Request your free, three-month trial to Tabletalk magazine. You’ll receive the print issue monthly and gain immediate digital access to decades of archives. This trial is risk-free. No credit card required.
Try Tabletalk NowAlready receive Tabletalk magazine every month?
Verify your email address to gain unlimited access.
Western classical music was long built around consonance—notes that fit, harmonies that resolve quickly, and dissonance used only to sweeten the return to stability. But in the last couple of centuries, composers began to push against that order. Some delayed resolution, others stretched tension to the breaking point, and many used unresolved chords to echo the anxiety and injustice of their age.
By the twentieth century, some pieces ended without resolving at all. The music stops, but your ear never gets the final chord it longs for. The result is intentional discomfort—dissonance that hangs in the air.
Life in a post–Genesis 3 world feels much the same. We crave the harmony of Revelation 21 but instead encounter confusion, contradiction, and pain. It’s like living inside a modern symphony where the tension won’t resolve. This makes us restless. We may even wonder whether the divine Composer knows what He’s doing. Contentment feels elusive.
This unresolved tension is not imaginary; it’s the reality of living east of Eden. Yet the God who governs all things has not left us hopeless or helpless. Ecclesiastes meets us in this dissonant world—not to silence the tension but to teach us how to trust Him within it. As we listen to the Preacher, we begin to learn what contentment looks like for people who long for the world to be made new.
understand your context
How would you describe the world? It’s not an easy question. The answer shifts with the day. Some days feel like a major chord; others slide into minor. Life under the sun tastes sweet and bitter in alternating bites—full of joy, full of ache, full of longing for something more.
The Preacher calls this life “under the sun,” and his repeated conclusion is that it’s vanity. He chooses a word that is intentionally difficult to pin down. It’s vapor—there for a moment, then gone. He walks through the world and keeps finding things that don’t quite make sense. He scratches his head, asks hard questions, and admits that life often feels more like a riddle than the kind of story we wish we were living.
Why? Because this isn’t heaven. Something foundational is crooked (Eccl. 1:15). We want the world to carry the full weight of our desires, but it can’t. Ultimately, it’s not home, and it’s not meant to be. So we become restless and weary, longing for somewhere better and something fuller.
The first step toward contentment is simply acknowledging this: The world cannot bear the freight of your deepest needs and desires. It’s too broken for that. And so are the people in it—including us.
That realization leads naturally to the next step: identifying where our discontentment comes from.
identify sources of discontentment
Contentment is a word that we like but rarely define. The English Puritan Jeremiah Burroughs describes it as “an inward, quiet, gracious spirit.” Contentment is not loud, not frantic, not scrambling for the next thing. It is quiet. Steady. Grace-shaped.
And that definition also helps us diagnose discontentment. What disturbs that inward quiet? What makes us restless, anxious, or envious? What conditions provoke grumbling in the heart?
Ecclesiastes, once again, proves to be a faithful companion. The Preacher helps us see the cracks—both around us and within us. He also shows us the reality of our work and mortality.
Once again, the Preacher in Ecclesiastes is a good friend. He tells us the truth and helps us along.
The crooked world around us. Sometimes discontentment grows simply through our looking at the world. Things are not the way that they should be.
Some people spend their lives trying to do what’s right yet face hardship after hardship. Meanwhile, others live wickedly and seem to prosper (8:14). It feels backward.
Suffering runs rampant. Many who suffer do so quietly, without anyone to comfort them (4:1–3). Leaders who are supposed to promote justice sometimes use their authority to harm (5:8). Courtrooms meant to defend the innocent can become places where justice is twisted (3:16).
Life under the sun feels out of tune. The world’s dissonance unsettles us, and we long for resolution. That longing, if left unguarded, breeds discontentment.
The conflicted hearts within us. But the world is not our only problem. There is tension inside us, too. Our desires, motives, and relationships fracture easily.
We know it theologically and experientially: Our hearts are selfish. There is no one who doesn’t sin (7:20). And this isn’t due to some flaw in God’s design; He made humanity upright, but we’ve wandered (v. 29).
That internal bent shows up everywhere. Envy and rivalry motivate far more of life than we’d like to admit (4:4). Fear of failure isolates us. The Preacher imagines a man who works endlessly yet cuts himself off from others, and his isolation deepens his wound (vv. 7–12).
So we work harder. But work doesn’t give us what we want, and we feel the sting of exhaustion layered on top of loneliness. Our own hearts sabotage us. It’s miserable.
The frustrating and fleeting work that we do. Work matters, but it can’t become our identity or our measure of worth. Ecclesiastes reminds us that there is no lasting gain from all our toil (1:2). The harder we try to squeeze meaning from it, the more discouraged we grow (2:18–23).
Even when work leads to financial gain, that gain isn’t a guarantee of joy. In fact, it can introduce new anxieties. Sleep—one of life’s simplest gifts—can slip through our fingers (5:10–12).
Unmet expectations pile up. Disappointments stack. Anxiety grows. This, too, is a picture of discontentment.
The unsettling fragility of life. Running underneath all this is the quiet reminder that our time is limited. The Preacher tells us plainly: Death comes to the wise and the fool alike (2:14–16). We all return to the dust (3:19–20).
As mortality comes into view, we feel pressure. We take stock of what we have done and what we haven’t. We feel the window closing. We try to climb faster. But as we push harder toward achievement, we discover how far off true wisdom still is (7:23–24).
We try to summit the hill of our accomplishments, but the climb drains us. Then we turn around and face the headwind of our mortality, and our souls groan. We discover—again—that contentment rooted in this world is sheer vanity. It cannot hold us.
So what do we do? How do we find contentment in a world of unsatisfied longings?
prize the gift that god gives
In Ecclesiastes, the Preacher shows us how to live in a world with dissonance. He doesn’t remove life’s troubles, but he points us to truth.
What truth? In a world that seems futile, you can find meaning by fearing God and enjoying the gifts He gives.
Count and enjoy your blessings. He gives us the ability to enjoy the little things in life (2:24–26; 3:12–13; 5:18–20; 8:15; 9:7–10). The Preacher doesn’t erase the problems, but he points us to joy in the midst of them.
It’s good to count our blessings. In fact, you should make a list of everything you have that you don’t deserve and then another list of everything you don’t have that you do deserve. When you look at the list of blessings, you’ll be reminded that the Lord has richly blessed you. If you need extra reminders, don’t forget that all have sinned and, on their own, deserve hell. For those of us forgiven and alive in this world, what we encounter is far better than we deserve.
Hear the chorus. But there’s still a nagging question: When will the dissonance end? When will the tension finally be removed?
While the Preacher doesn’t answer this fully, the Apostle Paul does. He tells us that God has subjected all of creation to futility (Rom. 8:20). This is the same vanity that the Preacher highlights. Yet God does this “in hope” that creation one day will be set free from its bondage (vv. 20–21). There is hope. The tension will be removed when God ushers in the new creation in its fullness.
Until then, we long. We groan. But we are not alone. All creation groans (v. 22), and the Holy Spirit intercedes with groanings too deep for words (v. 26). Our longing echoes this groaning creation, forming a kind of chorus that cries out for renewal and redemption.
Wait with hope. This shared longing drives us to wait with patience and trust (vv. 23–25). No matter our circumstances—whether we have little or much—we can endure with contentment because our hope rests in the God who never changes and remains faithful (Phil. 4:11–13).
As we enjoy the small gifts of life while longing for what’s to come, the dissonance lifts just a bit. We lean in closer to listen, anticipating the day when the notes will resolve perfectly. We may not hear the full consonance yet, but we trust the Composer and the promise of our heavenly home.