“I have no understanding of a long-faced Christian. If God is anything, he must be joy.” —Comedian Joe E. Brown

One day when my children were small, I was dusting the furniture in my living room. Music was playing, Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony I recall, and I began to move to the music as I worked. The more I worked and listened, the more vigorously and flamboyantly I danced. Thinking no one could see, I leaped and twirled through the room without embarrassment. Perhaps I should have been embarrassed, since I’ve been told I look a little like a bear on roller skates when I dance. But I was having fun. Gradually I became aware of eyes looking at me—very little eyes. My four-year-old son was hiding behind the sofa watching his daddy dance. He was beaming with delight. No one else was watching, so I invited him to join me in the dance. Around the room we danced a rough and tumble ballet. We leaped over chairs, ran across the coffee table, jumped up and down on the sofa—something he would normally be punished for doing! We shouted and giggled and sang made-up arias in unknown languages. I finally had to sit down, exhausted. But he continued. I began to applaud his dance. I wish you could have seen the look of unabashed pleasure and joy on his face as he danced to his Daddy’s applause. He was acting as a true child of his father, receiving and giving pleasure as he danced with me and for me. He honored me with his joyful imitation.

Our dance is a picture of the Christian life. Joy is what you experience when you are grateful for the grace that has been given you. And yet this definition is incomplete if we do not understand that at its deepest, joy is delight in God—for and with God, not unlike the dance I had with my son. Failure to understand this constitutes a real joy buster: a shrunken, joyless and unbiblical view of God. For greater than the many graces God gives is God himself. God is grace, he is love. Greater than the gifts is the Giver of the gifts. To delight in God is to see something of the excellence and beauty, the goodness and grace of God—the splendor of his “Godness”—and to exult gratefully in the sight. God is, after all, the greatest thing going on in the universe; it only follows that to behold him in even the tiniest way is to be delighted.

Devout Christians have sometimes missed this. How ironic, that some of God’s most ardent supporters can be the least joyful. In her autobiography, Helen Glasgow spoke of her religious father as a man of rigid rectitude: “He was entirely unselfish, and in his long life he never committed a pleasure.” Apparently Martin Luther’s good friend, Philip Melancthon, was the same way. He was so scrupulously attentive to every moral jot and tittle, that Luther thought he was missing out on the grace and mercy of God. Exasperated, he one day exclaimed, “Philip, would you just go out and sin a little bit? God deserves to be able to forgive you for something.”

Jonathan Edwards was perhaps the greatest theologian and philosopher America has produced. With all of his intellectual rigor and exactitude, he was also one the greatest enjoyers of God in American history. It was for “sweet delight in God” that he gave himself to God. He wrote of his conversion on reading 1 Timothy 1:17 (“Now unto the King eternal, immortal, invisible, the only wise God, be honor and glory forever and ever. Amen.”):

“As I read the words, there came into my soul, and was as it were, diffused through it, a sense of the glory of the Divine Being; a new sense, quite different from anything I ever experienced before. Never had any words of Scripture seemed to me as these did. I thought with myself, how excellent a Being that was, and how happy I should be, if I might enjoy that God, and be rapt up to Him in Heaven, and be, as it were, swallowed up in Him forever” (italics added).¹

Delight in a Delightful and Delighted God

Edwards believed he would be happy if swallowed up in God because he believed God was happy—very, very happy, actually. Two other passages also speak of God’s happiness. 1 Timothy 1:11 calls him “the blessed God.” 1 Timothy 6:15–16 describes him as “. . . God, the blessed and only Ruler, the King of kings and the Lord of lords, who alone is immortal . . .” (NIV). One Bible translation renders “blessed” as “blissful,” or “God, the blissful God.” The Greek word for “blessed” or “blissful” is a word that described the bliss of the gods, the rich, powerful and self-sufficient who have whatever they want. At its deepest, joy is delight in a delightful and delighted God.

What delights God? What are the joys of this joyful God? First, God is delighted with what he creates. The Bible says that when he creates things, angels and even stars get happy. Their joy is his accompaniment, for when he made the heavens and the earth, “the morning stars sang together and all the heavenly beings shouted for joy” (Job 38:7). He gets happy over what he makes too. His joyful enthusiasm in creating fairly bursts through the lines of Psalm 104, the great song of creation. It is as though he dresses up for the occasion, wrapping himself, “in light as with a garment” (verse 2) before he “stretches out the heavens like a tent” (verse 3). His mood is playful as he “makes the clouds his chariot and rides on the wings of the wind.” The creation of the world is a sovereignly earnest, brilliantly rollicking project for the Almighty, as he makes this and then that, and waters flow, seasons change, grass grows, crops spring up, wine gladdens, bread satisfies, birds nest, lions roar, and the sea teems with creatures. What fun it all must be for the Lord! So the psalmist exults, “May the glory of the Lord endure forever; may the Lord rejoice in his works” (verse 31). Indeed, he does rejoice, for joy belongs to the very character of God. This is the way God is; he is joy, he is the God of joy.

The Bible says that when he finished his work of creation, he was so happy with it that he pronounced it, not just good, but “very good” (Genesis 1:31, italics added). Then he rested, which isn’t to say he took a nap because he was exhausted from his efforts. The sense of rest in the Hebrew is that he sat back and savored his work. To savor anything is to do a joyful thing. God thinks so highly of this joyful act that he even commanded that we savor it too (Genesis 2:1–3; Exodus 20:8–11).

The Extravagant Gesture

As God rested, he surely savored the extravagant immensity of space and all its wonders, as we humans are only beginning to do.

In August 1989 the unmanned spacecraft, Voyager 2, hurtled over the polar cap of Neptune as it sailed 2.8 billion miles out to the edge of our solar system. In a scientific feat that was termed the cosmic equivalent of sinking a 2,260-mile putt, it transmitted to scientists at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, astonishing photographs of a strange and stormy world—a planet covered by a thick haze of helium and hydrogen, with 1,500 mile-per-hour winds pushing great frozen clouds of methane across its surface. Discovered in its southern hemisphere was a tremendous storm system, a continuing counter-cyclone that is as big across as the earth. Traveling at speeds in excess of 60,000 miles per hour, it took Voyager 2 twelve years just to get to the outer rim of our solar system. Long after it has ceased to send signals back to Earth, it will still be traveling through empty space. In the year 40,176 it will likely pass within 1.7 light years of the star Ross 248, and in the year 296,036, will perhaps come within 4.3 light years of the star Sirius. Writer Annie Dillard is right: “If the landscape reveals one certainty, it is that the extravagant gesture is the very stuff of creation.”² Only a happy God acts with that kind of extravagance.

What God delights in can sometimes fill us with dread. The 17th-century scientist Blaise Pascal described the universe as so immense that its center is nowhere, its circumference everywhere. “The eternal silence of these infinite spaces fills me with dread,” he wrote. Why all that space? Why such incomprehensible distances? What’s Neptune for? Or a Ross 248? Why does God do such things? Simply because it is his sovereign, gracious and creative pleasure to do it. Or why all those species of birds—more than 9,000? Or all those insects? Or fish? Same reason. The Bible commands that we rejoice in this joyful God, and as we do, to “tremble before him, all the earth” (Psalm 96:9, italics added).

Joyful in Himself

So God delights in what he creates. He also simply delights in himself. The Bible says he has no needs, no holes in his soul to be filled by another. “I have no need of a bull from your stall or of goats from your pens, for every animal of the forest is mine, and the cattle on a thousand hills” (Psalm 50:9–10, NIV). The ancient Hebrews answered the mockery of the neighbors with, “Our God is in the heavens; he does whatever he pleases” (Psalm 115:3). Paul set Athenian idolaters straight: “The God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in temples built by hands. And he is not served by human hands, as if he needed anything, because he himself gives all men life and breath and everything else” (Acts 17:24–25, NIV). Whatever else a God like that may be, he must be happy.

Holy and Happy Trinity

But his joy in himself goes deeper that self-sufficiency. Here we tread on a mystery, but what a joyful mystery it is. What could more deeply satisfy an infinite Being, than another infinite Being? Who could that possibly be? Better stated, who could they possibly be? Father, Son and Holy Spirit. The Trinity. The Three in One, the Three as One, the One in Three. No one can adequately explain how such a Being can be, but C. S. Lewis’s attempt is as good as any:

“Perhaps the most important difference between Christianity and all other religions [is] that in Christianity God is not a static thing . . . but a dynamic, pulsating activity, a life, almost a kind of drama. Almost, if you don’t think me irreverent, a kind of dance. The union between the Father and the Son is such a live, concrete thing that this union itself is also a Person. I know that’s almost inconceivable, but look at it this way. You know that among human beings, when they get together in a family, or a club, or a trades union, people talk about the ‘spirit’ of that family, or club, or trades union. They talk about its ‘spirit’ because the individual members, when they’re together, do really develop particular ways of talking and behaving which they wouldn’t have if they were apart. It is as if a sort of communal personality came into existence. Of course it isn’t a real person: it is only like a person. But that’s just one of the differences between God and us. What grows out of the joint life of the Father and the Son is a real Person, is in fact the Third of three Persons who are God.”³

The dance of life within the Godhead is the joyful communion of Father, Son and Holy Spirit. The God who is love is, in himself, a community of love—and joy.

Let me give but one illustration of this out of many in the life of Christ. At the critical moment of his life, Jesus prayed, “Father, the hour has come; glorify your Son, that your Son may glorify you” (John 17:1). To glorify is not exactly synonymous with rejoice, but it is very near. Only one who delights in another gives glory to the other. A picture of my wife and children is sitting beside my word processor as I type this manuscript. Their faces and the memories they bring fill me with such joy and pride that I want their images beside me as I do my work. When I pray at my desk each morning, their faces are in my peripheral vision. If you were to come into my study, I would hold their picture up and tell you about each one. My joy in them is not the same as the pride I take in them, but the two are inseparable. So what is the first thing Jesus prays as he approaches the cross? He asks that the Father whom the Son loves be celebrated, and the Son be celebrated by the Father who loves him. Even in death, God is glad to be God, loves to be God, is delighted to be God.

Joyful in Us

God is happy with what he does, joyful in himself, and he is delighted to make his creatures the same way—in him. The Bible encourages us to think of God as a bridegroom. He told Israel, “. . . as a bridegroom rejoices over the bride, so shall your God rejoice over you” (Isaiah 62:5). In my vocation as a pastor, I have stood many times with a bridegroom as he waited for his bride to appear at the back of the sanctuary. So this image of God both delights and amazes me. Since all eyes in the congregation are on the bride as she walks down the aisle, most people aren’t aware of the look on the groom’s face. I like to peek at him while he and everyone else is focused on the bride. I usually see in his face a lovely mixture of longing, passion, and tenderness tinged with terror. This Adam is so in love, so thrilled to be joined to his Eve. Is that a little bit how God is toward us, really? He says it is, in the Bible.

In Jesus’ famous parable of the prodigal son, we see God not only as a loving father, but also as the perfect host. When the foolish boy comes home after a season of waste and debauchery, what does he find his dad to be? The judge, the lecturer in ethics? None of these! He is the magnanimous, cordial host, the gracious maitre de, proposing toasts, filling the glasses of his guests, hovering over the kitchen help to be sure the food is just right, the roast cooked to perfection, the salad crisp and colorful. And when the elder brother refuses to come inside and celebrate, he goes outside to beg him to come in. He says, “But we had to celebrate . . .” (See Luke 15:11–32). Jesus said God is like that! He’s one who says, “We have to celebrate. It’s a necessity, not an option.”

He Will Have a Party

Perhaps the greatest demonstration of God’s gracious love, and his determination that we know joy, is his humility. He humbles himself to coax those who need him most, but seek him least, to come to him and be satisfied. In one of his parables of the Kingdom of God, Jesus likens God to a king who sends out invitations to a great feast. Excuse after excuse comes back with every RSVP. No one will come, an unthinkable snub of one so majestic. What then does the king do? He humbles himself and tells his servants to go out in the alleys of the city and the country lanes and “urge anyone you find to come, so that the house will be full” (Luke 14:15–24, New Living Translation). He will have a party!

C. S. Lewis was thinking of this parable when he wrote of his conversion. Looking back on the struggle that led to this event, he described himself as “perhaps . . . the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England. I did not then see what is now the most shining and obvious thing; the Divine humility which will accept a convert even on such terms. The Prodigal Son at least walked home on his own feet. But who can duly adore the love which will open the high gates to a prodigal who is brought in kicking, struggling, resentful, and darting his eyes in every direction for a chance of escape?”⁴

Those lines are taken from his autobiography, which he entitled, significantly, Surprised by Joy. But they are based on Jesus’ description of God’s joy, found only in the Bible.

The Bible also says God is appalled when people go looking for joy in the wrong places. He complains about his people’s penchant for virtual joys: “‘Has a nation ever changed its gods? (Yet they are not gods at all.) But my people have exchanged their Glory for worthless idols. Be appalled at this, O heavens, and shudder with great horror,’ declares the Lord. ‘My people have committed two sins: They have forsaken me, the spring of living water, and have dug their own cisterns, broken cisterns that cannot hold water’” (Jeremiah 2:11, 12, NIV). They have preferred things like mere drink, sex and ambition to infinite joy! So God laments his people’s obtuseness: “. . .if you would but listen to me, O Israel! . . . Open wide your mouth and I will fill it. . . . If my people would but listen to me, . . . you would be fed with the finest of wheat; with honey from the rock I would satisfy you” (Psalm 81:8, 10, 13, 16, NIV). Though infinite in his understanding, God just doesn’t get it—how could anyone refuse such joyous generosity?

Kindling for Joy

I’ve been going out of my way to point out that all I’ve said about the God of joy is found in the Bible. If the phrase, “The Bible says,” and others like it have seemed a little monotonous, it’s been a deliberate monotony. We must not miss the critical truth that the only place we can discover that God is a God of joy is in the Bible. If it is true, as the Westminster Shorter Catechism teaches, that the chief end of humankind is to glorify God and enjoy him forever, then the chief way to glorify God is certainly to enjoy him! The Bible is to this delight what kindling is to a fire, for the Bible alone shows us who God is, what he is like, his character and his mighty deeds. How can one delight in God without the knowledge of God? How can joyful gratitude follow grace if the grace is not known? Ignorance of the God of joy revealed in the Holy Scriptures is a great enemy of the joy of God in a believer.

To meditate on the God of the Bible is to kindle joy with the tinder of Scripture. To behold the God of joy is to become joyful. George Mueller believed this. He thought the best thing he could do each day was to get his soul “happy in the Lord” by reading the Word of God. He believed this to be better than all the service he might render God, because it was, in fact, foundational to all the service he might give God:

“I saw more clearly than ever, that the first great and primary business to which I ought to attend every day was to have my soul happy in the Lord. The first thing to be concerned about was not how much I might serve the Lord, how I might glorify the Lord; but how I might get my soul into a happy state, and how my inner man may be nourished. . . . I saw that the most important thing I had to do was to give myself to the reading of the Word of God and to meditation on it. . . .

“How different when the soul is refreshed and made happy early in the morning, from what it is when, without spiritual preparation, the service, the trials and the temptations of the day come upon one!”⁵

Read the Bible this way. Open it as if it you believed everything in it were true. Meditate on Scripture expectantly, as though you believed you would find in it the very thoughts of the God at whose right hand are eternal pleasures (Psalm 16:11). Take daily draughts from God’s book as if his river of delights were to be found in it (Psalm 36:8).

Don’t Kill Joy with mere joys

Joy is found in a person, not a thing. At its deepest and truest, it comes from God himself, not the things he does for us or the things we may feel when near him. The good things, the lovely sensations that God gives are like footprints in the snow: to fixate on them is to lose the trail, to miss where they lead—while they melt away and disappear, as all God’s good gifts in this life inevitably will. If the joys do not lead us to Joy, they are worse than useless, they are bitterly disappointing, since they will pass away. To make a joy into Joy will kill the joy.

My life changed when I began to understand this. Whatever the joy or pleasure was, I had operated with the premise, “If this much made me feel this good, then twice as much will make me feel twice as good”—or four times as much, or ten times as much, as the case may be. I can remember the exact day when I began to see things differently. I had been in San Diego for business and was planning to take the train home to Irvine at the end of the day. Two friends picked me up where I had been working downtown and drove me to the train station in Del Mar. Del Mar is a pretty little sea coast town on any day, but that day it was sparkling. The temperature was a perfect 76 degrees, the breeze soft and fragrant off the emerald ocean. Children played in the park, surfers rode the waves, sea gulls glided.

The train was coming in an hour, so we went to a deli and bought lunch: big turkey sandwiches on sourdough bread, corn chips and salsa and a bottle of wine. The food was exquisite that day, the conversation deep and laughter-filled, and as the wine gently enhanced all the good things I was experiencing, the sights, the sounds, and the joys of friendship, I began to feel the smallest irritation that the time for the train was nearing and it would have to end. In the back of my mind I began to calculate what it would mean to postpone my return home, to call my wife and tell her I would be a little late that day, a vague lie implying that I was tied up with more business. I wanted more conversation, more wine, more food, more sunshine and ocean—more joy! If this much made me feel this good, how much better would more make me feel? How much more joy could I extract from the moment by catching a later train home? God have mercy on me for the times I strangled an experience for every last ounce of joy I thought I could get from it, only to find it dead when I was done.

The Joy of God and the Joys of God

But I was coming to understand that the joys of that day were signposts to Joy, to the good and gracious God who gives people “wine to gladden . . . and bread to strengthen the human heart” (Psalm 104:15) —or deli sandwiches and chips and salsa in a Del Mar park! The reason I so loved that day was because it was a little bit like the God who gave it. To try to seize these things and keep them for myself would be to miss him. Then two terrible things would have happened. First, the little joys which couldn’t last anyway would turn bad, and my memory of that day would be tainted with deceit and irresponsibility and gluttony. Second, I would miss the big Joy that can never go bad.

I got on the train, waved goodbye to my buddies and went home. The memory of Del Mar remains fresh and sweet, even after twenty years. And I have since gotten to know the God of joy better than I could have had I worshiped the joys of God.

Joy is a person, not a thing. So Paul in his letter to the Philippians, repeatedly urges them to “rejoice in the Lord” (Philippians 4:4). When he speaks of his own great joy, it has nothing to do with the things he once so exulted in—his pedigree as a quintessential Jew and a Pharisee, his religious purity and zeal. He exults in the Person he wants to know.

Young David, hiding in the hot Judean desert from a murderous Saul, beheld the same joy. But it wasn’t his pleasure that pointed to God, it was his pain! He saw in his physical thirst a deeper longing:

“O God, you are my God, earnestly I seek you; my soul thirsts for you, my body longs for you, in a dry and weary land where there is no water” (Psalm 63:1, NIV).

David knew that greater than the water and food he craved and the life he sought to protect, was the God who gave him life, and made David for himself. Real life was more than bread and water.

The saints and mystics throughout history have known this about God too. Bernard of Clairvaux prayed like David: “From the best bliss that earth imparts, we turn unfilled to you again.” A man as sober as Jonathan Edwards could speak of being “besotted”—drunk!—with God. And even the less saintly and mystical have left picnics in Del Mar at their height and gone home, because God’s love is better than life. Joy is a person, not a thing.

Ben Patterson is chaplain of Westmont College. This article is from his forthcoming book, He Has Made Me Glad: Enjoying God's Goodness with Reckless Abandon, coming to stores in March 2005.

Notes:

¹From a biographical sketch of the life and work of Jonathan Edwards, by Phillip E. Howard, in the introduction to The Life and Diary of David Brainerd, Jonathan Edwards, editor (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Books, 1989), p. 14.

²Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (New York: Harper’s Magazine Press, 1974), p. 9.

³Quoted in Daniel Fuller, The Unity of the Bible (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Zondervan Publishing House, 1992), pp. 123–124.

⁴C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy, (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1955), p. 229.

⁵Quoted by John Piper, Desiring God: Meditations of a Christian Hedonist, Chapter Five, (Portland: Multnomah Press, 1986), pp. 127–129. From Autobiography of George Mueller, compiled by Fred. Bergen, (London: J. Nisbet Co., 1906), pp. 152–54.