Life isn’t a sprint, it’s a marathon. It’s not how you start that determines your success, it’s how you finish. This lesson is brought home firmly in both the stories of Solomon and the nation of Israel.
Solomon started so well, so full of promise. He had so much going for him. It seemed like everything he touched turned to gold. He listened to God and responded with obedience. God blessed him with wisdom unlike any other human being who had ever lived before. Solomon amassed a fortune and set a new standard of dignity among the leaders of God’s people.
But, as so often happens, his success slowly turned to complacency, opening the door for compromise and disaster. He lost touch with the legitimate needs of his people. He became self-indulgent and began to listen more and more to his pagan wives, catering to their religious desires rather than maintaining his own integrity.
When Solomon began his reign, there was no doubt that there was just one God. But by the end of his reign, there was a hill to the east of Jerusalem with shrines built to just about every other god of the surrounding nations. The magnificent temple that Solomon had worked so hard to build stood as just one of many possible options. A visitor could quickly come to the conclusion that YHWH was but one of many possible gods.
Solomon did so many great things for God during the first half of his life. Unfortunately, he spent the second half of his life undoing a lot of the good he had accomplished. His father, David, had handed him a kingdom that was united and at peace. Solomon handed his son Rehoboam a kingdom that was divided and on the brink of civil war.
It’s not how you start, it’s how you finish. It is true of individuals, and of nations, churches and corporations as well.
Israel started so well. God brought them into the land miraculously, parting swollen rivers and knocking down fortified cities. The inhabitants of Canaan were terrified of them, and they managed to take possession of the Promised Land with relative ease. They had some bumpy times, brought about because of their own failure to honour God, but they still held together and built an empire that was the envy of all the surrounding nations.
But it didn’t last very long.
In less than 50 years, the Israelites went from being united under one God, worshiping in the magnificent Temple and astonishing foreign dignitaries with their society to being a fragmented, confused people who believed that one religious practice was as good as another. They became inconsequential on the international scene and were eventually swallowed up by larger, more powerful nations.
It’s not how you start, it’s how you finish.
There are examples of people in the Bible who both started and finished well. Those examples, however, are fairly rare. Fortunately, the promise we can cling to is that Jesus, the One who began a good work in and among us, will be faithful to see it all the way through to completion (see Philippians 1:6).
Regardless of whether you started well or have faded somewhere along the path, if there’s breath in your body, it’s not too late. You can make a decision today to follow Jesus in finishing well.
Lord of all, I truly desire to finish my earthly sojourn well. I know this will not happen automatically, and that many who begin well finish poorly. You have taught me that the most important key to finishing well is intimacy with Christ Jesus, and I ask for the grace to treasure that above all else. Grant that I would grow in fidelity to the spiritual disciplines of renewing my mind with Your Word, with prayer and with times of solitude and silence so that I will grow in the knowledge of the Lord. Give me a biblical perspective on the circumstances of my life, and teach me to pursue a biblical hope and purpose. Please empower me to express the vertical on the horizontal, so that my love and service to You are increasingly evident in my love and service to others. I want to run with endurance the race that is set before me and fix my eyes on
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