This is a lesson I prepared for a Sunday School class series on Ecclesiastes in the Spring of 2025. The lessons are meant to be a mix of teaching and interactive discussion in the group. This is an outline of my presentation that guided the teaching and discussion. It was adapted from the Gospel-centered life in the Bible Series – Ecclesiastes: Life in the Light of Eternity.
View Ecclesiastes Lesson Series
Ecclesiastes 1:12-2:26
Big Idea
“The more we try to find lasting satisfaction in the many offerings of happiness in this world, the more we find we instead need to look somewhere else entirely.”
Just as the Preacher is teaching us that “all is vanity,” so too is the ability to fully explore all that is in this section!
1:12-18 & 2:12-17 Wise living is better than being foolish, but still vanity.
2:1-11 Vanity of indulging in pleasures, acquiring possessions, and achieving success.
2:18-26 Hard work going for nothing
C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity
“If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world. If none of my earthly pleasures satisfy it, that does not prove that the universe is a fraud. Probably earthly pleasures were never meant to satisfy it, but only to arouse it, to suggest the real thing. If that is so, I must take care, on the one hand, never to despise, or be unthankful for, these earthly blessings, and on the other, never to mistake them for the something else of which they are only a copy, or echo, or mirage. I must keep alive in myself the desire for my true country, which I shall not find until after death.”
How to Be Happy
The Preacher explores three truths about life which inform what he learns about happiness.
Life is Always Short
Ecclesiastes 2:3
I searched with my heart how to cheer my body with wine—my heart still guiding me with wisdom—and how to lay hold on folly, till I might see what was good for the children of man to do under heaven during the few days of their life. (ESV)
The vanity nature of life is that like your breath in a frosty morning, so too the life we have been given is short. It takes wisdom to know this, for we spend a lot of our lives assuming we will live forever or that death is a long way off.
When we’re young, we think old age will never come to us.
When we’re old, we can’t believe how quickly we lost our youth.
How does the shortness of life impact your understanding and value of your present state of happiness?
Life is Usually Elusive
Ecclesiastes 2:11
Then I considered all that my hands had done and the toil I had expended in doing it, and behold, all was vanity and a striving after wind, and there was nothing to be gained under the sun. (ESV)
The Preacher discovered not just that life is short, but that what it seems to offer eludes your grasp. Someone has said that we do not know that we are happy, only that we were.
Happiness doesn’t last when you get to it, because when you find the thing you’ve been working for and longing for – when you actually have it in your hands – you discover that it’s not everything you hoped it would be. You’re often disappointed.
Psychologists talk about the “progress principle,” which is that we find more pleasure in working toward a goal than we experience when we actually attain it.
How do your see the elusiveness of happiness in your own life?
Life is Often Unjust
Ecclesiastes 2:18–19
I hated all my toil in which I toil under the sun, seeing that I must leave it to the man who will come after me, and who knows whether he will be wise or a fool? Yet he will be master of all for which I toiled and used my wisdom under the sun. This also is vanity. (ESV)
But it’s not just that happiness doesn’t last because of life’s brevity and life’s elusiveness. Happiness also doesn’t last because we cannot control its presence in our future. We spend a lot of time and energy seeking to find happiness through controlling our environment and the things around us. We grasp for what we think will make us happy.
The same fate overtakes both the wise and the fool, both believers and unbelievers. We all die, and our lives are so short and what we achieve doesn’t seem to last.
What are some ways that we try to control the presence of happiness in our lives?
Under the Sun
Look these verses with me
1:14; 2:11; 2:17; 2:18; 2:19; 2:20; 2:22
The “days under the sun” refer to these days of temporal existence, the whole of human history from the beginning of time until the end of time.
But these time-bound days of brief human existence are not the only kind of days there will be. On the other side of time is God and eternity.
As Lewis says, “I must keep alive in myself the desire for my true country, which I shall not find until after death.”