We live life forwards and if you just carry on like that you just plot your life forward all the time and then bang you're dead.

Ecclesiastity says how about we switch that around. Start with death. The fact that one day you're going to die that's definitely coming.

If you believe it and start to take that on board now, live backwards from that point.

Imagine the terminal diagnosis. You've got six months left to live. You're going to live backwards.

David Gibson serves as Minister of Trinity Church in Aberdeen, Scotland, and as 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.

Such a pleasure, Matt. It's lovely to get to chat to you again.

So 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 expected to go. And 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's 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? Yeah, thanks. I think you touch straight away there on really the 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 when, the order that God has put into the world that you see really

clear 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 to the book

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