Finding Happiness

One of the most forgotten of the greatest Biblical themes is that God created the human body.

God made us to have desire for food, pleasure in sex and a drive to be ambitious. He made us to be attracted to other humans, to find babies adorable and to be angry at injustice. Gathering in communities, gardening, governing, and having possessions are all a part of God’s plan. They are all a part of God’s created order.

God wants us to have a happy life. This is what salvation is about. To be able to live, contentedly, in God’s created order, with everything we need. Life should be simple, graspable and joyful. This is the basis of salvation, what God offers every human being.

However, God didn’t only make us to be happy, for happiness is a goal, but it is not the whole of what is being human. Yes, God made us to have pleasure, but He also made us to feel depression. God made us to govern, but He also made us with fear. God made us to be attracted to that which is deeply unlike ourselves. He also made us with the capacity for boredom, so that when we finally find the perfect, we find it ultimately insufficient.

Within our own nature is our own demise. God created us to desire happiness. But he also made us inadequate to the task of obtaining it. We are incomplete, self-contradictory. Every time we discover our happiness—we fall in love, we take a bite of the perfect food, we accomplish our most important goals, we hear a song that matches our souls—within that happiness we find a blemish. And that blemish grows until our unhappiness becomes greater than our original happiness. Then we must go on an odyssey for the next happiness. The search never ends.

So we have to find something complex that will fulfill our needs. We usually find that in a societal complex. Perhaps a job, perhaps a family, a church, an intellectual community, a government. It takes us some time to run the gauntlet of any complexes. And we find happiness for a time. But in the end, our assurance that we have truly found happiness in the community rings empty in our ears.

There is no food big enough to keep us happy. There is no marriage big enough to keep us happy. There is no truth big enough to keep us happy. There is no society big enough to keep us safe, give us justice, provide us pleasure, and continually grant us peace.

The world is not enough for our happiness. Peace is not to be found on earth. Only God is big enough to grant us perpetual contentment.

A lot people see Jesus as some happy pill. As if God is some kind of serotonin injection, applied directly to our brain. We must remember, God created us to be in this circumstance to begin with. God is the first to admit that our search for happiness must pass through depression, anxiety, frustration and hopelessness. And God is not directly the answer.

God, rather, is our help. God is our guide and shield. God is our hope, but not the answer in and of itself. God is our answer, who leads us to the life which is contentment. For this reason, obtaining a relationship with God is not the end, but the beginning.

God is an artist who takes trash and creates something beautiful with it. But the artist gathering trash is not the act of beautifying, in and of itself. The love of trash does not leave trash as trash. This process of creating beauty requires tearing, burning, shaping, gluing, painting, covering, protecting.

Even so, us being put into Jesus’ kingdom through baptism isn’t what makes us happy. Rather, stepping into Jesus is an acceptance of the process that God puts us through. The end of this process is our peace, our happiness. But before this process is over, we must delve deep into a broken heart, tears of repentance, severed relationships, acceptance of other’s hatred, moving from our home, struggling with temptation, surrender of our possessions, anger at injustice, and the shame of mockery.

This is the human condition. And by God’s direction, we will obtain His goal for us—happiness, contentment, peace. If we would but accept this. As long as we can live for a time with just hope. Only with that grasping at straws will we ever experience the reality.

Let us turn to God, and ask for help. Allow that help to lead us through the valley of the shadow of death, as long as His staff leads us. Surrender to Him and so let suffer for the joy set before us.