Monday, September 11, 2017

Book Review: Living Life Backward

Living Life Backward: How Ecclesiastes Teaches Us To Live in Light of the End. David Gibson. 2017. Crossway. 176 pages. [Source: Review copy]

First sentence (from the preface): I am going to die.

Premise/plot: Living Life Backward is a commentary on the book of Ecclesiastes. David Gibson addresses the contents of each chapter focusing on the big themes of the book. (It isn't exactly a verse-by-verse commentary. But all the big ideas of the book of Ecclesiastes are discussed and the text of Ecclesiastes is included so I don't hesitate to call it a commentary.) The main premise of this one is simple. Gibson writes,
"Ecclesiastes teaches us to live life backward. It encourages us to take the one thing in the future that is certain—our death—and work backward from that point into all the details and decisions and heartaches of our lives, and to think about them from the perspective of the end. Living in the light of your death will help you to live wisely and freely and generously. It is the destination that makes sense of the journey."
Lesson from chapter one: "Ecclesiastes is a meditation on what it means to be alive in a world that God made and called good, yet which has also gone so very wrong, often in catastrophic ways."

Lesson from chapter two: "Death can radically enable us to enjoy life. By relativizing all that we do in our days under the sun, death can change us from people who want to control life for gain into people who find deep joy in receiving life as a gift."

Lesson from chapter three: "One of the ways we learn to live by preparing to die is by realizing that death means judgment and that this is a good thing. It gives my present actions meaning and weight, and it gives my experienced losses and injustices a voice in God’s presence. What is past may be past, but what is past is not forgotten to God, and because he is in charge and lives forever, one day all will be well. Every single thing that happens will have its day in court. This brings both comfort and challenge."

Lesson from chapter four: "If you can live in this world in such a way that the person or people beside you—your friend, your spouse, your children, your brother, your sister, the people God has put in your path—are your waking concern and your dominant focus, then you will find happiness."

Lesson from chapter five: "The ear is the Christian’s primary sense organ. Listening to what God has said is our main spiritual discipline. We need someone to tell us to listen because we want to look and speak more than we want to listen."

Lesson from chapter six: "Death is an evangelist. He looks us in the eye and asks us to look him right back with a steady gaze and allow him to do his work in us. Death is a preacher with a very simple message. Death has an invitation for us. He wants to teach us that the day of our coming death can be a friend to us in advance. The very limitation that death introduces into our life can instruct us about life."

Lesson from chapter seven: "To die well means everything I have in this world I hold with open hands because I love Jesus more than anything and anyone else, and I’m happy to go home to him."

Lesson from chapter eight: "There are better things to do than succeed, more important things to do than make it in the world, and there are worse things to do than fail."

Lesson from chapter nine: "Only Christ can make any life, young or old, truly beautiful or truly happy. Only he can cure the heart’s restless fever and give quietness and calmness. Only he can purify that sinful fountain within us, our corrupt nature, and make us holy. To have a peaceful and blessed ending to life, we must live it with Christ. Such a life grows brighter even to its close. Its last days are the sunniest and the sweetest. "

Lesson from chapter ten: "I want to suggest two ways to help you evaluate where you are in relation to these two things: the pleasure of the Bible and the pain of the Bible. They’re attitude testers, ways of taking your own spiritual temperature. First, you can measure whether you find the Bible delightful, not by how often you read it or by how much of it you read, and not by whether you find it easy or difficult to read, but by whether you approach the Bible expecting to be surprised. Bible delight is born when you expect it to teach you something you did not know already. The more childlike you are toward the Bible, the more likely you are to find it having just the right words for you. Second, a way to evaluate your relationship to the Bible’s pain is to ask yourself, when was the last time you submitted to it and acted on what it says, even when you did not like it? Have you ever obeyed it when you found what it was saying offensive? Reinterpreting the Bible to mean something different is always a moral exercise before it is ever an intellectual one. That is, if we do not like what the Bible says because it confronts us, then we will always find some way of changing what it means so it lines up with the world we want to live in instead."

My thoughts: It is natural to live life forward. It takes the Holy Spirit's guidance to live life backward.
Living Life Backward is packed with rich insight on how to live life. It isn't necessarily restricting the "how to live life well" to how to live a Christian life. Ecclesiastes has lessons to teach everyone after all. It is a contemplative book; a book that can easily be misunderstood and misapplied. I loved so much of what Gibson had to say. I also loved the quotes that he shared.

  • The broad Christian community has many, many books on joy, but few of them appear to grasp the weight of joy. They tend to talk rather stoically about how to feel pleasure in the midst of dysfunctional relationships. Joy is just a marginal psychological trait, not the center of the universe. How is it that, for centuries, Christendom can write creeds and theological tomes that don’t tell us this simple point from Deuteronomy? Why haven’t we had giant church councils on the nature of joy? Or different schools of thought that wrestle over the intricacies of joy? Why don’t our creeds dedicate long sections to expositing the nature of joy for the people of God? ~ Douglas Jones
  • Old age is the harvest of all the years that have gone before. It is the barn into which all the sheaves are gathered. It is the sea into which all the rills and rivers of life flow from their springs in the hills and valleys of youth and manhood. ~ James Russell Miller
  • It is possible to live so as to make old age very sad, and then it is possible to live so as to make it very beautiful. ~ James Russell Miller
  • Every memory is a little snatch of song. ~ James Russell Miller
  • How can we so live that our old age, when it comes, shall be beautiful and happy? It will not do to adjourn this question until the evening shadows are upon us. It will be too late to consider it. Consciously or unconsciously, we are every day helping to settle the question whether our old age shall be sweet and peaceful or bitter and wretched. It is worth our while, then, to think a little how to make sure of a happy old age.  ~ James Russell Miller
  • Every one carries in himself the sources of his own happiness or wretchedness. Circumstances have really very little to do with our inner experiences. ~ James Russell Miller
  • We are every day laying up the food on which we must feed in the closing years. We are hanging up pictures about the walls of our hearts that we shall have to look at when we sit in the shadows. ~ James Russell Miller
  • Our excesses are the best clues to our own poverty, and our best way of concealing it from ourselves. Adam Philips
  • All men seek happiness. This is without exception. Whatever different means they use, they all tend to this end. The cause of some going to war, and of others avoiding it, is the same desire in both—to be happy. This is the motive of every action of every man, even of those who hang themselves. ~ Blaise Pascal

© Becky Laney of Operation Actually Read Bible

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