Human beings are terrible at being satisfied.
We want something. We convince ourselves we need it. We work for it, buy it, win it, marry it, build it, earn it or achieve it. For a little while, we’re happy.
Then we want something else.
Amazon Prime may be the greatest scientific proof of original sin ever devised.
The writer of Ecclesiastes understood the problem thousands of years ago. He describes pursuing wealth, knowledge, pleasure, property, accomplishment and power. He got the things people spend their lives chasing and reached a rather depressing conclusion:
“Vanity of vanities… all is vanity.”
The Hebrew word hevel is better understood as vapor. These things aren’t necessarily bad. They’re simply temporary. Worse, we keep expecting temporary things to provide permanent satisfaction.
Augustine wasn’t always a Saint… he ran the experiment centuries later. Sex, education, ambition, philosophy, career, prestige. Still restless.
His conclusion:
“Our heart is restless until it rests in You.”
Then Leo Tolstoy tried it again. Wealthy aristocrat. Army officer. Estate owner. Husband. Father of thirteen. International fame. The man wrote War and Peace and Anna Karenina. If success could provide lasting satisfaction, Tolstoy should have been drowning in it.
Instead, he found himself wondering what any of it meant if he was simply going to die.
Three men. Three civilizations. Same experiment.
Maybe we’re pursuing the wrong thing.
Happiness Isn’t Peace
We chase happiness. Christianity promises something different.
Jesus says in John 14:27:
“Peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you: not as the world giveth…”
The Greek word is eirēnē: peace, harmony, wholeness.
Christ didn’t promise permanent happiness. He promised peace.
There’s an enormous difference.
Happiness depends upon what happens. Peace can survive what happens.
You can grieve and have peace. Lose and have peace. Be afraid and still have peace. You can stand in circumstances you desperately wish were different and somehow remain whole.
Which brings us to perhaps the real problem with the human condition.
Every Sunday millions of Christians pray:
“Thy will be done.”
Then we spend the rest of the week demanding:
My will be done.
I want this job. This relationship. This amount of money. My children to make these choices. My health restored. My plans to work. My life to unfold according to the PowerPoint presentation I’ve prepared for God.
And when reality refuses to cooperate, we wonder why we have no peace.
Maybe that’s because peace and control aren’t the same thing.
There’s an old theological idea that hell can be understood as an appetite that can never be satisfied.
That’s frightening because it sounds familiar.
More money. More pleasure. More recognition. More possessions. More control.
More.
The appetite survives every meal.
Perhaps our desires aren’t too large. Perhaps we keep trying to satisfy them with things too small.
Money isn’t God. Neither is sex, career, reputation, politics, family, land, trophies or another rifle —although I’ve conducted considerable independent research on that last possibility.
They’re not necessarily bad things.
They’re just terrible gods, aka idols.
And maybe that’s why Christ’s prayer in Gethsemane matters so much:
“Not my will, but thine, be done.”
That prayer didn’t lead to happiness.
It led to the Cross.
Christianity therefore makes a much harder claim than “follow God and you’ll be happy.”
It says something closer to this:
Follow God and you can have peace even when you aren’t happy.
Ecclesiastes discovered possessions couldn’t provide it. Augustine discovered pleasure and intellect couldn’t provide it. Tolstoy discovered achievement and fame couldn’t provide it.
Thousands of years. Same experiment. Same result.
We keep asking the world to give us something it doesn’t possess.
Maybe peace doesn’t come when God finally gives us everything we want.
Maybe peace comes when we finally stop demanding that He does.
Thy will be done.
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