I am going to make this blog entry as something of a teaser for a book called Living Life Backward, with the sub-title How Ecclesiastes teaches us to live in light of the end.  First off, I am generally not known for being a very experiential or mystical Christian.  In other words, I do not look for signs as a kind of subjective leading from the Lord.  That said, I have found that as long as I have been a believer, God seems to send the right book to read just at the right time and this was one of them.  It was published in 2017, written by David Gibson, a PhD. grad from University of Aberdeen and minister of Trinity Church in Aberdeen, Scotland.  So, how I came to read this book was from a meeting I had with the campus pastor of The Master’s University.  We were having breakfast and he told me how much this book meant to him personally and how it was sweeping through the student body.  So, while that caught my attention, I was not officially sold to dive in and read it, though I did purchase a copy.  As it turns out a funeral sent me back down to Southern California where I was going to meet this same campus pastor a second time which motivated me to quickly pour through the book so I could tell him I read it.  When I started reading it, like only a select few others, this book grabbed me.  I heard D.A. Carson once say that most books he reads deserve one hour of your time but that there are certain books that deserve many hours.  This is one of those books. 

I studied Ecclesiastes in Seminary, in its original Hebrew language.  I have read several books on this book of the Bible and preached through it twice (not too long ago at our church).  Still, this book hit me right where I am with incisive clarity.  What makes this Gibson’s book distinct is that it applies Ecclesiastes like it is supposed to be applied.  Ecclesiastes, more than a wisdom book in our Old Testament, is a sermon preached by Solomon and should be read as such.  This is a sermon makes a  point and a point that is supposed to be understood and applied.  So what is it?  As odd as this may sound the point of the sermon is to simply live your individual life with all of your complicated and unpredictable circumstances in light of what is absolutely certain and predictable, namely our death.  We are all going to die. 

What is surprising is how Gibson brings liberating encouragement by teaching that says, when we live our lives from the perspective of certain death, we free lives of any number of this world’s temptations.  Freed from money-greed or job-performance idolatry or from trying to answer why wicked people prosper when we struggle to etc. etc. 

Gibson unpacks Solomon’s wisdom from Ecclesiastes calling believers to understand what appears unfair in life by considering a great leveler – death.  Allow the next funeral to reshape your value system.  Turn your daily to-do list into your bucket list.  Value your friendships during your vapor-like existence as precious and life defining.  Receive each day as a gift from God and understand that your life will not go on forever and that one-day God will take it back from you.  The first line of the book in the preface Gibson writes:

I am going to die.  By the time you read these lines, I may even be dead.  It’s not that I have a virulent disease or a terminal illness.  A doctor has not pronounced on how I am going to die.  I don’t know when I will die.  I just know I will.  I am going to die, and so are you.  But here is why I wrote this book: I am ready to die.

Reading his book, you can tell Ecclesiastes is what put him in this frame of mind.  This is a man in his forties with a wife and children.  People to live for, right?  Yes, but what I found in reading his testimony is that he has tapped into the key to living life to its fullest by living in view of certain death.  Probably the best way I could summarize this book is by referencing the experience of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol.  Remember, after Scrooge met the ghost of Christmas future, he woke a changed man, ready to engage life and ready to love and to give!  This same effect is what Ecclesiastes is supposed to have on our lives. 

“Vanity of vanities, says the Preacher, vanity of vanities!  All is vanity” (Eccles. 1:2).  Life is filled with broken promises, broken dreams, and unmet expectations all while life is also a passing vapor.  So, how are we supposed to square life and find satisfaction and joy in a world that can be so empty, so vacuous?  Understand your life is being built by God as if you were a complex model from a box with a thousand pieces.  Pieces God is snapping together through your daily experiences that for the most part you will not understand. 

This book by Gibson gives you permission not to have to understand how it all fits together and frees you up to live as long as you live life with the end in mind!  I’ll conclude with the summary blurb on the back cover.

Keeping the end in mind shapes how we live our lives in the here and now.  Living life backward means taking the one thing in our future that is certain-death-and letting that inform our journey before we get there.

Looking to the book of Ecclesiastes…[this book] was written to shake up our expectations and priorities for what it mans to live “the good life.”  Considering the reality of death helps us pay attention to our limitations as human beings and receive life as a wondrous gift from God-freeing us to live wisely, generously, and faithfully for God’s glory and the good of his world.

So, if you can’t tell, I’m sold on this book and hope you will give it a look.