Ecclesiastes 7:10

Ecclesiastes 7:10

This text has a natural and deep connection with Solomon and his times. The former days were better than his days; he could not help seeing that they were. He must have feared lest the generation which was springing up should inquire into the reason thereof in a tone which would breed which actually did breed discontent and revolution. Therefore it was that Solomon hated all his labour that he had wrought under the sun, for all was vanity and vexation of spirit.

I. Of Christian nations these words are not true. They pronounce the doom of the old world, but the new world has no part in them, unless it copies the sins and follies of the old. And therefore for us it is not only an act of prudence, but a duty a duty of faith in God, a duty of loyalty to Jesus Christ our Lord not to ask why the former times were better than these. For they were not better than these. Each age has its own special nobleness, its own special use; but every age has been better than the age which went before it, for the Spirit of God is leading the ages on toward that whereof it is written, "Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, nor hath it entered into the heart of man to conceive, the things which God hath prepared for those that love Him."

II. The inquiry shows disbelief in our Lord's own words that all dominion is given to Him in heaven and earth, and that He is with us always, even to the end of the world. It is a vain inquiry, based on a mistake. When we look back longingly to any past age, we look not at the reality, but at a sentimental and untrue picture of our own imagination. We are neither to regret the past, nor rest satisfied in the present, but, like St. Paul, forgetting those things that are behind us, and reaching onward to those things that are before us, press forward each and all to the prize of our high calling in Jesus Christ.

C. Kingsley, The Water of Life,p. 189.

I. This is the outcry of every age. Certainly it is a great difficulty in the way of the evolution theory as the one explanation of man and of things. That it plays a very important part there can be no question; but looking at it as the one explanation, it is a fact that the past looms brighter in man's memory than either the present or the future: there are always rays of glory trailing down the vistas of time. Every movement for reformation is really, when you look into the springs of it, a lament for restoration; what man prays for always is the restoration of the glittering pageant, the golden saturnine reign. (1) By a wise law of Providence, time destroys all the wreck and waste of the past and saves only the pleasures destroys the chaff and saves the grain. (2) The worship of the past springs out of man's deep and noble dissatisfaction with the present.

II. We are always looking back with complaint and longing in our own personal lives. Always there is the great fact of childhood in our lives, the careless time, the joyous time, when the mere play of the faculties was a spring of enjoyment. The days of old were better than these. We are always mourning for a lost Eden, but a wilderness is better than Eden, for it is a pathway from Eden up to heaven.

III. Notice the unwisdom of the complaint. In the deepest realities of life, in the work and the purposes of God, the complaint is not true. The former days were notbetter, for you are now larger, stronger, richer in power, with a far further horizon round you. If something is lost, something more is gained at every step. It is all faithlessness which is at the root of this lamentation of man, which a sight of the realities of life and of Him whose hand is in mercy moving all the progresses of the world would correct. The world mourns the past because it does so little with the present. Faith, hope, and love would soon make a today which would cast all the yesterdays into the shade.

J. Baldwin Brown, Penny Pulpit,No. 925.

References: Ecclesiastes 7:11. R. Buchanan, Ecclesiastes: its Meaning and Lessons,p. 250. Ecclesiastes 7:12. F. E. Paget, Helps and Hindrances to the Christian Life,vol. ii., p. 240.