Ecclesiastes & the Quest for Elusive Happiness: Why Everything is Never Enough

C.S. Lewis once said, “I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen; not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.”

Ecclesiastes is a book about the darkness and despair of life “under the sun”.

One commentator called Ecclesiastes “the strangest book” of the entire Bible. Ecclesiastes is the dark contrast to the light of God’s revelation. The book reveals to you exactly the depth of despair and precisely the kind of meaninglessness which is attached to living life only “under the sun”.

Life under the sun — if that is your only horizon in life — will be ultimately full of meaninglessness and vanity. As Peter Kreft argues, Ecclesiastes is a “revelation of darkness rather than by light”.

The thematic structure of Ecclesiastes is helpfully discussed here (sermon hand-out on Sunday) and visualized below as a three-story home, with a shout-out to the creativity of Kristian Eikevik for the visual and Bobby Jamieson’s “Everything is Never Enough: Ecclesiastes’ Surprising Path to Resilient Happiness” for (some of) the basic nuts and bolts of the idea.