Such a question actually
reveals a common mistake of pitting holiness and happiness against
each other. “God is more interested in you being holy than happy,” so the line
goes.
Some of my favorite
theologians fall prey to this subtle dichotomy. And this includes one of the
best thinkers I love (David Wells). In charity, and in much gratitude for
everything I have learned from his writings, I’ll post a few paragraphs
from his 2014 book where
this tension arises, and I’ll make a friendly amendment later.
In attempting to criticize the therapeutic definition of the
faith in so many pulpits, he writes:
In this psychological world, the God of love is a God of love
precisely and only because he offers us inward balm. Empty, distracted,
meandering, and dissatisfied, we come to him for help. Fill us, we ask, with a
sense of completeness! Fill our emptiness! Give us a sense of direction amid
the mass of competing ways and voices in the modern world! Fill the aching
emptiness within!
“By
distancing holiness from happiness, we create a false dichotomy.”
This is how many in the church today, especially in the
evangelical church, are thinking. It is how they are praying. They are yearning
for something more real within themselves than what they currently have. This
is true of adults and of teenagers as well. Yes, we say earnestly, hopefully,
maybe even a little wistfully, be to us the God of love!
Those who live in this
psychological world think differently from those who inhabit a moral world. In
a psychological world, we want therapy; in a
moral world, a world of right and wrong and good and evil, we want redemption. In a
psychological world, we want to be happy. In
a moral world, we want to be holy. In
the one, we want to feel good but in the
other we want to be good. . . .
God stands before us not
as our Therapist or our Concierge. He stands before us as the God of utter
purity to whom we are morally accountable. He is objective to us and not lost
within the misty senses of our internal world. His Word comes to us from outside
of our self because it is the Word of his truth. It summons us to stand before
the God of the universe, to hear his command that we must love him and love our
neighbors as ourselves. He is not before us to be used by us. He is not there
begging to enter our internal world and satisfy our therapeutic needs. We are
before him to hear his commandment. And his commandment is
that we should be holy, which is a much greater thing than being happy. . . .
It is true that there are psychological benefits to following
Christ, and happiness may be its by-product. These, though, are not
fundamentally what Christian faith is about. It is about the God who
is other than ourselves, who is the infinite and gracious God.
Now it’s certainly
appropriate to push back on culturally defined happiness(like
consumer-centered materialism, sexual liberation, and self-centeredness in all
its many forms). And it’s certainly right to push back on the idea that
holiness is non-essential in the Christian life. And it’s certainly right to
attack the idea of God as nothing more than a Santa Claus for our felt needs.
God self-exists outside of us. He is the wholly pure Creator to whom all
creatures will give an account.
But by distancing holiness from happiness we
create a false dichotomy.
Happy or Holy?
“The
soul’s true happiness is no incidental byproduct of holiness. True happiness is
true holiness.”
When in doubt, glance at
the Redwoods of the church: the Puritans. Two in particular can help us respond
to the modern attempt to separate happiness from holiness so cleanly. For
example, Thomas Brooks (1608–1680) authored a 450-page book under the apt
title: The Crown and Glory of Christianity: Or, Holiness, The Only Way To
Happiness (1662). It’s a massive defense of the interconnectedness
of human happiness and holiness that runs on and on, point after subpoint, to
make the case irrefutably clear from Scripture.
“Holiness differs nothing from happiness but in name,” Brooks
boldly writes near the opening of the book. “Holiness is happiness in the bud,
and happiness is holiness at the full. Happiness is nothing but the
quintessence of holiness.”
Near the end of the book, he reiterates the point, “An absolute
fullness of holiness will make an absolute fullness of happiness. When our
holiness is perfect, our happiness shall be perfect; and if this were
attainable on earth, there would be but little reason for men to long to be in
heaven.”
Or we can cite the
formidable Matthew Henry (1662–1714), a celebrated Bible scholar who saw the
same thing. “Those only are happy, truly happy, that are holy, truly holy,” he
wrote on Psalm 1:1–3, going so far as to write “goodness and
holiness are not only the way to
happiness but happiness itself.”
These Puritans knew it well.
The soul’s true happiness is no incidental byproduct of holiness. True
happiness is true holiness.
More recently, John Piper
dialed in the point with an even finer adjustment in an Ask
Pastor John episode: “Happiness
is part of holiness,” he said. “If you tried to describe for me what it means
to be a holy person, leaving out happiness in God, you can’t do it. There is no
such thing as holiness minushappiness in God.
Happiness in God is — I will risk it — the essence of
holiness.”
But do the Scriptures support such claims about how inextricably
intertwined holiness is with happiness?
True Happy-Holiness
The Psalms are incredibly
helpful here. The psalmists often address those who are blessed —
and by blessed, they mean those who are truly happy.
So who are the blessed, the truly happy?
“At the
core of our being, we don’t want to be happy or holy. We want to be happy-holy,
like God.”
The truly
happy are those who are, in some measure, truly
holy, and it’s a theme that carries right through the Psalms in
places like Psalms 1:1–2, 19:8, 32:8–11, 34:8–14, 40:4, 106:3, 112:1, 119:1–2, 22–4, 69–70, 143–4, 128:1–6.
But not only are holiness
and happiness (or blessedness) joined in the Psalms; they get linked together
in the Proverbs, and very tightly by Jesus in his Beatitudes (Matthew 5:2–12).
And preceding any
possibility of finding true happy-holiness is the profound reality that our
sins must be permanently and forever removed before a holy God. The beautiful
reality of justification in Christ bridges the happy-holiness of the Psalmist
and our forgiveness in Christ, by faith alone (Psalm 32:1–2, Romans 4:7–8).
However incompletely,
Christians taste this true happy-holiness as we live out our union in Christ.
In him, we find the inseparable organic connection between our obedience and
our joy, between our pursuit of true holiness and our experience of true
happiness (John 15:1–17).
The Happy-Holy God
So, at the core of our
being, we don’t want to be happy or holy. We want to be happy-holy, like God.
God is the fountain of joy and delight; he is a happy God, satisfied in his
eternal self-delight, and this happiness is part of his glory (1 Timothy 1:11).
And our glorious God is, at the same time, an awesome blaze of unpolluted
holiness, revolted by all of man’s depravities (1 Timothy 1:8–10).
What, therefore, God has joined together, let no theologian
separate.
The Choice We Face
Today
In reality, our quest for happiness is driven by a primal urge,
an urge as ancient as the first man and woman, an urge that predates
postmodernism, modernism, the Enlightenment, and Freud.
“What,
therefore, God has joined together, let no theologian separate.”
Like every generation before, we face the same ancient choice,
and it’s not a choice between happiness and holiness, but between two different
quests for happiness (one evil, one holy).
Quest #1 is
a pursuit of the happiness promised by the false securities and comforts and
idols of our world, but it turns out to be false lies that can only grieve us
in the end.
Quest #2 is
a true happiness found in God, a genuine delight in him, an eternal and
unending treasuring of his glory and holiness above all else.
People avoid holiness to pursue happiness not knowing that the
two are one. So there’s the key. The battle for this true holy-happiness is a
daily spiritual battle for the faith to choose the right happiness.
To return to that same podcast episode, Piper well summarized
the daily faith-battle of this happy-holiness: “When we say God is most
glorified in you when you are most satisfied in him, we are saying the
essential warfare of holiness, or sanctification, is the warfare to be
satisfied in God.”
There’s a weight of truth in that statement worth deep and long
reflection.
