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Doesn’t God Want us to be Happy?
Michael S. Horton, Ph.D.
This article
is a part of a collection of essays written recently by Dr.
Horton after his interview on
60 Minutes which aired on October 14, 2007.
So does God want us to be poor, sad, lonely—generally
unsuccessful in our life and relationships? This view would
simply be the mirror opposite of the prosperity gospel. God is
not abstractly interested in ensuring that we are either wealthy
or poor, successful or unsuccessful; he has far larger plans for
us. He has chosen us as his children—co-heirs with Christ of the
whole estate. Fellowship in the age of everlasting peace, not
where believers live above poverty, but where the poor are rich
and there is no more poverty; not where believers are spared a
little pain and even tragic news of a loved one killed or
seriously injured in war, but where no one gets killed or even
fights anymore because sin, evil, injustice, violence, and
oppression no longer exist.
It is sometimes said that it is not our happiness but our
holiness that concerns God. A helpful way of drawing us back to
a God-centered orientation, this contrast nevertheless assumes
that happiness is found somewhere else than in God’s glory,
which is holiness epitomizes. Created by God—in God’s own image,
humanity is the creature who was designed for holiness. More
than a static moral quality or attribute, this holiness was to
characterize every thought, action, and desire. Things in fact
went this way until our first parents willfully determined to
set their affections on themselves rather than on God.
Immediately, they were unhappy: ashamed, guilty, fleeing from
the presence of the best thing that had ever happened to them.
So the problem is not happiness, but that we do not even know
real happiness when we see it. More than happiness, we crave
power and control over our circumstances, fellow-humans, the
whole creation, and even God. We will surrender happiness to
being in charge because we mistakenly believe that the latter is
the realization of the former.
What we have trouble understanding as Americans—especially
Boomers (sorry to pick on my generation again)—is that what we
call happiness is really this sense of being in control. Even if
we get cold, we are comforted in knowing that we have control of
the thermostat and can change it whenever we want. We have
choices. We’re in charge. If we get in a pickle, there is
nothing that we cannot turn around with the right credit card.
But take away the cherished props of our life movie and we can
get pretty dramatic. It is like cutting off the oxygen supply to
a deep sea diver. Like overweight children sitting on the sofa
with their Happy Meals watching a report of starving children in
the Sudan, we think that we are better off. But are we? Of
course, in one important sense we are, but in the big picture?
Our most significant domestic crisis right now seems to be our
health care. We are all, especially us Boomers, doing everything
we can to make sure that we do not die—or experience the
tentacles of that coming death by unhappiness, discomfort, or
sorrow. But we will die. In fact, we are all dying right now.
Christ and Everlasting Life versus you and Your Best Life Now:
That is the clear choice. At least Osteen has given us the
opportunity to see just how clearly that choice stares us down.
God’s glory is most manifest in our salvation. God’s holiness is
most vividly portrayed in his salvation of the unholy. That he
not only judges righteously, but freely gives his righteousness
to the unrighteous as a gift, is an astonishing feat indeed. The
benefits for us, however, seem to weighty, too staggering, to be
characterized by the word “happiness,” as we typically
understand it. It is something more than not being bothered,
disappointed, or set back. It is the full possession of riches
we were not even aware existed, awakening senses that we did not
even know we had. In short, the biblical word for it is joy.
Rather than another fast-food meal that we consume by ourselves,
it is a feast that we share with each other—indeed, even with
the other creatures we dragged into the wasteland. With our
Creator and Redeemer as the host, even now we share a foretaste
of that joy of the wedding feast whenever we are gathered by the
Spirit to receive the word and participate in Holy Communion.
The message of American consumerism is a Happy Meal. It offers
no foretaste of heaven, just more of the same—with a choice of
dipping sauces.
It is neither that God wants us to be successful in our daily
living or unsuccessful, but that he has a larger goal that is
even sometimes served by temporal suffering. In all of these
things, delightful and disappointing, God is working all
circumstances together for a good that is beyond a mere absence
of discomfort. In fact, God often has to go to extreme measures,
taking away our props, in order to get us off of our own
glory-trail (viz., thinking we’re “in control”) in order to give
us the deeper happiness that he calls joy. When something
greater than happiness as we usually define it is the goal, all
sorts of things—good, bad, indifferent—can be accepted as part
of God’s plan for our life. We do not know whether, in a given
instance, God has planned for Bob to be healed of cancer or Sue
to get that raise at work. But we do have God’s public,
certified, and certain promise that all who die in Christ will
be raised for a life that is far greater than even the most
pleasant circumstances of our best life now.
If the gospel is not true, then it cannot even make us happy. If
Christ was not actually raised bodily in real history, then
nothing we say is even useful. That was Paul’s point in 1
Corinthians 15: If Christ was not bodily raised on the third
day, we are “still in our sins” and have no hope of our own
resurrection in his wake. “‘Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow
we die’” (1 Cor 15:32). So for Paul, Christianity is not useful
for whatever needs we think are important at the moment; it’s
true. If it is not true, it does not matter how many marriages
it has fixed, how many healthy families it has engendered, or
how much stress it has relieved. “If in this life only we have
hoped in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied” (v 19).
After defending the resurrection of Christ as the harbinger of
our own, Paul explains in this letter why only a solution as
deep as the cross and resurrection of Christ can match the depth
of the problem. Our ultimate enemy is not failing to get
everything we want out of life, but something much more serious.
Sin and death came by Adam. However, righteousness and life came
by Jesus Christ, the Last Adam, so that through faith in Christ
we too may be raised on the last day (vv 20-28). Death is the
penalty for breaking God’s covenant, but those who are in Christ
are justified by his righteous life, atoning death, and
triumphant resurrection (vv 50-56).
Significantly, when the Apostle Paul addressed the auspicious
assembly of philosophers in the famous Areopagus of Athens, Luke
reports that many Epicureans were present. Epicurean philosophy
held that if there is a God, he is distant and aloof. There is
no heaven or hell. “So let us eat, drink, and be merry, for
tomorrow we die,” went their motto. There, if anywhere, we might
have expected the Apostle to the Gentiles to woo the group by
appealing to their craving for autonomous happiness here and
now. Instead of trying to show them how God fit into their
scheme, he told them where they fit in God’s story of creation,
the fall, Christ’s resurrection, and the coming judgment (Acts
17). Christianity isn’t therapy. It is either true or the
Epicureans win hands-down.
C. S. Lewis, author of the Narnia series and Christian
apologist, once observed, “I haven’t always been a Christian. I
didn’t go to religion to make me happy. I always knew a bottle
of Port would do that. If you want a religion to make you feel
really comfortable, I certainly don’t recommend Christianity.”(1)
In another essay, he wrote,
We are defending Christianity; not ‘my religion’….The great
difficulty is to get modern audiences to realize that you are
preaching Christianity solely and simply because you happen to
think it true; they always suppose you are preaching it because
you like it or think it good for society or something of that
sort. Now a clearly maintained distinction between what the
Faith actually says and what you would like it to have said or
what you understand or what you personally find helpful or think
probable, forces your audience to realize that you are tied to
your data just as the scientist is tied by the results of the
experiments; that you are not just saying what you like. This
immediately helps them to realize that what is being discussed
is a question about objective fact—not gas about ideals and
points of view.(2)
It all depends on whether we start with what we have decided to
be our greatest need or with the God in whose presence we
discover needs we never knew we had.
If we begin with ourselves and our felt needs, we may have room
for a spirituality that assists us in our self-realization and
success in life, but the chief question will be how we can
justify God in a world so obviously out of whack. If we begin
with God—his holiness, justice, and righteousness as well as his
love, mercy, and grace—then there will be a very different
question: How can I , a sinner, be justified before this God?
Describing his own process of conversion, Lewis explains, “I was
the object rather than the subject in this affair. I was decided
upon. I was glad afterwards at the way it came out, but at the
moment what I heard was God saying, ‘Put down your gun and we’ll
talk’…I chose, yet it really did not seem possible to do the
opposite.”(3)
We do not “put down [our] gun” until we give up even on religion
and spirituality as our way of ascending to heaven. We do not
know what is relevant or of utmost concern until God’s word
addresses us. Discourses on “modern man” may be occasionally
interesting, says twentieth century German theologian Karl
Barth.
But who and what [humanity] is before God, as the one addressed
in His Gospel, is something which Narcissus as such cannot
discover in any age for all the loving exactitude of his
self-analysis, self-appraisal, and self-description, and
something which he cannot accept even in his most ruthless
sincerity. To know himself as the one who is intended, addressed
and known by God in the Gospel, he must first be radically
disturbed and interrupted in the work of self-analysis by
receiving the Gospel of God. Then perhaps a posteriori he can
see whether or how far in his self-analysis he was on the right
track, or on one which was quite wrong.(4)
Like Charles Finney, Joel Osteen is less a pioneer than a clear
example of a wider phenomenon. Even in circles that would not
countenance the full-strength version of the prosperity gospel,
Osteen’s emphases seem increasingly typical.Topical sermons, focusing on improving our lives by following
biblical principles, easily eliminate the offence of the cross,
using the Bible for whatever we want to say, rather than
proclaiming it as those who have been sent. In Osteen’s TV
sermons (at least the handful I’ve seen) and best-selling book,
we learn more about the preacher than about God. We hear more
personal anecdotes than biblical exposition. We learn how God
gave him a bigger house, a good parking space, gave him the best
table in a restaurant, and a seat in first class. For anyone
interested in the sociology of pampered American Boomers, Osteen
is a valuable source. However, for anyone interested in knowing
God in Jesus Christ as he is revealed in Holy Scripture, for
anyone wanting to know how God saves sinners, for anyone who
senses that there are more pressing issues in life than having
their best life now, Osteen will surely disappoint.
Footnotes
1 C. S. Lewis, “Answers to
Questions on Christianity”, God in the Dock (DATA), 58
[back to text]
2 C. S. Lewis, “Christian
Apologetics,” God in the Dock, 91 [back to text]
3 C. S. Lewis,
“Cross-Examination,” God in the Dock, 261 [back to text]
4 Karl Barth, Church
Dogmatics, IV/3.2, 803 [back to text]
Read other essays in this collection:
For additional resources on this subject visit Dr. Horton's national radio broadcast website: The White Horse Inn >>
Ó 2007
Westminster Seminary California All rights reserved
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