This article is part of the The Crossway Podcast series.

You Can’t Have a Grandmaster Plan for Life (Or Even Tomorrow)

In this episode, David Gibson discusses the intent, message, and way of life that Ecclesiastes has to teach us. He addresses the negative connotations associated with this book and how Ecclesiastes teaches us how we can know God, love him, and accept the gifts we receive from him.

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Topics Addressed in This Interview:

00:30 - Do Proverbs and Ecclesiastes Have Contradictory Messages?

Matt Tully
David Gibson serves as minister of Trinity Church in Aberdeen, Scotland and is the author of several books, including Living Life Backward: How Ecclesiastes Teaches Us to Live in Light of the End from Crossway. David, thanks so much for joining me today on The Crossway Podcast.

David Gibson
Such a pleasure, Matt. It’s lovely to get to chat with you again.

Matt Tully
Today we’re going to talk about the book of Ecclesiastes, this really incredible yet somewhat perplexing book in the Bible. And one of the big themes in Ecclesiastes that I want to focus on today is just the uncertainty of life that we all experience. Life doesn’t always go the way that we expect it to go. I think that’s something that we’ve all experienced in our own lives in different ways. Sometimes in really distressing ways, perhaps. So I wonder if we can just start with the big picture. As someone who spent a lot of time in the book of Ecclesiastes, how has it shaped your perspective on those moments in our lives when life does feel random or even out of control?

David Gibson
Yeah, thanks. I think you touch straight away there on probably one of the biggest takeaways from the book, that I think it’s there to help us make sense of those moments. I think it’s part of the wisdom literature that is given to us to help us get our heads around the order that God has put into the world that you see really clearly in the book of Proverbs. Ecclesiastes comes at that order from a different angle and says, yes, the order is there, but what happens when it doesn’t look like it’s there and nothing seems to make sense? I think a lot of where people connect with the book Ecclesiastes is necessarily bound up with our own individual life story. So I’m the eldest child. I'm a typical eldest child. You see these Instagram accounts about this. I follow these guys on Instagram that always do these reels about the different type of kids: the eldest, the middle, and the littlest. And I’m one of three boys, so I see that in my two brothers. Eldest children love order, neatness, tidiness in everything. We work by a schedule. We’re where we’re meant to be. Randomness and things out of control are very infuriating in a way that they’re not for my two other brothers. They’re like, "You’re there to take care of all that stuff. What’s the problem?" So depending on your type of personality and where you are in the world, the book will resonate in different ways. For me, as someone who loves order and tidiness and control, I think I’ve learned, through the book of Ecclesiastes, that God is teaching me that I make an idol out of those things. It’s not just my personality (although it is that); it’s that when my desk is tidy, and my calendar is tidy, and my relationships are neat, and the kids are where I want them to be, and the dog is well behaved, and church is looking good, it’s very possible that I have risen up above my creaturely station and tried to take control of the universe and say that because everything is where I want it to be, God is good. And actually, I’m not really saying that God is good; I’m saying that I am good, and my world is good, and therefore God is good. And the book of Ecclesiastes is there to ask is it possible that love of control is an idol that God is smashing very gently—well, it doesn’t feel gentle—very lovingly, by showing you that you cannot control everything in life? And whether you’re an eldest child or a youngest child, it’s still the same message, that we are creatures who do not run the universe. And the randomness of life, and the things that you can’t control, and your best laid plans that all unravel unexpectedly, and the medical diagnosis you didn’t see coming—all of these things are tools in God’s hand to wake us up to the fact that he is the one running the world, not us. So that’s a long answer to your question, that Ecclesiastes has helped me see more and more that I am a creature. God is the creator, not me.

Matt Tully
You mentioned the book of Proverbs a minute ago, and I think that is one thing that I’ve wrestled with at times is that portions of the book of Proverbs seem to portray a world that is very you do this, and then this will happen. It’s very straightforward math almost. So you kind of know if I give this input, if I act in this way, if I live a wise life or a godly life in this way, then this thing should happen every time. And that feels very much at odds with the message of the book of Ecclesiastes, which seems to say I can live life as wisely as I possibly could, and yet sometimes things will still not turn out for me. So how do you reconcile those two? I think to some it could feel like those are contradictory messages.

David Gibson
Well, you need them both. The second one only feels contradictory because you have the first proverb says, "Do this, and you will live. Do this, and things go better than if you do the opposite." And that’s all completely true. But along comes Ecclesiastes to say—and Proverbs says this, too, but Ecclesiastes says it in a little bit more of a stark form—that yes, you’ve got all those given things about what makes life work well, but don’t forget two things. Don’t forget that you’re doing them in a broken world. Sin has fractured everything. And don’t forget that you’re doing it in a world where you will soon be dead. You are dying, and your lifespan is not very long. You are only here for a short time. Those are the two main angles, I think, and particularly that first one that God has made the world. A friend of mine who did a PhD here at Aberdeen partly on Proverbs said that God has made the world hospitable to wisdom. The world works best the wiser you are. The more of God you have in your life, the more you’ve imbibed the law and the gospel, the wiser you will live and, therefore, the better life will go. And at the same time, Ecclesiastes says, yes, but disaster can overtake you in a moment, because this is a broken and fallen world. So it’s a case of holding both together, Matt, that yes, this will be better if I live this way, and I might be dead tomorrow, because this world is broken and I don’t have any guarantee for the future.

Matt Tully
As you describe it like that, it makes me think of how the book of Ecclesiastes is almost like the asterisk on the book of Proverbs. This is true, generally speaking, but just don’t miss that asterisk. Don’t forget that there are these other two factors, these X factors: we live in a broken world, and we ourselves are going to die. Those impact our experience of our lives.

David Gibson
There’s an Australian Anglican theologian called Graham Goldsworthy, who many of your listeners may know. He has a wonderful book called Gospel and Wisdom, where he talks about how you find and read and know the gospel through the Bible’s wisdom literature. And he breaks the books, and he says Proverbs is about the perception of order, Ecclesiastes is about the confusion of order, and the book of Job is about the hiddenness of order. In some of my teaching I’ve done recently in the wisdom literature, I’ve added in Song of Songs into that and say that Song of Songs is about the ecstasy of order. The really interesting thing in all of that is the word order. Order recurs in all of Goldsworthy’s headings—perception of order, confusion of order, hiddenness of order. And the order comes from the doctrine of creation. To anybody listening, the key to understanding the Bible’s wisdom literature is the doctrine of creation. You cannot get Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Job, Song of Songs right unless you believe God has made the world in a certain way. And it’s because there is a Creator that there is order in the world. It’s because sin has ruined creation that there is confusion of the order. I’ve always just found that a really helpful thing, that the doctrine of creation is the unspoken screen saver. It’s the backdrop to the whole of the wisdom literature.

Matt Tully
You write in this book, "The message of the book of Ecclesiastes is mirrored in the effect of the book." I just found that a very fascinating statement. I wonder if you could unpack a little bit more what you mean by that.

David Gibson
I think the best storytellers—I was trying to think of an example of this, and I couldn’t think of one. It’ll come to me as soon as we click end recording. The best storytellers and the best filmmakers make you feel what they’re trying to tell you on the screen. So Harry Potter, when it’s Voldemort in the woods or whatever, it’s not light and bright and happy music on the screen. It’s dark, it’s foreboding, and it’s matching. The effect is mirroring the message at that particular point. So I think the message of the book of Ecclesiastes is life is really bewildering and perplexing and will leave you scratching your head and you don’t know where you are. You don’t know which way is up. So if that’s the message of the book, what an incredibly skillful teacher the teacher of the book is to write a book that leaves you scratching your head. How many people have you spoken to who say, "I steer clear of Ecclesiastes. I don’t know how to make sense of Ecclesiastes." What an amazing effect, if the point of the book is that we don't easily know how to make sense of life. So I think that that’s what I’m getting at in that sentence. It’s a very skillful thing to write a book that leaves you scratching your head to teach you that life leaves you scratching your head.

Matt Tully
That’s such a helpful encouragement to us as we approach a book that, yeah, does sometimes feel hard to understand. It feels a little bit inscrutable in certain points. And I hear you saying that that is part of the point, that the book was actually intentionally designed to be a little bit difficult to penetrate, because that reflects the way that life often is difficult for us to penetrate.

David Gibson
Yeah, exactly. And this is controversial, but I think that’s reflected in a lot of the scholarship of Ecclesiastes, that a lot of Christian scholars feel they have to compensate for the perplexity. And there are all sorts of different theories, most of them that I disagree with, about bits of the book that are unorthodox—"no believer would say this." And I don’t think that’s right, and I think that’s the shock of the book. It’s meant to make you stop in your tracks and say, "Hang on. I thought this was the Bible I’m reading." Anthony Thistelton, who was a New Testament scholar, he says that wisdom literature, and I think this is particularly Ecclesiastes, wisdom literature wounds from behind. It’s the sucker punch, the punch in the back that you didn’t see coming that leaves you blinking in the sunlight, thinking hHang on, what is this? That’s part of the unique contribution that Ecclesiastes makes in the canon.

11:21 - How Is It a Comfort That We Are Not in Control of Our Lives?

Matt Tully
There are many different ways that we experience this uncertainty of life, these unexpected turns in our lives that leave us feeling sucker punched. There are a lot of different angles on that that we could explore, but I wanted to pick maybe three broad categories of these and see if you can help us understand what this book can help us learn about these ways that we experience life’s uncertainty. The first one is just that understanding that we don’t have control over the things that happen to us. This is going to come in all different ways. I know for me, I can look back on my life and I can just see so many small moments that happen, things that I either had very little control over or maybe had literally no control over, that then had really big repercussions for me that maybe made a huge impact on my life. And there’s obviously lots of good examples of that in our lives, lots of wonderful happen-stances, so to speak, that then led to good things. But I think we can all probably think of small moments that led to really difficult, hard things in our lives. As you think about your own life, can you think of examples of that—these small moments that you had no control over that then ended up having a big impact on the rest of your life?

David Gibson
One hundred percent. I can think of loads and loads of different things. I’m married to the most amazing woman in the world, who I messed around at university, who I treated badly. And we met on a summer evening in our college days. She was cycling home, and I happened to be walking back a particular way that evening that led to a conversation that began my humble pie journey of saying to her, "Have I missed the boat?" And we didn’t plan to be there. Then all of a sudden, our whole lives are now meshed together, and we have four kids and a church, and we’re living in this part of the world and not another part. I think Ecclesiastes is just all about that. But here’s how it does it. Ecclesiastes has a beautiful doctrine of God. We can talk about that. It’s actually very rich in the way that it describes God. But it helps you see who God is mostly, I think, by showing us who we are. We are creatures, not the Creator. That, I think, is the main message of Ecclesiastes. It has one of the richest anthropologies in the Bible. It’s got a doctrine of man that sheds light on who God is. Because the fundamental human condition ever since the garden is that we think we are God. That’s what the serpent offered our first parents, wasn’t it? That if you do this, you will be like God. I say this in my book, that my wife will tell you I’m pretty keen on that idea of being God. It surfaces in all sorts of ways, and Ecclesiastes is there to say just take a minute to look at your life—those happen-stances and everything that you mentioned. If you stop and unpack your life, most of the really, really significant decisions and things about you, you didn’t decide and you had no control over. Or even if you did decide, you didn’t realize what you were contributing to. It led to this that you didn’t see coming and all the unintended consequences. Stop thinking that you’re like Garry Kasparov, or whoever those Chess players are, that you’re sitting there with a grand map of your life and the universe and everything. We’re not. We’re small bit-part players who barely know what we’re doing tomorrow, nevermind how we’re going to shape the universe in the future. And Ecclesiastes is just a beautifully humbling book to say, What do most of us think we’re like? We think we’re like castles. We think we’re like granite. We think we’re skyscrapers. We think we are individual Babel towers, going to reach up to the heavens, change the world, and live forever. And Ecclesiastes says, no, I’ve seen people like you before. You’re like the mist that was there on my grass in the morning. And it’s now two o’clock in the day, and you’re like the dew, and it’s gone. It’s just evaporated. That’s what you’re like. You’ll be here for seventy years. Tomorrow no one will remember you were there. That’s what I mean by it being a book about God by teaching us who we are. It puts us in our proper place.

Matt Tully
I love how at the beginning of each chapter of the book you often include little quotes from different figures. And one of the quotes that stood out to me that just is so at odds with, obviously, broader secular culture, perhaps, but even some Christian culture. It’s a Nicholas von Zinzendorf quote: "Preach the gospel, die, and be forgotten." That is the true trajectory for most of us. And yet even just the starkness of that, especially the idea of being forgotten, can really cut against the sense of purpose or significance that we all want to feel.

David Gibson
I think it’s when the wisdom literature has wounded you from behind and you catch your breath and you think, What the heck just happened there?—it’s realizing that what the punch in the back has done is put a whole different way of looking at life into your system. So the idea that in 100 years probably no one will know I existed, if you don’t know why that’s a beautiful, beautiful, liberating thing for you, you’re going to struggle with the book of Ecclesiastes, or at least it’s written to teach you why that’s a beautiful thing. Because if you imagine really taking that on board, that in 100, 200, or 300 years no one will know I was even here, well, think about the difference that makes to what I’m trying to achieve today. What am I trying to do? Am I trying to build a legacy today that will last forever? There are occasional people like that. There’s Winston Churchill. There’s US presidents. There are people that God puts in the world who leave an indelible trace. What are they? Maybe five, ten, fifteen, twenty people out of billions. If you’re striving to be one of those people, you’re probably not going to be. And that’s God’s way of saying stop overreaching. Stop trying to do more with your life than you were ever meant to do. And if no one’s going to remember you in 100 years, the fact that I have made you, God is saying, that I’ve made you, you’re still worth something. You’re worth an awful lot. But you don’t need to be remembered for your life to have value and meaning. So maybe the value and meaning is not where we think it is.

Matt Tully
Going back to the broad struggle that we have with feeling so powerless to control our lives, to control the future of our lives and just the experience of all the unpredictability that can come our way, you’re talking about it as being almost a comforting thing, as we realize what that tells us about God in contrast to ourselves. But I think the reality is that for many of us, that can feel very unsettling. As we think about that, we think about just my lack of control over what might be coming tomorrow, much less five years from now, it can just feel really scary to think that there’s nothing I really can do, ultimately, to control that. So how would you counsel or encourage or help someone who is saying, "Honestly, that makes me feel very scared"?

David Gibson
It’s a really good question. I think I would say all of life—and I think this as a pastor increasingly—that all of life is the doctrine of God. My fears, my anxieties, my sins, my hopes, my dreams, my struggles—all of them locate me somewhere in relation to who God is and to my understanding of who God is. So I would say that the adult—and I’m fifty this year in December—the adult (that’s someone in my position)—I remember reading John Piper saying that when you’re in your mid forties or fifties, you’ve got the most responsibilities on your shoulders that you’ll ever have. You’re probably a sandwich carer—you’ve got dependents beneath you and you’re starting to get dependents above you. You’re at a point in your career, probably, in work where pressures are increasing. You’ve got increasing responsibilities. And I feel that exactly right, all those things for me personally at the minute. if you’re that kind of person and you don’t locate yourself in relation to God properly, you begin to think, I really am carrying the weight of the world on my shoulders. I’ve got to make all these decisions. I’ve got a plan the future and all the rest of it. And what that person forgets—what I forget—is, well, imagine looking at your dog. I’ll give you two examples. Look at your dog, and if your dog said back to you, "Do you know what I’ve got to do today? Have you any idea how busy I am? Have you any idea what responsibilities I’ve got? Where’s my next walk coming from? Where’s my next meal coming from?" If your dog could speak, you’d look at it and say, "You have no idea how good you’ve got it." What you say is, "I’m in charge of that. I take care of all that, not you. You’ve forgotten who you are, dog. You’re getting above your station." That’s not a totally weird example. I think large parts of Job, using the animal kingdom, are to teach Job that if God were to tell him why he does what he does, Job wouldn’t understand. There are categories that God works in that human beings are just not built to understand. My knowledge of God is the same as my dog’s knowledge of me. We think God is just a bigger version of me when, actually, God is a different being altogether than me. So I’m taking a long time to give you hopefully a helpful, simple answer, which is when I feel anxious about tomorrow and anxious about what’s coming and anxious about the future, it’s like a dog saying to a human being, "You don’t know what you’re doing. Have I really got to run the world, dog walker? Have I got to sort it out?" We really don’t. We’re forgetting, in all the stress and worry and anxiety about tomorrow and about what’s coming, we’re forgetting that we are creatures who God has placed in this world for a short time to simply know him, love him, obey him, trust him, to accept—and this is another beautiful part of Ecclesiastes—to accept the good things in the world that he’s given us as gifts—food, drink, relationships, work—to enjoy them for what they are. The dog that buries a bone thinking, The entire future of the universe depends on me burying this bone, it is as silly as the president thinking the entire future of the universe depends on which button I press here. Of course it’s monumental. But it’s nothing like the grandness of what God is orchestrating and God is controlling. And the other image I’d use, not just dog and human, but parent and child. That’s the main thing, pastorally, I want to say to people who are really anxious about the future and anxious about control over their life. Your four-year-old child who says to you, "I’m really anxious about school tomorrow, mom, and what my friend is doing." That’s how life works, isn’t it? The parent looks at the child’s fears and knows how small they are compared to the parent’s fears. The parent can navigate the world in a way that the child can’t. And the parent says, "Look, don’t worry. I’m here, I’ve got this, put your hand in mine. I’ll walk with you through that." We’re so quick to forget that, aren’t we? I don’t know what you’re like, Matt. Me, myself as a pastor, my wife, my kids, our church family, if only I could get the doctrine of God deeper into my bones and into my heart, that a) he’s a different being from me, and secondly, he’s a father, not just a chess player. He’s not an orchestrator of events. He’s a loving father who loves me the same way that I love my kids and say to them at nighttime, "Let’s pray. God’s got this. I’ve got this." Does that make sense? That’s a very long-winded answer. You’ve probably even forgotten what the question was.

Matt Tully
No, absolutely. It makes me think of a subset of the broad category in just the uncertainty of life. We can look at our lives and see things happen to us that are out of our control, but one subset that is also maybe a focal point of our anxiety at times is decision making that we have to do. So every day we don’t have the option to not make decisions. It’s not as if this doctrine of God and the doctrine of humanity means that we just sit passively and let things happen. And sometimes it can just feel hard to know what decision to make. And I think especially of the situations where we are trying to make good, wise decisions, and yet things still don’t go as planned. We do what we’re called to do, we feel like faithfully, and yet the results just still go wrong. So how do you think about that? How should we as Christians understand our responsibility to make good decisions, to think carefully about the future, with our tendency to want to have control over the future?

David Gibson
I think what Ecclesiastes does is it injects into our decision making the unexpected decision-making help of death. The message of Ecclesiastes is life is a breath. The recurring phrase, "Vanity, vanity, all is vanity. Vanity of vanities." In the English Standard Version or the NIV, "Meaningless, meaningless. Everything is meaningless." The way to understand that, I think, the Hebrew word hevel is breath, mist, vapor, breath, breath, vapor, vapor. Everything is a vapor. Everything is misty. Everything is momentary. Everything is passing. Everything is fleeting. And Ecclesiastes says, if I could put it this way, Ecclesiastes says stick that in your decision making pipe and smoke it. Here I sit wrestling over this decision, and Ecclesiastes stands over my shoulder and says, "Come on, make up your mind. You don’t have long." And by that it means you’ve only got seventy years or eighty years. If you really know you’re here for a short time and you’re going to die, does that make any difference to the decision making? We never really think that, but you get the unexpected diagnosis that gives you six months to live. Very few people are cloudy in their decision making then. Things become incredibly clear very quickly about what matters most, about who you want to speak to, about what you want to put right, about where you want to go, what you’re going to do with your money. In Ecclesiastes, the whole point of the book is to say you don’t need that six-months-left diagnosis. I’m giving it to you now. You’ve got seventy years max, and look how quickly it’s going. I’m fifty, Matt, and yet in my head I’m twenty. It’s just passing like a Formula One race car. Life is flying by. So the whole point of the book, I think, is to say can you just stop and think about the fact that your grandparents are gone, and they were like you? And you don’t even know then names of your great-great grandparents. They’re here and they’re gone. So take it down deep, really deep, into your bones that when you go to that funeral and you look at the coffin, one day that will be you. And when someone stands to give the eulogy, what are they going to say about you? Today is your chance to change that. That’s one main thing, I think. Inject the reality of your death into your decision making. And then if I could just say one other thing, which is I think the book of Ecclesiastes says once you do that, once you pump your death into your veins and into your bloodstream and your mindset and everything, the very last thing it does is make you morbid. Death has that effect, doesn’t it? When people lose someone tragically, often what does the family do? They start running marathons, they climb mountains. The loss accelerates life, in some ways, and adds more life. If you can do that yourself for your own death in advance of your death, instead of becoming morbid, people like this become the most alive people that you can meet. They become incredibly generous with their money, with their time. That’s the second main thing I would say, that once you inject death into your mindset to help you make decisions, it won’t automatically tell you which fork in the road to go down, but it might help you think, Is one of these forks in the road more generous than the other? Is one going to serve others more than it serves me? It’s that kind of thing. That’s the difference that I think Ecclesiastes makes on our decision making.

27:43 - What Comfort Can We Find in the Uncertainty of Suffering?

Matt Tully
Another area of uncertainty that we face, another subcategory, is uncertainty in the midst of suffering. And Ecclesiastes does address this. It presents what I would say is a pretty brutally honest picture of suffering in a broken world that is oftentimes unavoidable for us. We live in the modern world where we have technology now that helps us to push some of this away. But ultimately, suffering, which culminates in death, is unavoidable for us. And sometimes it barges into our lives in very intense ways. So what comfort does this book offer to somebody who is experiencing deep suffering?

David Gibson
I think it operates on a few different levels. On the one hand, some people I know just simply find the sheer presence of Ecclesiastes comforting. Psalm 23 is, "Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me." Ecclesiastes just takes time to describe that valley of the shadow of death. It’s quite comforting to read the Bible and to realize that the Bible is not fairytale land. It’s not make believe. It really knows the world that we live in. That in itself is comforting.

Matt Tully
We should take a moment, David, here just to briefly mention your book. You said Psalm 23, and you have another book that you’ve written with Crossway called The Lord of Psalm 23, where you walk through that incredible Psalm in a way that I’ve never heard anyone else do. And you really helped to explain both what that valley is but also the Lord who meets us there. Can you just share very briefly what you see in that psalm and even how it connects to Ecclesiastes?

David Gibson
I think the psalm, again, some people say that the comfort—Charles Spurgeon said this really famously—that the comfort of the psalm is realizing that in the valley of the shadow of death, the reason it’s only a shadow is because there must be light somewhere. So the Lord is there as light, and so the shadows aren’t really dangerous. And I don’t think that’s right. I think the point of the psalm, and David who wrote it, his own life experience is that valleys can be very, very dangerous, dark, bleak, crushing places. The psalm doesn’t try and deny that or pretend that that’s not like that. And, in fact, that’s what makes the psalm so beautiful, that the Lord is with us. Not to then, because he’s with us, that the valley of the shadow of death disappears. No, he’s with us in that valley, right there in the midst of it and in the thickest darkness. And I think Ecclesiastes is just like that. It doesn’t sugarcoat life. It doesn’t pretend and say, "Come to Jesus, and everything will be okay." That there are many people in many parts of the world that their life was fine until they came to Jesus, until they came to Christ, and then the suffering began, then the persecution began. So that’s that’s one level of comfort, to go back to your original question. Ecclesiastes is real, and there’s comfort in it being real. I think a second thing is that Ecclesiastes says that suffering comes to us in seasons. There are just times when these things roll into our lives that are unexpected. But because there is a time for these things, Ecclesiastes is very good at saying they’re not forever, they’re not always. Just like the four seasons of the year roll around, just like days and weeks and months roll around, so times of suffering that we think are going to go on forever, in God’s hands probably are simply a season that we’re going through, a rhythm that we’re in at the minute. The most important thing, though, where I get that from in chapter 3, the most important help that I have about suffering from Ecclesiastes is that even in that time of suffering, God is going to use it in some way to tell a bigger story than I can see in this particular time. So in Ecclesiastes chapter 3, we have "a time to be born, a time to die, a time to mourn, a time to dance." There is a season of suffering, in other words, that comes into all our lives. But then chapter 3, verse 11, "He has made everything beautiful in its time. Also, he has put eternity into man’s heart, yet so that he cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end." That, I think, is the most incredible verse in the whole book. Everybody thinks of "meaningless, meaningless, vanity, vanities," but that verse is the most incredible verse, to think that God has made everything beautiful in its time. And I shudder at that. How can some things—Gaza, 9/11, Northern Ireland (where I grew up)—take your pick at what’s unfolding in the world. How on earth can it be beautiful? And the answer is, of course, it’s not beautiful to us, but it’s not beautiful to us because we don’t see it in its time. God is the one controlling all the times of the universe. My suffering, your suffering at this particular moment is no more meaningful or beautiful than opening Lord of the Rings halfway through and reading one particular sentence and saying, "This doesn’t make sense." It doesn’t make sense on its own there in that moment, but the whole story put together is beautiful. And I think that’s probably, ultimately, the most ultimate help in suffering, that my suffering is one moment in this unfolding story that has God taking care of sin, dealing with it once and for all in the death and resurrection of Christ his Son, the promise of a new world to come. Then we will see everything beautiful in its time.

33:30 - Living Life Backward

Matt Tully
You titled this book Walking Through the Book of Ecclesiastes: Living Life Backward. I wonder if you could just, as a final question, help us understand what you’re getting at with that title.

David Gibson
I need to say what Crossway is getting out of that title. The funny thing with that title, Matt, is that I didn’t like it. I didn’t want it. The book was called, in the United Kingdom, Destiny: Learning to Live by Preparing to Die. And you guys, folks at Crossway, are brilliant at titling books, and that title came back to me and I fought it and said no. And Crossway said, "No, trust us. It really is the right one." And I now agree completely. It’s an excellent distillation of the message of Ecclesiastes. And so the reason for it, I think, is this: we live life forwards, don’t we? That’s the normal thing. I sat on my calendar, and this morning my wife said, "What’s happening this week? What are we doing this evening?" The kids say what they’re doing. We’re plotting our life forward all the time. And if you just carry on like that, you just plot your life forward all the time and then bang, you’re dead. In some way, death comes. Ecclesiastes says how about we switch that around? Start with death, the fact that one day you’re going to die. That’s definitely coming. It really, really will happen. If you believe it and start to take that on board now, live backwards from that point. It’s the thing I mentioned earlier. Imagine the terminal diagnosis. You’ve got six months left to live. You’re going to live backwards from that. That cold, hard reality is going to shape everything you do in the next six months. And so Ecclesiastes says, "Well, I don’t know whether it’s six months or six years or sixteen years, but it’s coming. So take that point and work backwards into your life, and you’ll find that you live completely differently."

35:15 - The Meaning of Mirth

Matt Tully
And to be fair to you, even if we insisted on that title, we got that from your introduction where you talk about our tendency to live life forward, to want to live life forward, and yet the need to actually think backwards. Maybe actually as a final question, one other quick quote from the book. You say this perspective, starting with death and the end, "can teach us the meaning of mirth." I wonder if you could just close us with explaining what you mean by that.

David Gibson
Don’t you think that some of the most interesting people you’ve ever met, or some of the most delightful people to be around, are the people who don’t take themselves so seriously? In my work, I’ve had the privilege of meeting some really powerful people. I’ve met some incredibly powerful people—powerful in the world’s terms, in terms of politics, money, influence, capability. The world-at-their-feet kind of people. And there are some of those people that you just—I anyway—just didn’t really want to be around too long. These are big hitters, and, boy, do they know they’re big hitters in the world. But you see when you meet a person with immense power and immense reach and they just are so self-deprecating and they don’t take themselves seriously. They put you at ease. It is tremendous fun to be around people like that. So people who don’t take themselves seriously know how to laugh at themselves. When you realize you are a mist and that you’re only here for a short time and that the future of the world does not depend on the David Gibson project and my legacy. I’m a pastor, and I could go under a bus tomorrow and Trinity Church in Aberdeen will carry on just fine, because it’s God’s church not mine. You become someone who just relaxes and lets go of needing to be in charge of everything, needing to be in control of everything. And that’s the message of Ecclesiastes. Chapter 9: go enjoy your life with your wife, whom you love. Open a bottle of wine. Look after your body. Dress well. Eat well. Enjoy your work. That comes from death. It’s knowing that you’re going to die that teaches you how to laugh at yourself, how to not take yourself too seriously, how to enjoy the good things in life. That’s where I think the mirth comes from. I think that’s what it means.

Matt Tully
David, thank you so much for helping us take a book that I think can sometimes fill us with a little bit of anxiety, can feel unsettling to us and confusing, and hopefully helping each of us to understand a little bit better the freedom, the relief even, that comes from understanding not just who we are but ultimately who God is. We appreciate it.

David Gibson
You’re very welcome. It’s been a real pleasure. Lovely. Thank you.

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