Happiness is an act of faith

Issue #155

What is the chief end of man?

You probably know that it is to glorify God and enjoy him forever.

But we could just as easily reverse this, and say: to enjoy God and glorify him forever.

I think the reason the Westminster divines chose to put glorifying before enjoying is because they wanted to emphasize what we owe to God, over what we receive from him — lest any hint of humanism corrupt their pure doctrine. This is well and good, but the actual order of being is from God to man and then back again; rather than from man to God and then back again. God is always the first mover, so to speak — and so man always receives before he gives.

We can give nothing that we did not first receive.

Indeed, without first receiving our very existence from God, we could not give anything at all!

This is the reciprocal pattern that I talked about last time. There and back again. In and out. One, then the other.

If we put the Westminster Catechism into this reciprocal pattern, then the chief end of man is to enjoy God — that is, to receive God’s goodness — and then to glorify him forever — that is, to return that goodness to him transformed and beautified.

It is the relationship between these two things that I want to think about today. I would like to suggest to you — I think this is what scripture is patterning for us — that it is only in this reciprocal action, of receiving and returning, that true enjoyment, true fulfillment, and true transformation of our own minds and hearts is possible.

This relates back, of course, to how “to be consuming is also to be consumed.” When we take in God’s word with the intention of returning it transformed and beautified, we cannot help but be transformed and beautified in turn. The very process of trying to transform and beautify it will transform and beautify us. When we take it in, not just passively through reading, but actively by praying it, and doing it, it forms us into something more God-like.

The problem of unhappiness

When we’re thinking about consuming God’s word, I think Reformed Christianity especially has tended to theologize this — to treat it as something we just have to do because it is our duty, and it is good for us, like eating brocolli. We should like it, but we often don’t. Yet scripture does not speak this way. God’s word is not a bitter herb in scripture, but sweet honey. And so the Bible has much to say about the happiness of those who consume it.

O the happiness of the man that goeth not in the counsel of the wicked, and in the way of the sinful hath not stood, and in the seat of the scornful hath not sat; but only in the law of Yahweh is his pleasure, and in his law he murmureth by day and night. (Psalm 1:1–3)

This is what I want to particularly focus on today. It is hard to imagine a more pressing topic in the modern day. By every account I have read, we as a society are becoming less and less happy, and it is happening at an extraordinary rate. Anxiety and depression have skyrocketed, especially among women, and especially among young women — and especially since smartphones and social media became normalized. But men, too, are much less happy than they used to be. So this is a topic that the church ought to be searching the scriptures on. As I have been trying to grapple with what “digital piety” looks like — the piety of the digital age, of rightly using smartphones in ways that will not form us into something wicked, or disintegrate or consume us — I can’t help wondering why the whole church has not been doing this for years. Why am I the one saying this stuff?

We should already have a clear theology around this; we should already have straightforward and practical guidance to give.

But we don’t. If you are looking for answers about relieving your anxiety, or alievating your depression, I don’t think your first instinct would be to look for theological answers. It would not be to ask a churchman. It would be to ask your doctor, or to ask Jordan Peterson. These things ought not to be so, but the church has (by and large) avoided ownership of this issue. We have believed that it is too hard for us. We have believed that it is outside our lane. We have gone along with the cult of expertise, where you need a professional qualification to deal with difficult issues.

In fact, we have largely created that cult of expertise through our perversion of the pastorate into a professional job requiring academic credentials, contrary to scripture. The church leads the rest of culture. But that will take me somewhat far afield right now. Suffice to say that, not just in recent times, but for generations, we have handed over what we now call psychology and psychiatry — but scripture would call spiritual disciplines — to secular professionals who believe that a person is just a physical body, and therefore everything we think and feel is just a result of bodily functions and chemical interactions, and so the “cure” (and that is the appropriate word in their minds) should essentially be medical.

Here in New Zealand, we now have one in ten people taking antidepressants, and I don’t even know what the number is for anti-anxiety meds. Let alone for all the people using cannabis and other illegal drugs on the reg — which my wife’s cafe workplace experience suggests is surprisingly high. More importantly, it is also why even Christians have come to think of emotional problems as being the domain of professionals, rather than of pastors, and to seek chemical or sometimes psychological solutions, rather than spiritual ones. I say this, not out of some desire to take over dealing with these problems myself — because I know how much experience and wisdom is required to counsel people who are suffering, and to help them in any appreciable way. I also know how great the danger is of doing terrible harm to people through bad counsel. I am not suggesting that being a pastor automatically makes you know how to “fix” someone’s chronic depression, for instance.

But I do think that scripture contains wisdom sufficient to fully equip us for every good work — because that is what God himself claims (2 Tim 3:16–17). And this must certainly include the good work of learning to be joyful.

The Bible furnishes us with the wisdom required to treat the problem of unhappiness. I don’t mean that scripture is a textbook for counseling. And I don’t mean, either, that it directs us to ignore the role of the body in what we feel and focus exclusively on the heart. Certainly bodily ailments can cause us to be, shall we say, emotionally disregulated; and there may well be certain ailments, which we don’t yet understand well, that especially cause us to feel very down. Scripture tells us quite directly that moods are experienced in the body, so it would be rather surprising if problems with the body did not affect us spiritually. Think of what Jeremiah says:

My anguish, my anguish! I am pained at my very heart (Je 4:19)

But in fact, what he says in the Hebrew is,

My entrails, my entrails! I am pained at the walls of my heart (Je 4:19)

I think the postmillennial future will see a great deal more cooperation and study between experts on the body — which is of course a legitimate field of study in natural revelation — and experts on the spirit — who certainly benefit from natural revelation, but must begin with God’s own words. We will see this cooperation because man is a complete soul: an indivisible composite of both body and spirit. Scripture in many places speaks of how our spiritual attitudes are felt or expressed in the body, and certainly the interplay between the spiritual and the physical should come as no surprise to those of you who follow my work over at True Magic. For instance, I have read one study where they found that,

those who had been remembering emotionally chilly times also literally felt chillier, even though the room’s temperature remained constant during the experiment. People who had recalled feeling ostracized estimated the temperature to be about 71 degrees Fahrenheit, on average. Participants who were remembering the warm, fuzzy feeling of social inclusion felt the room to be a balmy 75 degrees Fahrenheit, on average. The discrepancy is a statistically significant difference. (Social Isolation Makes People Cold, Literally)

You see a similar effect with food: socially isolated people prefer to eat warm foods, as if warming their bodies will help warm them spiritually.

But that is a considerably more complicated topic than I want to tackle today. My goal today is to simply begin to understand happiness from a biblical perspective, and in doing so, I am taking for granted that the spiritual does have primacy over the physical. I don’t mean that bodily ailments can never hinder, or even prevent, our happiness. But I am supposing that, normally, seeking to transform our hearts and minds in the way that scripture directs, will have a true and powerful effect on our hearts and minds. It will change how we think and feel. To give you an analogy, most fat people can get thin through discipline. But there may be some people for whom such discipline is never very effective, because of some physical disorder. In the same way, perhaps, there may be some people who are unable to fully break themselves out of depression, or perhaps only rarely are able to do so — because of a bodily problem. But if this is the case, I think it is by far the exception rather than the rule — and more importantly, spiritual discipline is even more vital for that person (the person who struggles with depression or anxiety) in the same way that healthy eating is for the person who struggles with their weight (actually healthy eating is probably just as critical to the person with depression). Someone with an illness that causes obesity shouldn’t throw up his hands and say, “what is the point in eating healthily?” He may not be able to achieve a normal weight, or be completely healthy — but he can certainly set a trajectory. He can make himself a bit thinner and more healthy — or fatter and less healthy. In the same way, the less able you feel to be happy, the more I think it is your responsibility to seek happiness, for otherwise you will only fall deeper into joylessness and despair and anxiety. Scripture says:

exercise thyself unto piety: for bodily exercise is profitable for a little; but piety is profitable for all things, having promise of the life which now is, and of that which is to come. Faithful is the saying, and worthy of all acceptation. For to this end we labor and strive, because we have our hope set on the living God, who is the savior of all men, especially of them that believe. (1 Ti 4:7–10)

This is the attitude we should have as we seek what God says about happiness, and how to have it. We must have our hope set upon him. We must believe that if there is happiness to be found, it will only be found because of him. If we are not looking to him for our answers, we will be essentially untethered — in which case, anything goes, and any advice will be worth a shot. But we are his people, and so we have a better hope than that.

With that said, I find myself with two great obstacles to overcome in writing on this topic. These are:

1. We are wrong about what happiness is.

2. We are wrong about how to get it.

There is no use at all in trying to discover how to get happiness (item 2), if we have not yet understood what happiness is in the first place. If we don’t know what we are seeking, how shall we find it?

So in this issue, I am going to tackle item 1: what does scripture say that happiness is. Then we can follow up the answer in the next issue with how scripture says to get it.

What is happiness?

In the modern day we have come to think of happiness in extremely shallow and self-centered terms. I believe this is actually central to why many people are so unhappy — they have redefined happiness to be something that is essentially unattainable and unrealistic and honestly bizarre: namely, the complete lack of any negative emotions. Or, to put it positively, they want to feel good all the time. They want to always have a sense of pleasure and well-being — and because we have culturally divorced ourselves from God, what this means is very often not a sense of fulfillment or satisfaction or joy in things of eternal value, but rather a kind of sensual gratification.

Because happiness is something like “the enjoyment of agreeable sensations from the possession of good” (Webster’s 1828), attaining it is very much dependent on what we take to be the highest goods. Pleasure from gratifying our appetites is one kind of good that people seek — but as Webster goes on to note,

The pleasurable sensations derived from the gratification of sensual appetites render a person temporarily happy; but he only can be esteemed really and permanently happy who enjoys peace of mind in the favor of God. To be in any degree happy we must be free from pain both of body and of mind; to be very happy we must be in the enjoyment of lively sensations of pleasure, either of body or mind. (Webster’s 1828)

(This is, again, from a dictionary. How times have changed. Another time, perhaps we can investigate Noah Webster; I have it on good authority from the pen of Kevin Swanson that he was a notable man of faith in American history.)

Happiness is not physical pleasure

I believe one of the chief reasons we are so unhappy today is that we have traded the hard work of stimulating spiritual pleasure, for the easy work of stimulating physical pleasure. But while our physical capacities for pleasure are designed to reflect our spiritual capacities for pleasure, they cannot replace them. We all know that the man who tries to make himself happy with drugs, to take the extreme example, succeeds ultimately in only making himself miserable, because he is going about getting happiness in the opposite way that God designed him to. The spiritual is always primary, and you cannot find spiritual pleasure in good sensations. The first time is always the most blissful, and every time thereafter is spent just trying to get back to where you started, meaning that it is a gradual downward spiral into the abyss.

I say this is the extreme example, but as I have argued, smartphones are a kind of drug, and we are often doing a very similar thing with them that the junkie is doing with heroine or crack or whatever it is the cool kids are shooting into their eyeballs these days. There is a line of thought here that I will follow further another time — but my point for now is simply this:

The happiness that scripture speaks of — the happiness of David in Psalm 1, or the happiness that Jesus promises in the beatitudes (Matthew 5:1–12) — is not the gratification of our sensual pleasures. It is not momentary physical pleasure. I am not saying physical pleasure is bad, of course; God made it good. But it is not any true source of happiness; it is, or rather should be, a symbol of true happiness: a natural physical expression of the spiritual reality we are seeking.

Happiness is not gladness

Neither is happiness merely gladness. I have no doubt that many more thoughtful people — not just Christians, but all those people who appreciate that happiness requires something deeper than the physical — seek happiness by seeking gladness. Gladness is more than just physical pleasure, although they can be connected, as in the case of Jonah:

And Yahweh God prepared a plant, and made it to come up over Jonah, that it might be a shade over his head, to deliver him from his evil case. So Jonah was exceeding glad because of the plant. (Jon 4:6)

We can also be glad because of good weather, or success in our work, or a new car, or any manner of things — but often the deepest kinds of gladness are relational. For instance, when Darius finds Daniel alive in the lion’s den, we read,

Then was the king exceeding glad, and commanded that they should take Daniel up out of the den. (Dan 6:23)

And of course, closer to home,

A wise son maketh a glad father (Pr 15:20)

There is certainly some overlap between happiness and gladness. But gladness is reactive to some circumstance. I believe that if we examine scripture more closely, we will find that happiness is active — and so it is deeper and more enduring.

Happiness as faith ordering the affections

Look at the connection that Jesus himself draws with gladness in Matthew 5:10–12:

Happy those persecuted for righteousness’ sake — because theirs is the kingdom of the heavens. Happy are ye whenever they may reproach you, and may persecute, and may say any evil thing against you falsely for my sake — rejoice ye and be glad, because your reward is great in the heavens, for thus did they persecute the prophets who were before you.

At the risk of pointing out the obvious (the obvious is so easily overlooked, after all), let me ask you: is it a normal reaction to be glad and rejoice when you are reproached and persecuted and slandered?

Of course not.

This is why Jesus has to command it. The examples of gladness I listed before are all natural reactions: Jonah was naturally glad to be in the shade; Darius was naturally glad that Daniel survived the lions; a father is naturally glad when his son is wise. But no one is naturally glad to be mistreated. So Jesus must command it. And in doing so, he connects it to happiness. It is this kind of gladness, that must be commanded, which shows forth the happiness of which he speaks in the beatitudes. This is clear in how he structures them.

Look at the command again: “rejoice ye and be glad — because your reward is great in the heavens.” You see, it is not rejoice and be glad because your natural reaction is wrong. It is not a command to an unnatural reaction. It is, rather, a command to a supernatural reaction. To put it a little differently, it is a command to have the natural reaction of the supernatural eyes of faith — rather than the natural reaction of the natural eyes of sight.

And this is true of the previous beatitudes — the ones which do not come with commands — as well.

“Happy the poor in spirit.” Whatever it means to be poor in spirit, it certainly includes a certain amount of, shall we say, emotional desolation. To be poor in spirit is to be spiritually destitute. To know one’s poverty. Surely that is a natural cause for grief and sadness. But we are told they are happy, “for theirs is the kingdom of the heavens.”

In the same way, there is an even more obvious contradiction in the second beatitude: “Happy the mourning.” Well, the mourning by definition are sad. They are mourning because they are unhappy. So very obviously, Jesus by making this contradiction is bidding us to look past the natural response. There must be some other way in which they are happy. Yes, he gives it: “because they shall be comforted.”

They are mourning — yet happy, because they know they shall be comforted.

The spiritually poor are desolate — yet happy, because they know the kingdom belongs to them.

The persecuted are miserable and hated — yet happy and glad and joyful because they know their reward is very great.

All of this happiness, in other words, is not a reaction to circumstance; it is not responsive. It is not gained by experiencing something good, which triggers an automatic sense of enjoyment that God designed us to have. It is not a pleasure or gratification that arises out of creation at all. It is rather an active and intentional response which we cultivate in ourselves, and which God cultivates in us through his Spirit, on account of our faith.

Think of how scripture speaks about the apostles in Acts 5:

having called near the apostles, having beaten them, they commanded them not to speak in the name of Jesus, and let them go; they, indeed, then, departed from the presence of the council, rejoicing that for his name they were counted worthy to suffer dishonor. (Ac 5:40–41)

This is certainly not a normal response, is it? It is a reaction to their circumstance — but it is a reaction that is only possible because it is conditioned on their prior faith. It is not a natural reaction, but a supernatural one — a faith reaction. The apostles, you might say, have a continually happy disposition which results in them rejoicing in the strangest situations, because how they interpret those situations is utterly different from how the natural man would.

The natural man would think, “This is so unjust and unfair, and also it hurts, ow, why did this happen to me, I feel bad and I hate it. I am sad and unhappy.”

The apostles think, “This is so unjust and unfair, and also it hurts, ow” — you see they have the same experience — but then what is their response? Their faith is active and working to move their hearts in a completely different direction. Their affections are not moved toward misery or self-pity or anger or anxiety. Rather, they are moved toward gladness and joy. They have this terrible experience, and they think, “This is like what happened to Jesus. We are participating in the same sufferings that he did, and it’s happening because we are preaching what he preached. What a remarkable honor, that God would count us worthy to share in what happened to him. What a clear sign that we are imitating him well and imaging him faithfully.”

Thus the scriptures also say:

Lo, the happiness of mortal man when God reproveth him: and the discipline of the Almighty despise not. (Job 5:17)

O the happiness of the man whom thou doth discipine, O Yah, and out of thy law teachest him (Ps 94:12)

Happy the man who doth endure temptation, because, becoming approved, he shall receive the crown of the life, which the Lord did promise to those loving Him. (Jas 1:12)

And it even gives us the most extreme example, namely Job — the one man you would be perhaps most unlikely to think was happy:

look, we call happy those who are enduring; the endurance of Job ye heard of… (Jas 5:11)

Is it natural to be happy when you are reproved and disciplined? Is it natural to be happy while you are sitting in a pit scratching your sores from head to foot with a piece of broken pottery, contemplating the death of your family and the destruction of your houses and the loss of all your wealth? We don’t even like to be reproved and disciplined by other people — how much less by God. It hurts. He scourges us, Hebrews says. It sucks. Sometimes it gets even to the point of shedding blood. But we also know that God’s discipline proves that we are his sons, and that he loves us, “for what son is there whom his father chasteneth not?” (Heb 12:7) Thus, the man disciplined by God is happy — not because of the discipline, per se, because frankly, “all chastening, for the present, indeed, doth not seem to be of joy, but of sorrow, yet afterward it doth yield the peaceable fruit of righteousness to those exercised through it” (Heb 12:11). It is not the experience itself which produces the pleasure and gratification for the believer, because it is not natural pleasure and gratification he is experiencing. It is spiritual, produced by faith through the right interpretation of the experience. He is, in other words, ordering his affections according to what he believes his experiences to mean, rather than how he knows his experiences feel.

This brings us right back to the idea that “you go where you look.” Where you set your vision, your heart will follow. And where you set your vision has to be by faith.

Happiness is an act of faith. It is a determination that the meaning of our experiences, no matter how miserable, is not dictated by how we feel. Rather, how we feel is dictated by what they mean — what we know by faith. And this is true even when we do not understand our experiences. We may have no idea why something is happening; why we are suffering in a particular way; why a certain prayer is not answered; why we must endure the same hurt or shame yet again.

Our circumstances may be inexplicable to us.

But one thing we do know: the steadfast love of Yahweh (Lam 3:22)!

And one thing more: to them that love God all things work together for good (Ro 8:28). As I tell my kids in times of trial, “everything is going according to plan.”

And yet one more: the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory which shall be revealed toward us (Ro 8:18).

Biblical happiness is thus grounded in faith and hope.

But this does not mean it is purely intellectual. It does not mean there is no feeling involved. Quite the contrary — it is an ordering of our affections in order to rightly feel.

Happiness is not a purely mental exercise, because faith is not a purely mental exercise. But it does begin in the mind, because faith begins in the mind. More particularly, faith begins with the object of Christ’s person and work. The reason we are unhappy, the reason the world is an unhappy place, is truly because of sin. It is our sin and guilt and shame that separates us from God in the first place, and causes us to be unable to enjoy him and glorify him. So it is appropriate and right — indeed, it is vital and necessary — to ensure that Christians understand they truly are forgiven, their sin truly is covered, their shame truly is blotted out, their guilt truly is forgotten — not because of anything they have done, nor ever could do, but purely by Christ; and that they receive this gift with the open hand of faith.

It is utterly essential to your happiness that you really do believe this; that you really are trusting Christ; that you really know that you are justified by faith apart from works of the law. You cannot be happy without having this faith in your heart, for it is the foundation of every affection toward God. To return to where we began, it is a reciprocal motion: it is impossible to respond to God in happiness without first receiving from him the basis of that happiness — Christ himself, and the forgiveness he offers. As it is written:

O the happiness of him whose transgression is forgiven, whose sin is covered. O the happiness of a man unto whom Yahweh reckoneth not iniquity, and in whose spirit there is no deceit. (Ps 32:1–2)

Notable:

A bit more on the connection between happiness and eating healthy:

A fun summary of how weird and deep (deep weird?) language is:

This story is a perfect illustration of why God gave Israel indentured servitude instead of prisons:

Hunters in scripture aren't manly men. They're effeminate men masquerading behind manly trappings. The internet wants to turn you into a hunter. (This is not a comment on hunting; I enjoy hunting; it’s a comment on a whole pattern of life.)

The symbolism of the hunter in scripture

Until next month,

Bnonn