The forward-looking nature of biblical happiness
Issue #156
Last time I looked at happiness — as scripture defines it. Biblical happiness is rather different to modern conceptions:
Firstly, it is neither merely pleasure nor gladness (which is passive or reactive, rather than active and intentional), though it may certainly include these things;
Secondly — more importantly — it does not begin with our feelings at all.
This seems almost like a contradiction in terms, but biblical happiness is first and foremost an act of faith. This means that it really can contradict how we feel in the moment: whereas our feelings are a natural response to circumstance — we feel bad in bad circumstances — biblical happiness is a supernatural response to circumstance — even in the worst situations, through the Spirit, we can set our hearts upon God’s favor, knowing that what is happening is working to our good. In this, we follow Jesus, “the author and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising shame, and hath sat down at the right hand of the throne of God” (Heb 12:2).
Biblical happiness begins with the end in mind. It looks upon a situation with the eyes of faith, to judge not by appearances, but with a right judgment — to know what its spiritual meaning is, and what, therefore, the true outcome will be.
So happiness — or blessedness, in many translations — is not just the end that we seek, of pleasure and gladness and fulfillment and joy, but also the beginning and way toward true pleasure and gladness and fulfillment and joy.
Think of the classic comment that even many pagans still know, made in Acts 20:35, that it is more blessed (much happier), to give than to receive. This defies our common experience — which is generally that it is more blessed to receive than to give. We are happier in the moment we get things than when we give them. But this saying, that it is more happy to give than to receive, emphasizes the forward-looking nature of present happiness in scripture.
This forward-looking element is also why, I think, most translations prefer the term blessed to happy. It is not just because it sounds more religious or pious necessarily, but because it does indeed emphasize the future-oriented or spiritually-focused aspect of biblical happiness. It emphasizes that the good state we enjoy is not primarily because of circumstance, and it is not primarily experienced right now; rather, it is primarily because of God’s favor, and it is primarily experienced in the future. That said, I do still prefer the word happy for a couple of reasons.
Firstly, it emphasizes a condition or emotion that is really fundamental to what all people desire in life. Our whole existence in some ways is grounded in the search for happiness, and that is because we are made to glorify God and enjoy him forever. Since this is such a foundational longing within the human heart, we ought to make it very plain when scripture speaks of it, rather than obscuring it behind religious terminology — “blessed.”
Most people do not think of happiness and blessedness as meaning the same thing. And in the modern day, when people are desperately casting about for happiness in all the wrong places, we especially should translate the scriptures in a way that clearly points them to the answers they are seeking.
Secondly, saying blessedness causes confusion with the separate word blessing. In Psalm 34, for instance, the word “bless” in verse 1 is barak (not to be confused with Barak, the judge, who is actually Baraq, which means lightning — a whole other matter):
I do bless Yahweh at all times
Continually his praise is in my mouth
But the word “happy” (generally translated “blessed”) in verse 8 is ashre:
Taste ye and see that Yahweh is good
O the happiness of the man who trusteth in him
Similarly, when Jesus blesses the bread and the wine, that is not the same word as when he says, “Happy are they that hear the word of God and keep it” (Lk 11:27–28). Blessing as something you do is literally to “say good,” or to speak goodness toward something. In Greek, eu-logeo — “good saying.” When Jesus blesses the bread and wine, this is what he is doing. It is the same when your pastor says the benediction at the end of the Lord’s service (you do have a benediction, don’t you?) — bene-dictus is a direct Latin translation from the Greek: “good speech.”
The point is, “bless” as an action is distinct from the idea of happiness as a thing, and we should therefore use distinct words for them if we can.
Prophetic happiness
Be that as it may, I want to particularly focus on the forward-looking nature of biblical happiness. There is a kind of prophetic tone to how scripture speaks of happiness, where the end is spoken of with such certainty that it intrudes into the present. When Lady Wisdom speaks in Proverbs 8:32, she does not say, “Happy will be they that keep my ways.” She says, “Happy are they that keep my ways.”
Yet we know as a simple matter of fact that keeping God’s ways is often not an immediate cause of happiness; it is often hard and painful, and the cause of much heartache. And we need only look to the life of Christ to confirm that this heartache is not just because of our own failure to keep God’s ways; it is not just our sin that causes it. It really is that keeping God’s ways often brings about immediate pain, even though its fruit is long-term happiness. The way of the gospel is short-term loss for long-term gain. Indeed it is much happier to give — to sacrifice, to give of oneself — than to receive.
And yet scripture does nonetheless speak repeatedly, insistently, of happiness as an immediate, present reality. Why?
I believe one reason is to emphasize the certainty of what we have to look forward to. But not only this — more practically, it also firmly refutes and reproves the natural ways in which we seek happiness.
After all, why is it that we do anything contrary to God’s will? Is it not because we expect it to bring some form of happiness?
Why does a man drink a whole bottle of whiskey? Because he thinks, “I am unhappy. If I am drunk, I will be happy” — or at least, “less unhappy;” at least for a while.
Why does a woman have an affair? Because she thinks, “Being with this new man makes me happier than being with my husband.” (Did you know that women now have more affairs than men? Female empowerment. Ain’t feminism grand.)
Why does a child steal a cookie? Because he thinks, “Eating a cookie will make me happy.”
Now, am I saying that the desire for happiness drives all sin? I am saying that all people are unhappy to some extent because of sin, and all people are therefore seeking happiness; and in the flesh, the only way they know to get it is the very way that will make them less happy still, and lead them to the ultimate, final, permanent unhappiness of hell. People are unhappy because of sin, and they seek happiness in sin — making them unhappier still.
God knows this, and so he says in his word, not, “If you do these things instead, you will be happy,” but something even stronger, in order to both greatly assure us, and oblige us; to compel our commitment: “If you do these things, you are happy.” And he says this not through the Spirit only, but by the Spirit speaking through men who can testify to their own experience of happiness — so we cannot later turn back and say, “But you said if we do this we are happy, and we are not happy, so you lied.” No, he doesn’t leave this option open, because David in Psalm 34, for example, is perfectly blunt about the matter:
Taste ye and see that Yahweh is good,
O the happiness of the man who trusteth in Him.
Fear Yahweh, ye his holy ones,
For there is no lack to those fearing him.
Young lions have lacked and been hungry,
And those seeking Yahweh lack not any good. (Ps 34:8–10)
What, they are always happy and never lack good? But if you refer back to the superscript of the psalm, you will find that David is writing about the time that he had to pretend to be mad in the court of Abimelech. Let me remind you of what happened.
Firstly, why was he there to begin with? Because the king, Saul, was trying to kill him — a fact that David had to uncover with much scheming and agony of suspense through Jonathan, while he himself hid away for fear of his life. Then, he had to flee to Nob, where he was so lacking and hungry that he had to eat the holy bread, the show-bread, from the tabernacle. And then we read:
And David arose, and fled that day for fear of Saul, and went to Achish the king of Gath. And the servants of Achish said unto him, Is not this David the king of the land? did they not sing one to another of him in dances, saying, Saul hath slain his thousands, And David his ten thousands? And David laid up these words in his heart, and was sore afraid of Achish the king of Gath. And he changed his behavior before them, and feigned himself mad in their hands, and scrabbled on the doors of the gate, and let his spittle fall down upon his beard. Then said Achish unto his servants, Lo, ye see the man is mad; wherefore then have ye brought him to me? Do I lack madmen, that ye have brought this fellow to play the madman in my presence? shall this fellow come into my house? David therefore departed thence, and escaped to the cave of Adullam (1 Sa 21:10–22:1)
(Incidentally, we should not be troubled that Samuel calls him Achish here, but David calls him Abimelech in our psalm; people often have more than one name in scripture, and Abimelech is simply abi-melech: “my father is king.”)
Now I think it is safe to say that David did not feel very happy while he was fleeing for his life and lacking even bread to eat; and even less happy while he was humiliating himself among his enemies, pretending to be insane, scrabbling at the doors and drooling all over himself; and least happy of all when he was driven out of all human company and had to let the earth literally swallow him up as he lived in a dank hole in the ground. You don’t need to be a highly competent reader of scripture to figure all this out, and to know that when David therefore says, “O the happiness of the man who trusteth in him,” and, “those seeking Yahweh lack not any good,” he is not suggesting that trusting God instantly makes you feel happy; nor that it immediately fulfills every need you have. Rather, as he says in verse 19 of the psalm, this happiness and fullness, as it exists in the present moment, is a forward-looking act of faith toward the reality that will exist in the future:
Many are the evils of the righteous
Out of them all Yahweh delivereth him
Happiness is not denial
Here is our tendency as modern people, when we see texts like this; when we see how David describes future happiness in terms of a present reality: we naturally think:–
“Oh, so happiness is really just a kind of act of willpower. It’s purely intellectual. In a sense, it’s even fake, because you’re telling yourself you’re happy while actually you’re feeling miserable.”
I think this is a natural kind of conclusion for us, isn’t it? But although biblical happiness begins with faith and hope, it is not purely intellectual.
Happiness is not a purely mental exercise, because faith is not a purely mental exercise.
It does begin in the mind, because faith begins in the mind. But it is not a mental act of denial about our feelings. It is, rather, a determined effort to re-form them.
If you’re in a bad situation, for instance, your natural response is to feel bad. Biblical happiness is not to just tell yourself, “No, I don’t feel bad” — as if you can change your feelings by a sheer act of will. No, the act of faith, the act of will, is to say: “There is a way that God has given to become happy, a way to participate in happiness, and if I obey that, if I do it, God will give it to me.”
Because biblical happiness is forward-looking, it is an act of faith where you anticipate the future state in which your happiness is complete and fulfilled, and then you seek to participate in that future, now.
In this way, through faith, we begin to order our affections to feel rightly rather than wrongly. We actually begin to bring about the future we are anticipating. I don’t mean that we make ourselves happy by the power of positive thinking. Rather, I mean that happiness is one benefit of being in Christ; so pursuing happiness is just one facet of sanctification. It is one facet of pursuing glory. Of course none of us thinks he will one day be glorified because of the power of positive thinking. No one thinks that our glorification is brought about by our own efforts in sanctification. We don’t work really hard to be righteous and gradually get closer and closer to becoming perfect until eventually one day we make it. That is a heresy called perfectionism.
No, rather, just as with all sanctification, the pursuit of happiness is already and not yet. It is a forward-looking anticipation of the perfection we already have in Christ, which will become ours when we are glorified. By faith, we anticipate the perfect bliss of eternal union with God — but we also know we already are united to him in Christ. And so we seek to participate in that union now, as practice for what will become fully ours then.
Participating in future happiness
So what is it we must do to participate in this happiness we have in Christ? Or, to ask it in a slightly more accurate way, how do we participate in Christ himself, so that we may have the happiness that naturally comes with that?
Ultimately, participating in Christ is what makes us happy. So how do we do that?
I want to answer this question in multiple ways, because I want to contrast participation in Christ with the multiple ways in which we try to find happiness apart from him. There are many false ways in which people in the modern day, including ourselves, are tempted to seek happiness. So I want to assess at least the most important of these, to see what we can learn about how they actually make us unhappy, and how we can reform them or repent of them in order to truly participate in the happiness we are anticipating: the happiness of heaven.
Today, I want to start in the most logical place: the contrast between vicarious participation, and true participation. I realize those are not exactly self-explanatory terms, so here is what I mean:
We all know that doing the things God made us for will make us happy. God made us to image him; to be like him; to walk in his ways. The beginning of Psalm 119 captures this well:
O the happiness of those perfect in the way
They are walking in the law of Yahweh,
O the happiness of those keeping his testimonies,
With the whole heart they seek him.
Yea, they have not done iniquity,
In his ways they have walked. (Ps 119:1–3)
It is important to remember that walking in God’s law doesn’t mean merely following the rules. It doesn’t mean just: not stealing, and not murdering, and not making idols; or even not eating certain foods, or not mixing fabrics, if you were an Israelite. God’s law is far more than rules. There is a huge positive component to it. When scripture speaks of the law, it doesn’t just mean the 613 rules God made in the books of Moses. It means imaging God.
The law, the Torah, begins with Genesis. With Adam. It begins with the mandate to take dominion, to impress the heavenly pattern into the earth, to subdue the world and glorify it.
To put it simply, walking in God’s law involves not merely refraining from evil, but doing positive good. It involves growing in virtue, doing hard things, raising families, fighting evil, cultivating land, subduing the seed of the serpent, uncovering the things God has hidden, growing in mastery, exercising kingship.
God wants us to be mighty men — to be heroes.
Doing “heroic” things, as I drolly call them, will make us happy; it is to participate in happiness, to participate in the dominion, the heroism, of Christ as he exercises his reign from heaven through us as his body.
But…our flesh is very, very lazy. It wants happiness and it wants ease. In fact, it tricks us into thinking that hard things will make us unhappy — because they are hard after all. And that ease will make us happy — because it is easy after all. And this sets us up for a terrible illusion.
We know that participating in positive good (the kind I’ve described as heroism) will make us happy. And we are tricked by our flesh into thinking that the easier this is, the happier we will be.
Now, is there an easy way that we can participate in this kind of heroism? A way of engaging in the happiness God made us for — while doing nothing at all?
Of course! It is what most of us do for more hours per day than we might like to admit.
We vicariously participate in these things all the time. Someone else does the hard heroic work for us, as our substitute, and we just observe — through stories, through movies, through TV shows, through computer games, through documentaries, through YouTube. We are afflicted with an infinite number of options to vicariously participate in whatever kind of heroism we feel most drawn to, most fulfilled by, most happy in. We can watch other people doing those things, being heroes, and feel like we are participating with them. The characters in the story become a kind of proxy or figurehead for us — substitute people who do the work instead of ourselves.
It is a kind of twisting of the pattern of federal headship, where the story weaves an artificial covenant between us and the characters in it, and we feel we have achieved what they achieved.
I am putting this all very starkly, not to condemn stories outright, but so that you can see the mechanism of what is going on — because usually it operates at a subconscious level. It is not something we are aware of. It must be shown to us, and even then, we think, “No, I’m not doing that. Stories just make me happy because they’re a distraction from other less pleasant things. Or they’re reflecting the true and the good and the beautiful. That’s good, right? In fact, hey, how dare you anyway, who do you think you are? Nate Wilson told me stories are soul food.”
Well, that is true; there is a way in which we feed on stories, a way in which we consume them, and so therefore (as we have learned) a way in which they consume us. I think that is all very compatible and very consistent with what I am saying. My goal is not to condemn all stories, but to challenge us to ask how they are affecting us. I am starting to try to work out the first elements of what you might call a theology of entertainment. And I think we have to start by contrasting what entertainment tends to do to us, with what God made us to do. It tends to stimulate our natural desire to image God (to be heroic, as it were) — but then redirect it into a fake world. And this tends to sap our energy for imaging God, rather than increasing it.
We have to start here because the very nature of entertainment makes us want to justify it and gloss over its problems. We don’t want to change or reform how we are entertained. It’s too big a part of our lives. So we have to really try to present the problems in hard, uncompromising terms if we are going to be able to see them clearly and face them squarely.
Entertainment is so much a part of our culture, our liturgy of life, that we cannot see it objectively. This was really driven home to me in a powerful but savage little essay by Robert Lewis Dabney, called “On Dangerous Reading.” Dabney is one of the greatest thinkers of the Reformed tradition, and he wrote at a time that novels were just becoming very popular. Here is what he had to say about how fiction saps our ability to practice virtue in the real world:
The habitual contemplation of fictitious scenes, however pure, produces a morbid cultivation of the feelings and sensibilities, to the neglect and injury of the active virtues. The purpose for which fictions are read, and the drama is frequented, is to excite the attention and the emotions. They must be animated and full of incident, or they will not be popular. The reader who indulges much in them soon becomes so accustomed to having his sensibilities excited, and the labor of attention relieved by the interest of the plot, that he is incapable of useful reading and business… While the Christian, whose heart has been trained in the school of duty, goes forth with cheerful and active sympathies in exercises of beneficence towards the real woes of his neighbor, the novel reader sits weeping over the sorrows of imaginary heroes and heroines, too selfish and lazy to lay down the fascinating volume and reach forth his hand to relieve an actual sufferer at his door. (R.L. Dabney, On Dangerous Reading)
In other words, reading heroic stories cultivates heroism like watching the Olympics cultivates athleticism.
Which is to say, it actually does the opposite. It takes our desire to participate in something virtuous, and channels it into passive observing, rather than active doing. It turns out that “vicarious participation” is not really participation at all. Watching someone else do something is not actually involving you in that thing in any true way.
It may be deceiving you into thinking you’re involved — but you’re not. As Dabney puts it, your “sympathies must necessarily remain inert and passive, because the whole scene is imaginary.”
True participation exercises itself in the nature of the thing
To participate in heroism, one must exercise heroism. To participate in virtue, one must exercise virtue. To participate in athleticism, one must exercise athleticism. And, by the same token, to bring this back to the central issue:– to participate in faith, in Christ, in happiness, we have to actually exercise ourselves in faith, in Christ, in happiness.
Think about this. There is certainly a connection between our culture, that has come to think that you can participate in a thing by passively observing it — a culture that has normalized life as little else than continual passive observation — and the churchmen of our day who think you can participate in Christ by passively observing him; which is to say, intellectually believing in him, without necessarily exercising yourself in him, without “doing Christ,” so to speak — acting faith, as John Owen would say.
This is really what is at stake, and it is of enormous importance, because there is a trap for us within the idea that you go where you look, that you become what you behold — especially for us as passive moderns.
There is a passive way to look at virtue that does not make you go where you look. I can easily imagine someone reading my previous essays, on how we are transformed into Christ’s image by fixing our gaze upon him, and then interpreting me as saying that we should simply read about Christ in the gospels, and maybe think about it often. Now obviously we must read about Christ in the gospels, and we should think about it often — but we all know that there are many, many people who have read about Jesus, who have in no way been made more like Jesus. Many people read about him, and think to themselves, “Isn’t it wonderful that he was perfect so that I don’t have to be,” and go off and sin some more so that grace may abound. They look at Christ, but they do not look unto Christ. Their hearts do not follow their eyes; they do not end up going where they look — which tells us that there must be something wrong, something deficient, with how they are looking in the first place. If you will permit me to mangle a metaphor, Christ goes in one eye, and out the other.
This is the importance of the movement I have made over the past few issues — the movement scripture itself bids us to make — from the eyes to the mouth. You may passively observe with your eyes, without truly looking; but you cannot passively eat with your mouth, without truly eating. The modern mind may be tricked into thinking that looking can be passive; but even we are not yet so dumb as to think that eating can be passive.
And the same is true of happiness: to participate in it, you cannot merely look at it. You must end up doing it, as we read in Psalm 119. It is quite possible to look upon God through his word, and then go away and immediately forget what he looked like by failing to do his word. This is faith without works. We keep our eyes fixed on God not just by reading his word, but by doing it. If we are not doing his word, then our eyes have slipped to something else, and we are going in a different direction than we thought. This is why scripture tells us that we must continually reorient ourselves toward God through not only meditating on his word, as we have seen, and through prayer — but also by thinking on and doing anything and everything that will point us to him (Phil 4): by participating in the true and the good and the beautiful — not idolatrously, but gratefully — as a way of participating in Christ himself, from whom these things all flow.
But we are easily tempted to trade true participation for vicarious participation through entertainment. This is a great danger, and one that I therefore want to continue to examine in the next issue, so we can start to develop a clearer understanding of when we need to repent of, or reform, our entertainment habits, in a world that has turned the word re-creation into the word recreation.
It has been able to do this because we are not just thinkers; we are wanters, desirers, longers. We are made in God’s image, and God is not merely knowledge or consciousness; he is love. And so we aren’t only, or even primarily, taught by putting knowledge into our heads. We are taught by the direction of our entire lives; how we order our affections, and how they are ordered for us. It is not merely our thoughts and beliefs that must be reordered toward Christ, because conversion is not merely re-education — it is re-creation. But re-creation is easily twisted into a kind of recreation that captures and diverts us back away from Christ, by giving us a substitute for true participation in him. This will not make us happy. Fortunately, he is patient and kind to redirect us back again — and we will see how he continues to guide us through this in the next issue.
Notable:
“I found myself spending many hours grading writing that I knew was generated by AI… That is, I found myself spending more time giving feedback to AI than to my students. So I quit.”
I Quit Teaching Because of ChatGPT
“I am seeing mounting evidence that an increasing number of people are so used to algorithmically-generated feeds that they no longer care to have a self-directed experience that they are in control of. The more time I spend interacting with folks online, the more it feels like large swaths of people have forgotten to exercise their own agency. That is what I mean by algorithmic complacency. More and more people don’t seem to know or care how to view the world without a computer algorithm guiding what they see… Algorithmic complacency, if not noticed and acted upon, means you’re allowing other people who are not you to decide what matters to you.”
Until next month,
Bnonn