesiastes 7:8)
Our world loves beginnings. The thrill of a new project, a new relationship, a new year's resolution. There is an intoxicating optimism in a fresh start. But the Preacher tells us that this is a shortsighted view. The end of a matter is better. Why? Because the beginning is all potential and promise, but the end is proven character. The beginning is the blueprint; the end is the cathedral. The beginning is the planting; the end is the harvest. The beginning is the declaration of war; the end is the victory parade.
God is a God of completion. He is the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end. And what He begins, He finishes (Phil. 1:6). The entire story of Scripture is about God bringing His purposes to their glorious conclusion. The creation of the world in Genesis is good, but the new creation in Revelation is better. The first Adam was a good beginning, but the Last Adam is a far better end.
This reality directly informs the second half of the verse. Because the end is better, a patient spirit is better than a haughty one. The "haughtiness of spirit" here is pride. It is the spirit that demands instant results, instant gratification, instant success. It is the spirit that looks at a long and difficult road and says, "This is taking too long. I deserve better than this. I should be further along by now." This is the spirit of the child who plants a seed and digs it up the next day to see if it's growing. It is a spirit of arrogance because it presumes to know better than God what the timeline should be.
Patience, on the other hand, is the spirit of faith. It is the quiet confidence that God is sovereign over the process, over the timeline, and over the outcome. Patience is not passive resignation; it is active, robust trust. It is the farmer who plants the seed and then faithfully waters and waits, knowing that God must give the growth. It is the marathon runner who paces himself, enduring the long miles with his eyes fixed on the finish line. Patience understands that character is forged in the crucible of waiting, that sanctification is a long, slow process, and that God's story is not a sprint, but a grand, epic narrative. The haughty man wants to be the hero of his own short story. The patient man is content to be a character in God's great novel.
The Fool's Lodging (v. 9)
From the sin of impatience, the Preacher moves to its close relative: anger.
"Do not be eager in your spirit to be vexed, For vexation rests in the bosom of fools." (Ecclesiastes 7:9 LSB)
The word "vexed" here means to be provoked, irritated, or angered. The Preacher's counsel is not to avoid anger altogether, there is a place for righteous indignation. Rather, he says, "Do not be eager... to be vexed." Do not be quick-tempered. Do not have a short fuse. Do not be the kind of person who is always looking for an offense, always ready to take umbrage.
Why? Because this kind of spirit, this perpetual state of irritation, is the resident attitude of a fool. "Vexation rests in the bosom of fools." The word "rests" here is telling. It means it lodges there, it takes up residence. For the wise man, anger is a visitor that is carefully vetted at the door and dismissed quickly. For the fool, anger moves in, puts its feet up on the furniture, and starts getting mail delivered. It becomes a permanent resident in his heart.
This kind of vexation is the natural outworking of the haughty spirit in the previous verse. A proud man is easily angered because the world is constantly failing to meet his exalted expectations. People don't treat him with the respect he thinks he deserves. Traffic doesn't part for him. His plans are frustrated by inconvenient realities. At the center of his universe is a very sensitive and demanding idol: himself. And so he is constantly vexed because the universe refuses to bow down and worship at his shrine. The fool is vexed because things are not going according to his plan. The wise man has learned to say, "Not my will, but Thine be done," and in that surrender, he finds peace.
The Folly of Nostalgia (v. 10)
The final piece of wisdom addresses a subtle but corrosive form of discontentment.
"Do not say, 'Why is it that the former days were better than these?' For it is not from wisdom that you ask about this." (Ecclesiastes 7:10 LSB)
This is the sin of nostalgic grumbling. It is the temptation to look back at a selectively edited, golden-hued past and use it as a club to beat the present. This is the attitude of the Israelites in the wilderness, who remembered the fish and cucumbers of Egypt but conveniently forgot the whips and the slavery. It is the spirit of a church that is always talking about the "good old days" and is therefore blind to what God is doing right now.
The Preacher says plainly that this question does not come from wisdom. It is a foolish question. First, it is foolish because it is based on a lie. The "former days" were not unequivocally better. Every generation has its own unique set of blessings and its own unique set of miseries, its own opportunities for faithfulness and its own temptations to sin. To idealize the past is to engage in a form of historical idolatry. You are worshipping a phantom, a carefully curated memory that never actually existed.
Second, and more importantly, it is foolish because it is an implicit accusation against God. If God is sovereign over history, and He is, then He has placed you in this time and in this place for His good purposes. To pine for "the former days" is to tell God that He has made a mistake in His providential scheduling. It is to say, "God, your assignment for me here, in this messy and difficult present, is not as good as the assignment I would have preferred in some other era." It is a failure to bloom where you are planted. It is a discontentment with the sovereign lot God has assigned you.
The wise man does not waste his energy wishing he lived in another time. He recognizes that he has been placed on his post, in this generation, by the Captain of his salvation. His duty is not to daydream about past battles but to fight the good fight right here, right now. Wisdom accepts the present as a gift from God and looks for opportunities for faithfulness in the midst of it, however difficult it may be.
Conclusion: Finishing Well in the Present
These three verses give us a portrait of Christian maturity. The mature believer is not the one who starts with the most flash and fanfare, but the one who finishes the race. He does this by cultivating a patient spirit, rooted in the knowledge that God is sovereignly working all things together for good. Because he trusts God's timing, he is not easily provoked to anger when things don't go his way. He has crucified the haughty, demanding spirit that sees every inconvenience as a personal affront. And because he trusts God's placement, he does not waste his time in discontented nostalgia for a past that never was. He accepts his current circumstances as his divine assignment and seeks to be faithful within them.
This is a profoundly counter-intuitive way to live. Our flesh, and the world it loves, is always impatient, always angry, and always discontented. The only way to live out this wisdom is by looking to Christ. He is the ultimate example of one who endured. "For the joy that was set before Him," He endured the cross, despising the shame, and has now sat down at the right hand of the throne of God (Hebrews 12:2). He saw the end of the matter, the joy of our salvation, and it gave Him the patience to endure the beginning and the middle.
He was not quick to vexation, but was patient and longsuffering with His foolish disciples and His hateful enemies. And He did not long for "former days" of glory in heaven, but emptied Himself and took on the form of a servant, embracing His assignment in time and space fully.
When you, by faith, are united to Him, His Spirit begins to work this same character in you. He gives you a patient spirit, because you know the end of your story is secure in Him. He guards you from foolish anger, because your identity is not wrapped up in your own plans but in His. And He frees you from the trap of nostalgia, because your hope is not in a golden past, but in a glorious future, when the King returns to make all things new. And that end will be far better than any beginning.