Living Life Backward (David Gibson)

In Living Life Backward, pastor David Gibson walks through the bulk of the book of Ecclesiastes and its perspective on death. Why? "Living in the light of your death will help you to live wisely and freely and generously." In fact, Ecclesiastes "makes a very simple point: life is complex and messy, sometimes brutally so, but there is a straightforward way to look at the mess. The end will put it all right. The end—when we stand before God as our Creator and Judge—will explain everything." And "if we know for sure where we are heading, then we can know for sure what we need to do before we get there. Ecclesiastes invites us to let the end sculpt our priorities and goals, our greatest ambitions and our strongest desires."

I won't summarize the entire work here, but some highlights:

- We will die. Our lives are "like a whisper spoken in the wind." "Accepting death is the first step in learning to live." Since we won't live forever and will be forgotten, how should we then live?

- We insulate ourselves to forget death, often using "wisdom, pleasure, work, and possessions." Yet "this is the main message of Ecclesiasties in a nutshell: life in God's world is gift, not gain." God gives us things (life, wisdom, pleasure, work, etc.) partly for enjoyment, but they can never satisfy if they become our ultimate things and goals. "You can only truly enjoy what you do not worship."

- We don't always understand what happens in this world, and it eludes our control. Yet everything will have its day in court, so our conduct has weight and meaning. And we won't know it all. "Part of being wise . . . is learning to accept that we have only very limited access to the big picture." And "not even being wise will tell you everything you want to know . . . part of living wisely is learning to live with the limitations of wisdom itself." And "satisfaction lodges in my heart when I accept the boundaries of my creaturely existence and accept the seasons of my life as coming from his good and wise hands." 

- The source of our pain is our self-centerdness. We want to be god, to get ahead of our neighbor, and so on. When we do so, we hate others and in the process destroy ourselves. Relationships matter; your neighbor matters. Loving others is, in the end, loving yourself. So "take the best of what you have and the best of what you are and give them away." 

- Because life is a gift, "give up your pursuit of profit from your toil and instead seek to enjoy the things that God has given you for what they are, and as you do that, you will know some reward." There are better things than success and worse things than failure. Living well means, in part, to enjoy the gift you have been given and not obsessing over control, success, gain, etc. "A life fully lived is a life receiving the reward of today as a gift that you don't deserve and one that God has given you to enjoy." 

- "The Bible's realism about old age and death is both urgent—Rejoice!—and calm—Remember." We need to be "delighted with the bounty God gives" because when we aren't, we deny who God is and His covenant blessing. And we need to remember "your Creator, [which] means remembering that God made a good world, not an evil one, and that we are the ones responsible for spoiling it, not he. Remembering God as Creator means taking my place in the world in the appropriate way and not demanding for myself more than it is my right to have." 

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This is a great book! Powerful in many respects. As I learned, I was both convicted and overjoyed. My main ding is that it doesn't cover the entire book of Ecclesiastes. But I loved his discussions of the themes he does cover. Ecclesiastes is a powerful, yet at times confusing, book. Gibson does a good job showing its structure, patterns, and messages.

Rating: A-