Audio Transcript

Sheldon writes in to ask, “I would consider myself a Christian Hedonist, and I’m familiar with the Scriptures that extol God’s own happiness. However, when I observe God interacting with humans in Scripture (such as Jesus in the Gospels, or God with Israel in the Old Testament), he often does not come across as outwardly happy. Am I just reading it wrong? Was Jesus’s time on earth just full of hardship? How can I address this seeming disconnect between biblical theology that exclaims God’s full, unending joy and biblical observations of God in his actions, speech, and behavior that seem to show him as not all that abounding in joy?”

Well, Sheldon, I found this to be one of the most provocative questions I have heard in a long time. This really forced me to ponder some things that I hadn’t thought of before. So, thank you. It is just a great example of how asking questions is the key to going deeper in the Bible and what we think. I don’t know that I have the answer here, but I will tell you what I have been thinking about.

God’s Mind Like an Ocean

Let’s start with the truth that we Christians are joyful and sorrowful at the same time: “sorrowful, yet always rejoicing” (2 Corinthians 6:10). Even though the Bible says, “Rejoice always” (Philippians 4:4), and surely God rejoices always, we sorrow often — maybe always — because there is always something to be sad about, without losing our joy. Now I think it is this way with God. God can be grieved (see Ephesians 4:30), he is angry, he sympathizes with the sorrowful, and weeps with those who weep, even while laughing at the wicked — Psalm 2:4 — and rejoicing over sinners who repent — Luke 15:7.

So God is very emotionally complex, infinitely more so than we are, but we are emotionally complex, too, in his image. Let me try an analogy of God’s peaceful, joyful, trinitarian happiness. It is like the Pacific Ocean: From a satellite, it is perfect and beautiful, serene and blue. You have seen those pictures — the blue planet. Boy, it just looks wonderful. But if you are flying in a helicopter five hundred feet above the waves in a hurricane, the Pacific Ocean is frighteningly and terrifyingly turbulent. And that is the way, I think, the mind of God is.

“God sometimes looks at our lives through the narrow lens that focuses on our sin or our pain, and he is angry or grieved.”

Another way to see it is that God sometimes looks at our lives through the narrow lens that focuses on our sin or our pain, and he is angry or grieved. Mark 3:5 says, “Jesus looked around at them with anger, grieved at their hardness of heart.” So, grief and anger are happening together. I think God can feel that when he looks through the narrow lens at your life. Or he can open the lens to a wider aperture and see our sin and our pain in relationship to the whole panorama of his millions of purposes and approve of the tapestry that he is weaving in history, including our own pain and sin in it, and thus rejoice over all his works. So, he can be looking through the wide lens and rejoicing, and looking through the narrow lens and grieving and suffering.

In This Redemptive Age

And my answer to the question that he is asking is that in the Bible, what we mainly have is a record of God dealing with us in our sin and pain and looking largely through the narrow lens. That is what the Bible is. It is between the fall and the consummation where the Bible mostly records God’s interaction with man in rebellion in sin before the final day, which, I think, accounts for why the tone is so regularly bleak and agonizing and struggling and grieving and painful.

There are hundreds of glimpses of God’s joy and our joy in the age to come when we are done with sinning. But mostly, the Bible is the story of our sinning and God’s painful and merciful dealing with it. God enters into our pain-filled world in Jesus, and he is called “a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief” (Isaiah 53:3). So he is a high priest who can sympathize with us in our sorrows and in our pain (see Hebrews 4:15). That is what we would expect: that this man who came into the world precisely to suffer is going to look like a sufferer almost every time we see him, rather than a person who is chipper all the time, even though he went to parties, and they called him a glutton and winebibber (see Luke 7:34). He was sorrowful, yet always rejoicing.

So it seems to me that the very problem that has been raised is a good news problem. God is not distant, but is identifying with us in our sorrow. The God we meet in the Bible is a God revealing himself, not usually as before creation in perfect trinitarian happiness, or after consummation when all sinning is gone and all evil has been put out of the universe, but God with us now, agonizing over his recalcitrant bride — Israel in the Old Testament, and in his Son suffering for us in the New.

But I would end my effort to answer this question by saying, Let us not forget all the places — and I have never counted them, but there are a lot — where God himself reminds us, “The ransomed of the Lord shall return and come to Zion with singing; everlasting joy shall be upon their heads; they shall obtain gladness and joy, and sorrow and sighing shall flee away” (Isaiah 35:10). And that means not only our suffering, but God’s identification with our suffering will also flee away, and there won’t be any of this cloud hanging over the universe like there is now.