The Meaning of Ecclesiastes | Bobby Jamieson

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An image of Bobby Jamieson and Kirk E. Miller with design from the show, Logos Live, in the background.

In this Logos Live episode, Kirk E. Miller sits down with pastor, scholar, and author Bobby Jamieson to explore the message and enduring relevance of Ecclesiastes. Drawing from Jamieson’s book Everything Is Never Enough, their conversation delves into the philosophical nature of the text, its famous motif of hevel (“vanity”), and how the conclusions of Ecclesiastes challenge modern assumptions about frustration, fulfillment, and the fear of God.

Whether you’re new to the Ecclesiastes or looking to deepen your understanding, this episode provides rich interpretive insight and practical application.

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What you’ll find

Episode guest: Bobby Jamieson

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, DC, before moving with his wife and their four kids to plant a church in Chapel Hill, NC.

Episode synopsis

What can a skeptical, ancient voice teach us about modern life and the pursuit of happiness?

Bobby Jamieson’s book aims to bring Ecclesiastes into conversation with our modern issues and philosophical concerns, particularly those surrounding meaning, dissatisfaction, and restlessness.

Why Ecclesiastes? Why now?

Bobby and Kirk begin by observing Ecclesiastes’s resonance with contemporary life, especially its unflinching confrontation with dissatisfaction, injustice, and the limits of human achievement.

Bobby was drawn to the book after preaching a series on it and feeling unfinished, compelled to dwell further on the book’s wisdom. He was particularly struck by its “penetrating realism” and ability to speak to the disillusionments and longings of our lives under the sun.

Ecclesiastes as philosophy

One of Bobby’s central claims is that Ecclesiastes functions as the Bible’s only true work of philosophy. This philosophical approach makes Ecclesiastes deeply resonant with modern existentialists like Albert Camus, though ultimately Ecclesiastes will offer a notable alternative to them.

In contrast to narrative or law, Ecclesiastes methodically and relentlessly interrogates this life for what it yields. To do so, Ecclesiastes adopts an empirical mode of inquiry, grounded in lived experience rather than special revelation alone. It asks questions about life, death, meaning, and fulfillment—matters that remain profoundly relevant today.

A 3-part summary of Ecclesiastes

Bobby offers a succinct, three-perspectival summary of Ecclesiastes:

Everything is absurd: Human striving leads to futility and the quest for understanding yields frustration.
Everything is a gift: Life’s joys, though fleeting, are to be gratefully received and relished.
Everything is eternally significant: Life points beyond itself to God, whom we must fear.

This triad captures the tension found in the co-reality of futility and meaning, brokenness and beauty, despair and delight that animate the entire book.

Our 2 options: absurdity or gift

Ecclesiastes involves at least two vantage points:

The view from the ground: Qohelet (the “Preacher”) surveys life empirically and finds it absurd—filled with contradictions, injustice, and unfulfilled longings. This mode dismantles human idols and false hopes.
The view from above: But at several key moments, Qohelet switches to a confessional mode, affirming joy, contentment, and gratitude as right responses to God’s gifts.

This seeming tension is not a contradiction, but two ways to experience the same reality. Life’s pleasures are properly received when treated as gifts to be enjoyed, not gods to be worshiped. When approached as gifts of life, rather than that which itself is life-giving, these earthly pleasures are not experienced as absurdities (“vanity”), but as joys.

And here we find Ecclesiastes pedagogical method: It deconstructs false hopes, leading us down dead ends to direct us towards true joy.

Kirk mentions that the Hebrew word הֶ֫בֶל (hevel), traditionally translated in Ecclesiastes as “vanity,” occurs in other biblical texts meaning “idols.” While Kirk doesn’t argue that Ecclesiastes is explicitly identifying its various hevels as idolatries, the lexical overlap is nonetheless interesting. The book’s deconstruction targets human attempts to find ultimate meaning in finite things—an idolatry of sorts.

Logos Bible Word Study on hevel, emphasizing the gloss, idols.

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The insatiability of the human heart

As such, at the core of Ecclesiastes, Bobby argues, is a rich anthropology of desire: The human heart is inherently insatiable, always yearning for more than the world can possibly provide. “He has made everything beautiful in its time. Also, he has put eternity into man’s heart” (Eccl 3:11). As such, earthly pleasures fail when treated as ultimate goods.

This tension points not only to the world’s limitation but to the Creator, who alone can satisfy. One is reminded of C. S. Lewis’s comment in 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 kind of copy, or echo, or mirage. I must keep alive in myself the desire for my true country, which I shall not find till after death.¹.

The role of work amidst joy

Bobby highlights how Ecclesiastes rehabilitates toil—not as a god or a curse, but as a domain of meaningful and satisfying activity. When received as a “lot” (a portion given and assigned by God), work becomes a gift to be enjoyed, not idolized.

Bobby links this to modern concepts like “flow”—deep absorption in meaningful work—and finds resonance between Ecclesiastes’s viewpoint here and psychological insights about presence, diligence, and contentment.

Ecclesiastes’s relevance for apologetics

Bobby and Kirk agree that Ecclesiastes is an underrated resource for apologetics. Its empirical mode creates common ground with non-believers, and the skeptical tone raises undodgeable questions. Further, its unapologetically stark depiction of human limitations, injustice, and death maps closely onto the modern concerns, making it unusually piercing, even outside of formally religious circles.

Bobby notes that Qohelet functions like a premodern sociologist, observing not only personal experience but also the social structures and systemic injustices of the world. This makes Ecclesiastes an especially potent resource for both pastoral care and cultural analysis.

Fear of God: Ecclesiastes’s final word

The fear of God emerges as a key motif throughout Ecclesiastes. This theme culminates in its final verses:

The end of the matter; all has been heard. Fear God and keep his commandments, for this is the whole duty of man. For God will bring every deed into judgment, with every secret thing, whether good or evil. (Eccl 12:13–14)

This fear is not raw terror but reverent submission—a recognition of God’s sovereignty, his holiness, our finitude, and our accountability to him. For Ecclesiastes, the fear of God is not where the journey begins (as in Proverbs), but where it ends.

Final encouragements

Kirk and Bobby conclude by urging preachers not to shy away from Ecclesiastes. While it’s no doubt a difficult book, it’s also richly rewarding and offers invaluable wisdom for life “under the sun.”