How can you be happy? Who can show you the path to happiness? Pastor Bobby Jamieson shatters our illusions of what will make us happy and blazes a surprisingly simple trail to resilient joy. “Bobby Jamieson brings an ancient text to bear on the challenge of living fully. The result is fresh, direct, and enlivening.”--Matthew B. Crawford, Does it feel like you should be happy, and want to be happy, and try to be happy, but somehow you just can’t be happy? One way to be unhappy is not getting what you most want. Another way is to get all you could possibly want…only to discover that everything is not enough. The writer of Ecclesiastes did it all. He had money, education, possessions, sex, and power--everything the modern world promises will bring joy--and yet he was never satisfied. And from his discontent, we benefit and find a surprisingly simple trail to lasting joy. In this thoughtful exploration of Ecclesiastes, which speaks to all of us who feel restless and unfulfilled, Pastor Bobby Jamieson: • teaches us how placing life on an eternal horizon empowers us to experience joy no matter our circumstances • puts Ecclesiastes into dialogue with profoundly insightful critics of modernity to show that life in the modern West is a conveyor belt toward burnout • helps us dismantle our false hopes one by one, clearing ground for true satisfaction Poetic yet straightforward, philosophical yet accessible, <Everything Is Never Enough <frees us to stop grasping at broken promises and start receiving life as a gift of God’s grace.

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Bobby Jamieson is a widely respected pastor, scholar, and award-winning author. Originally from San Francisco, Bobby began a career as a jazz saxophonist before redirecting into pastoral ministry. He has degrees from the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and a PhD from the University of Cambridge, where he taught Greek and New Testament. Bobby served as an associate pastor of Capitol Hill Baptist Church in Washington, D.C., before moving with his wife and their four kids to plant a church in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

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**WINNER OF THE CHRISTIANITY TODAY BOOK AWARD AND THE GOSPEL COALITION BOOK AWARD • How can you be happy? Who can show you the path to happiness? Pastor Bobby Jamieson shatters our illusions of what will make us happy and blazes a surprisingly simple trail to resilient joy.

“Bobby Jamieson brings an ancient text to bear on the challenge of living fully. The result is fresh, direct, and enlivening.”—Matthew B. Crawford, New York Times bestselling author of Shop Class as Soul Craft**

Does it feel like you should be happy, and want to be happy, and try to be happy, but somehow you just can’t be happy? One way to be unhappy is not getting what you most want. Another way is to get all you could possibly want…only to discover that everything is not enough.

The writer of Ecclesiastes did it all. He had money, education, possessions, sex, and power—everything the modern world promises will bring joy—and yet he was never satisfied. And from his discontent, we benefit and find a surprisingly simple trail to lasting joy.

In this thoughtful exploration of Ecclesiastes, which speaks to all of us who feel restless and unfulfilled, Pastor Bobby Jamieson:

• teaches us how placing life on an eternal horizon empowers us to experience joy no matter our circumstances
• puts Ecclesiastes into dialogue with profoundly insightful critics of modernity to show that life in the modern West is a conveyor belt toward burnout
• helps us dismantle our false hopes one by one, clearing ground for true satisfaction

Poetic yet straightforward, philosophical yet accessible, Everything Is Never Enough frees us to stop grasping at broken promises and start receiving life as a gift of God’s grace.

Leseprobe
1

Hevel (I): Uncontrollable

“For my next trick,” says Qohelet, “I have put the world into a book.” And when you open the book, you see something dark and glittering, an orderly mess. Tokens and totems of memory you thought you had erased. Documentation of loss you have not yet suffered.

Will you lean in or look away? Will you meet Qohelet’s stare?

Qohelet’s book is the bittersweet harvest of observation and experience. He stakes his credibility on the breadth of his program of inquiry into the nature and effects of mortality, entropy, heartbreak, violence, and failure. Our researcher learned all their bitter lessons by heart. He says, “I applied my heart to seek and to search out by wisdom all that is done under heaven. . . . I have seen everything that is done under the sun.” Later he reiterates, “I turned my heart to know and to search out and to seek wisdom and the scheme of things, and to know the wickedness of folly and the foolishness that is madness.” Twenty-seven times he tells us that he saw; the objects of his sight include “everything,” “all the oppressions that are done under the sun,” that “the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong,” and that “folly is set in many high places.”

Qohelet does not merely observe the full sweep of human life; he passes judgment on it, most often with a single word: hevel. This one-word verdict opens the book and closes its body, bracketing the whole. This word punctuates Qohelet’s reflections as a tolling refrain. The problem is that the book’s most important word is also its most difficult to translate. You might recognize the King James Version’s rendering of the opening thesis, “Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity.”

The most concrete sense of hevel is “breath, air, vapor.” Because exhaled breath is weightless and apt to vanish, other Old Testament writers often use hevel metaphorically, to characterize something as insubstantial, ineffective, or worthless. For ancient Israel, a political alliance with Egypt would be hevel, offering empty help. When a sage contrasts female piety and beauty, the latter is hevel because it is superficial and fleeting. The theological reasonings of Job’s friends are hevel because they miss their mark. Human life is hevel since, like breath, it quickly disappears. A new car is hevel since the moment you drive it off the lot it starts losing value. Beauty is hevel since age never subtracts wrinkles; it only adds them.

Ecclesiastes uses hevel in all these senses and more. And throughout the book Qohelet custom molds hevel. He presses the word into a new shape, rendering it a fitting term of art to deliver his pitiless verdict on all of life. You could translate Qohelet’s opening thesis in half a dozen ways, each granting some purchase on his point, none exhausting it:

“Meaningless! Meaningless!” says the Teacher. “Utterly meaningless! Everything is meaningless.”

“Perfectly pointless,” says the Teacher. “Perfectly pointless. Everything is pointless.”

“Absolute futility,” says the Teacher. “Absolute futility. Everything is futile.”

“Utterly enigmatic,” says Qohelet. “Utterly enigmatic. Everything is enigmatic.”

“Complete hot air!” says Qohelet, “Complete hot air! It’s all hot air!”

Utterly absurd, said Qohelet, utterly absurd. All is absurd.

Meaningless, pointless, futile, enigmatic, hot air, absurd. We will meet all these nuances and others in the following chapters, as Qohelet delivers blow after blow to our sense of what’s worth living for. Here in this chapter, we will treat one aspect of hevel as a key that op…