What Does Matthew 7:14 Mean?

(14) **Narrow is the way.**—Literally, *pressed*, or hemmed in between walls or rocks, like the pathway in a mountain gorge. **Which leadeth unto life.**—Noteworthy as the first passage in our Lord’s recorded teaching in which the word “life” appears as summing up all the blessedness of the kingdom. The idea is developed as we advance; the life becomes “eternal,” and finally we are taught that the eternal life consists in the true and perfect knowledge of God and Christ (John 17:2-3). **Few there be that find it.**—The sad contrast between the many and the few runs through all our Lord’s teaching. He comes to “save the world,” and yet those whom He chooses out of the world are but as a “little flock.” They are to preach the gospel, and yet the result will be but discord and division. The picture is a dark one, and yet it represents but too faithfully the impression made, I do not say on Calvinist or even Christian, but on any ethical teacher, by the actual state of mankind around us. They are, for the most part, unconscious of the greatness of their lives, and of the interests at stake in them. If there is any wider hope, it is found in hints and suggestions of the possibilities of the future (1Peter 3:19; 1Peter 4:6); in the fact that the words used are emphatically present; in the belief that the short span of this life is not necessarily the whole of the discipline of a soul made for eternity; and that the new life, nascent, and feeble, and stunted here, may be quickened by some new process of education into higher energies.