Living Life From The End

“Be Prepared,” I heard our daughter say with a hurried excitement in her voice. “That’s the Scout motto,” she explained as she held up her Scout book for her friend to see through the screen. 

Robert Baden-Powell, an English soldier and founder of Scouting, devised the Scout motto over 100 years ago because he wanted every Scout to be prepared to meet challenges with a strong heart. Being prepared, Baden-Powell explained, is always being in a state of readiness in mind and body to do your duty.

As I listened to our daughter, I pondered: what does it mean for us as Christians to be prepared to meet inevitable challenges with a strong heart, and to be in a state of readiness in mind and body to do our duty to God? 

In this week’s sermon, “Aging, Death and Duty of Humanity,” Pastor Brad taught from Ecclesiastes 11:7-12:8. In these passages, Solomon helps us understand that to be prepared for aging and death, and also for life, we must live from the end. 

My husband and I usually prepare for family events with the end in mind. When we travel, we decide what time we’d like to arrive at our destination and after accounting for pit stops, we know what time we must leave. We plan our holidays this way too. For Thanksgiving, we decided what time we’d like to celebrate and prepared backwards from there to determine when to start cooking and decorating the table. Our preparation from the end helped lessen our stress, enhance our enjoyment of our family and center ourselves for thankfulness.  

Of course this makes sense when we’re talking about planning a road trip or hosting Thanksgiving dinner, but how does it relate to what Solomon teaches in Ecclesiastes? How does living from the end prepare us for life and death?  

Just as we can prepare for trips and holiday celebrations by starting from the end, Solomon encourages us to do the same with our entire lives. The good news for us is that, unlike the often complex planning required to prepare for family events, preparing for the life God’s envisioned for us is simple:  Submit and Surrender. As Pastor Brad explained, we submit to God as our Lord and Creator by surrendering our pleasures, possessions, accomplishments, labor, justice, wisdom, aging and death to Him. 

Ecclesiastes 12:1 provides, “Remember also your Creator in the days of your youth…” The Hebrew word used here for “remember” can be translated, “confess or invoke.”  It means to confess God as Creator and invoke Him by calling on Him and turning to Him.  It is to submit to Him and accept His authority and His will. 

Ecclesiastes was most likely written toward the end of Solomon’s life after his life experiences changed his perspective. It’s remarkable what a changed perspective can do. For some, a changed perspective can be gradual. For others, it can be instantaneous, like trying to see through blinders for years only to have them abruptly removed one day.  That was true for me.  

“You have a 30% chance to live beyond 5 years; your cancer has metastasized throughout your body.” 

In an instant, I was living life from the end. So much simply faded away. Vanished. Meaningless. Blinders removed. Career, house, possessions, “success.” None of it even registered in my mind at that moment. When I started living with 5 years left in mind, it was then that I truly began to live. 

That was 7 years ago. Frankly, the closer I was to the possibility of impending death, the clearer my perspective was. As the Lord has healed me and I continue to move past the 5 year mark, the easier it is for my perspective to become once again blurred with things that don’t truly matter. Somehow the blinders begin to creep back up and distort the “life from the end” perspective that was so crystal clear just a few years back as I sat on the oncologist’s table listening to my dim prognosis reverberate in the room. Submit and Surrender. It’s a continual process for me and maybe it is for you too. It is only then that the blinders seem to fade and my perspective becomes clearer. It is then that peace overwhelms my heart and my mind no matter what my circumstances are. Indeed, surrender breathes life into my sometimes weak body and mind.

Solomon wants his readers to gain perspective from his experiences too. As he teaches, when we get to the end of life, whether it’s after a long life of aging or an illness young in life, we’re no longer looking at life through blinders.  If we’ve lived life from the end, we don’t have to ache with regret and lament that if we’d only known... Some say hindsight is 20/20.  Solomon gives us his 20/20 hindsight which helps us prepare for life by living it from the end so that we can enjoy our lives in reverence of Him.

I’m sure we all want to look back on our lives and feel fulfillment, purpose, peace and joy. How do we prepare for this? How do we live life from the end? Solomon tells us, “Fear God and keep his commandments, for this is the whole duty of man,” (Ecclesiastes 12:13). Apart from enjoying life in the reverence of God as we were created by Him to do, life is indeed meaningless. Indeed, human effort and wisdom is vanity. Of course Solomon isn’t advising his readers to refrain from enjoying life. To the contrary, Solomon has repeatedly recommended that life be enjoyed in the reverence of God. Solomon is advising here that enjoying life without keeping God’s commandments and without humble fear and confession of Him is meaningless. 

As Pastor Brad mentioned in his sermon this week, just as life is starting out, when we are still in our youth, there is much mystery in life. However, as we age, we begin to think we’ve got it all figured out. We rely on our own efforts and our own wisdom. And yet, Solomon anticipates a great mystery of the gospel. It is a mystery that we cannot fully understand: Faith is the way to life (Romans 1:16, 17; Galatians 3:11; Hebrews 10:38). It defies human reason: that God would humble Himself and come to Earth to live, suffer, die and be resurrected so that we can have abundant life both here and forever through our faith in Him. Indeed, faith in Jesus is the way to life.

It’s a beautiful mysterious gift of His grace. 

While Solomon challenges us to be prepared by living from the end so that we can enjoy our lives as God enables and in the fear of Him, Peter challenges us to live with a view towards eternity by urging us to persevere in the faith and resist the fading attractions that often lure us in the present (2 Peter 3:11, 14; 2 Peter 3:17, 18). For not even the joys of today or the trials of this year can compare to what God has prepared for us in eternity.  

Robert Baden-Powell once said, “Be prepared to live happy and to die happy.”  As Christians, being prepared allows us to serve God and enjoy life as we age, regardless of our circumstances. Unlike Scouts, where preparation means hard work to earn ranks and merit badges, our preparation means submitting and surrendering our hearts, minds and actions to our Lord and Creator. And as we do, we live life from the end allowing the Lord to inform our perspective in our dependence on Him. I think this is what it looks like to live in a state of readiness to do the Lord’s will and to meet challenges with a strong heart. And in this way, we can live, age and die, joyfully. 

~ Nicole Bryan