Destiny: Learning to Live by Preparing to Die
Overview
Only a proper perspective on death provides the true perspective on life. Living in the light of your death will help you to live wisely, freely and generously. It will give you a big heart and open hands, and enable you to relish all the small things of life in deeply profound ways. Death can teach you the meaning of mirth. The author encourages us to take the one thing in the future that is certain—our death—and work backwards 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. It is the destination which makes sense of the journey. If we know for sure where we are heading, then we can know for sure what we need to do before we get there. Learn to find true joy and satisfaction in God’s good gifts, and, in realizing your own smallness, see just how great God is.
Key Features
- Composed of reflections on the book of Ecclesiastes
- Includes questions for personal reflection
- Encourages readers to live wisely in light of our inevitable end
Contents
- Let’s pretend
- Bursting the bubble
- Doing time
- Living a life less upwardly mobile
- Looking up, listening in
- Learning to love the limitations of life
- From death to depth
- Things to know when you don’t know
- One foot in the grave
- Getting the point
Praise for the Print Edition
Recently we worked through Ecclesiastes in our home groups at St George’s, Poynton. Uniformly, people who had hitherto spurned it as ‘too difficult’ found themselves facing a Bible writer who seemed to be asking today’s questions and giving timeless answers. Every reader of David Gibson’s steady and reverent progress through the book will reap the same reward, along with wonderfully enhanced understanding and rich insight into divine truth. Those who have benefited from David’s work in the foundational book From Heaven He Came and Sought Her will rush to enjoy the same values here of profound scholarship and covetable clarity of presentation.
—Alec Motyer, author and Bible expositor
David Gibson’s expositions of Ecclesiastes are like Ecclesiastes itself: sometimes shocking, often tantalizing, always refreshing. He deftly combines serious stuff with a light touch, clear style and gospel relief. You will repeatedly run into ‘think-stoppers’; he will make new grooves in your grey matter that weren’t there before; and you will often admit, ‘I wish I’d have thought to put it like that!’ I think the writer of Ecclesiastes would be pleased with David’s work.
—Dale Ralph Davis, formerly Professor of Old Testament, Reformed Theological Seminary, Jackson, Mississippi
The past two decades have witnessed quite a number of popular expositions of Ecclesiastes—and this one by David Gibson is the best of them. It follows the line of the book in a believable and compellig way. Its applications and reflections are cogent and telling, and the writing is characterized by grace and verve. Moreover, the questions found at the end of each chapter make this volume suitable for small-group Bible studies. Highly recommended.
—D. A. Carson, Research Professor of New Testament, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, Deerfield, Illinois, and President of The Gospel Coalition
Product Details
- Title: Destiny: Learning to Live by Preparing to Die
- Author: David Gibson
- Publisher: IVP
- Publication Date: 2016
- Pages: 176
- Resource Type: Monograph
- Topic: Ecclesiastes