Is Happiness Different from Joy?

00:00:00.000 | (upbeat music)

00:00:02.580 | - This week, Randy Alcorn joins us on the telephone.

00:00:08.320 | Randy, thank you for setting aside some time

00:00:10.720 | to sit in on the Ask Pastor John podcast for a few days.

00:00:14.160 | - Well, it's a pleasure, Tony.

00:00:15.600 | Great to be with you.

00:00:17.480 | - Randy is a friend of ours

00:00:18.640 | and a pretty well-known author to boot,

00:00:20.840 | and his new book is titled Happiness.

00:00:23.240 | It is a book that is encyclopedic.

00:00:26.360 | I love it.

00:00:27.180 | I love those kind of books.

00:00:28.080 | And spoiler alert, his new book, Happiness,

00:00:30.940 | will be my selection for the book of the year 2015,

00:00:35.100 | for whatever that's worth.

00:00:36.580 | - Ah, it's worth a lot to me.

00:00:38.100 | - Well, thank you, Randy.

00:00:39.660 | It was a very easy choice for me,

00:00:41.860 | and it's just about everything you ever wanted to know

00:00:44.660 | about a Christian understanding of happiness,

00:00:46.540 | as told by scripture and a long line of preachers

00:00:50.300 | and theologians throughout church history.

00:00:52.180 | It's really wonderful.

00:00:53.160 | I'm grateful for it.

00:00:54.220 | - Well, thank you.

00:00:55.460 | - Oh, certainly.

00:00:56.300 | Randy, as you know, there's a longstanding division

00:01:00.580 | in Protestant theology that goes something like this.

00:01:03.500 | Happiness is a bubbly and superficial

00:01:06.880 | and circumstantial feeling that comes and goes.

00:01:10.440 | Joy, however, is a deep-seated and enduring affection.

00:01:14.640 | We see this dichotomy in books,

00:01:18.020 | and we hear this in sermons all the time.

00:01:20.100 | Joy and happiness are fundamentally different,

00:01:23.100 | and yet you wrote your book to refute that discrepancy.

00:01:26.260 | So in summary fashion, how should Christians rightly think

00:01:29.900 | about happiness and joy as synonyms?

00:01:33.140 | - Well, I think the first thing we need to realize

00:01:34.940 | is that historically there was no such distinction

00:01:38.780 | in the church and in the English language.

00:01:40.660 | You simply look up a secular dictionary,

00:01:44.740 | Webster's Dictionary, and you'll see joy defined

00:01:48.020 | as happiness, happiness defined as joy.

00:01:51.820 | They're synonyms.

00:01:52.940 | They have overlapping meanings.

00:01:55.420 | Biblically, I've asked people,

00:01:57.460 | "Could you show me any passage that suggests

00:02:00.700 | "some contrast or even substantial difference

00:02:04.900 | "between happiness and joy?"

00:02:06.740 | And there just is no such thing.

00:02:08.300 | What I did was I used the Logos Bible software

00:02:11.180 | that we're both familiar with,

00:02:12.300 | and I went through the Puritans and Spurgeon and Wesley

00:02:16.700 | and found the words joy and happiness used

00:02:20.960 | in close proximity within five, six, seven words

00:02:24.620 | of each other and found again and again and again,

00:02:27.780 | they were used synonymously.

00:02:29.500 | I mean, completely interchangeably.

00:02:32.220 | Example of that, Jonathan Edwards cites John 15, 11,

00:02:36.580 | that Jesus' joy might remain in you.

00:02:38.780 | To prove this point, that quote,

00:02:42.460 | "The happiness Christ gives to his people

00:02:44.660 | "is a participation of his own happiness," end quote.

00:02:47.860 | He didn't have to say, and by happiness,

00:02:50.260 | I actually mean joy.

00:02:52.060 | I mean, well, of course that's what he meant.

00:02:54.980 | And Richard Baxter said, "The day of death

00:02:58.640 | "is to true believers a day of happiness and joy."

00:03:02.980 | And William Law spoke of the happiness of a lively faith,

00:03:06.780 | a joyful hope.

00:03:08.340 | And Spurgeon, again and again, he said,

00:03:10.920 | "The more often I preach,

00:03:12.040 | "the more joy I found in the happy service."

00:03:14.820 | And he said, "Despite your tribulation,

00:03:16.400 | "take full delight in God,

00:03:18.220 | "your exceeding joy this morning, and be happy in him."

00:03:22.060 | And he started off one sermon,

00:03:23.500 | "Oh, cheerful, happy, joyous people,

00:03:26.220 | "I wish there were more of you.

00:03:28.060 | "Let the uppermost joy you have

00:03:30.500 | "always be Jesus Christ himself."

00:03:33.260 | And then one other Spurgeon,

00:03:35.000 | "May you so come, and then may your Christian life

00:03:38.620 | "be fraught with happiness and overflowing with joy."

00:03:42.020 | So this is just a really recent thing that developed.

00:03:46.700 | And actually, one of the first people I found

00:03:49.860 | who really spoke out against happiness

00:03:53.300 | and contrasted it with joy was Oswald Chambers.

00:03:57.200 | And I love Oswald Chambers.

00:03:58.420 | I mean, "My Atmosphere is Highest,"

00:04:00.020 | great book and other books that he wrote.

00:04:02.060 | But it's just pretty startling,

00:04:04.380 | some of the things that he said

00:04:06.340 | that were so dramatically anti-happiness.

00:04:10.060 | But if you look at different Bible translations,

00:04:13.420 | there's actually more than 100 verses in Scripture

00:04:16.140 | in various Bible translations.

00:04:17.780 | Now, I'm not talking about paraphrases like the message,

00:04:21.380 | but actual Bible translations

00:04:23.220 | with teams of Hebrew and Greek scholars

00:04:25.800 | that also are English experts.

00:04:27.860 | And then they use happiness and joy together

00:04:31.780 | in these 100-plus verses.

00:04:34.260 | And for instance, in the NIV,

00:04:36.940 | "For the Jews, it was a time of happiness and joy,

00:04:39.640 | "gladness and honor," in Esther 8:16,

00:04:42.620 | or the Holman in Jeremiah 31,

00:04:45.780 | "I will turn their mourning into joy

00:04:48.080 | "and bring happiness out of grief,"

00:04:49.980 | or the NLT, "Give your father and mother joy.

00:04:54.100 | "May she who gave you birth be happy."

00:04:57.740 | And there's just all of these examples

00:05:00.300 | that go on and on in an English translation.

00:05:02.260 | "You, O Lord, have made me happy by your work.

00:05:04.880 | "I will sing for joy because what you've done,"

00:05:07.300 | Psalm 92, 4, or Psalm 32, 11,

00:05:10.540 | "Rejoice in the Lord and be happy, you who are godly."

00:05:14.100 | And so it's just a really false affirmation

00:05:19.100 | that happiness and joy are fundamentally different.

00:05:24.060 | John Piper writes about this very thing.

00:05:27.900 | If you have nice little categories

00:05:29.620 | for joy is what Christians have

00:05:31.440 | and happiness is what the world has,

00:05:33.540 | you can scrap those when you go to the Bible

00:05:36.100 | because the Bible is indiscriminate

00:05:38.140 | in its uses of the language of happiness and joy

00:05:41.300 | and contentment and satisfaction.

00:05:43.860 | And John Erickson Tata says similar things.

00:05:46.940 | She says, "Scripture uses the terms interchangeably

00:05:50.220 | "along with words like delight, gladness, blessed.

00:05:53.040 | "There is no scale of relative spiritual values

00:05:55.580 | "applied to any of these."

00:05:57.300 | I just think it's absolutely true

00:05:59.340 | and it's one of those things that we need to say,

00:06:01.980 | look, don't talk of joy as this unemotional,

00:06:06.060 | transcendent thing and happiness as this worldly thing

00:06:09.780 | because when we do that, we are pushing people

00:06:13.380 | who all seek happiness away from the gospel.

00:06:16.820 | Scripture says in the ESV and the NASB both,

00:06:20.860 | translates Isaiah 52.7 in the early context

00:06:25.860 | of Messiah's redemptive work in that great passage,

00:06:30.440 | it calls the gospel, quote, "The good news of happiness."

00:06:35.440 | - And you yourself did the lexical work

00:06:39.080 | behind all of this.

00:06:40.140 | I mean, how many Greek and Hebrew terms did you study?

00:06:43.060 | - I think there were about 22 primary Hebrew words

00:06:48.940 | and about 15 primary Greek words, all interchangeable.

00:06:53.940 | I mean, it's just amazing.

00:06:56.380 | You'll have, especially in Hebrew,

00:06:58.420 | in the parallelisms and the Psalms,

00:07:00.860 | you have these different Hebrew words,

00:07:03.880 | sometimes four different Hebrew words

00:07:06.500 | for happiness or gladness used in the same verse.

00:07:10.080 | And it's just like we do in English,

00:07:13.120 | if we say it's a bright, beautiful, sunny day,

00:07:17.280 | the sky is blue, we're not saying

00:07:19.200 | a bunch of different things,

00:07:20.280 | we're saying the same thing in different words.

00:07:22.600 | - Yeah.

00:07:24.240 | You mentioned Oswald Chambers distinguishing happiness

00:07:27.240 | from joy and it's problematic, of course.

00:07:29.560 | His impulse and others is to distinguish Christian joy,

00:07:33.720 | it seems, from non-Christian happiness.

00:07:36.880 | So if we use the same language of happiness and joy,

00:07:39.440 | how do we make this distinction clear

00:07:41.360 | between the joy of the Christian

00:07:43.200 | and the joy of the non-Christian?

00:07:46.160 | - Well, it's interesting that in Acts 14, 17,

00:07:49.940 | the Apostle Paul, who's speaking to unbelievers,

00:07:52.360 | I think it was at Lystra, said,

00:07:54.580 | "He did not," said of God,

00:07:56.600 | "He did not leave himself without a witness,

00:07:59.720 | "since he did what is good by giving you rain from heaven

00:08:03.780 | "and fruitful seasons and satisfying your hearts

00:08:07.280 | "with food and happiness."

00:08:09.440 | And some translations say gladness,

00:08:11.440 | they could say joy, whatever.

00:08:14.200 | But what he's saying is in God's common grace,

00:08:17.680 | he gives provisions such as food and even happiness

00:08:22.680 | to unbelievers.

00:08:24.760 | So an unbeliever being made in God's image,

00:08:28.000 | even under the fall and under the curse,

00:08:30.280 | can have a certain taste of happiness.

00:08:34.200 | So I think what Paul was doing

00:08:35.560 | was building a bridge to the gospel

00:08:37.360 | through identifying God as the universal source of happiness.

00:08:40.520 | But yes, of course, there is a significant difference

00:08:43.240 | between the happiness of believers and unbelievers.

00:08:45.940 | David spoke of people whose reward is in this life

00:08:51.600 | in Psalm 17 and a number of the Psalms,

00:08:54.560 | and Abraham spoke to the rich man in hell saying,

00:08:58.320 | "Remember that in your lifetime

00:08:59.980 | "you received your good things."

00:09:02.240 | And what he's saying there is you had your opportunity

00:09:07.240 | and God in his common grace

00:09:09.520 | gave you an experience of good things,

00:09:11.080 | including taste of happiness,

00:09:13.380 | but they are over now that you have died

00:09:17.600 | because God is the primary source of happiness

00:09:21.800 | and the world is full of secondary

00:09:25.040 | reference points of happiness.

00:09:27.160 | But even the atheist, when he takes a walk in the woods

00:09:31.800 | and sees the beauty and he just marvels at it,

00:09:34.840 | and he may in his own way celebrate the beauty

00:09:38.400 | and see a deer and just marvel at this,

00:09:42.600 | the happiness he is experiencing

00:09:44.940 | is coming from the hand of God.

00:09:47.280 | The fact that he doesn't believe in God

00:09:49.400 | doesn't change the fact that God

00:09:51.080 | is the only source of happiness.

00:09:53.360 | Tragically, however, if he dies in his atheism

00:09:56.560 | and he goes to hell,

00:09:58.780 | hell is the one place in the universe

00:10:00.960 | where God is not present except in his wrath,

00:10:05.960 | and as a result, he is cut off from happiness.

00:10:09.520 | So no God, no happiness.

00:10:12.240 | No God, no good.

00:10:14.120 | David Murray, who we both appreciate,

00:10:18.400 | identifies six different kinds of happiness.

00:10:21.080 | He talks about nature happiness, social happiness,

00:10:23.400 | vocational happiness, physical happiness,

00:10:25.880 | intellectual happiness, humor happiness,

00:10:28.000 | and really all of those in God's common grace

00:10:30.680 | are available except the final one,

00:10:33.800 | which David calls spiritual happiness.

00:10:37.840 | And he calls it a joy that at times

00:10:39.880 | contains more pleasure and delight

00:10:42.000 | than the other six put together.

00:10:44.880 | And that's the thing that you can't have

00:10:48.960 | until your sins are forgiven

00:10:51.480 | and you are reconciled to God

00:10:53.040 | and you're made right with him.

00:10:54.680 | And that's why Psalm 32,

00:10:57.400 | using the Hebrew word asher,

00:10:59.000 | a very common word that means happy,

00:11:02.500 | says happy is the man whose sins are forgiven.

00:11:07.960 | And then in verse two,

00:11:08.920 | happy is the one whose transgressions

00:11:12.000 | are not counted against him.

00:11:14.120 | Now you're made right with God,

00:11:16.400 | you have a deep reality-based happiness.

00:11:21.400 | It's based upon the truth that you are made right

00:11:27.640 | with the happy God of scripture

00:11:29.920 | who created you and wired you to be happy.

00:11:33.080 | But up until now, up until your sins are forgiven,

00:11:36.360 | you've been trying to satisfy your happiness

00:11:39.800 | and find it in all of these cul-de-sacs

00:11:42.680 | and dead-end streets, but now you truly found it in God.

00:11:47.680 | And when you find it in God,

00:11:50.680 | then you can look at nature

00:11:53.660 | and have greater pleasure in it.

00:11:56.320 | It's what Lewis talked about

00:11:57.880 | with the first things and the second things.

00:11:59.720 | If you put the second things first,

00:12:01.180 | then you lose in many ways the value

00:12:04.280 | of those second things.

00:12:05.640 | But if you put the first things first,

00:12:07.640 | and the first thing is really the first person who's God,

00:12:10.920 | then everything else falls in place.

00:12:14.400 | - Yeah, and as Chesterton said,

00:12:16.680 | "The atheist sees beauty, but has no one to thank,

00:12:19.280 | "thus no one to be happy in."

00:12:22.000 | - Yes, exactly.

00:12:23.720 | - Randy Alcorn, thank you for your time.

00:12:25.180 | We're talking about Randy Alcorn's new book,

00:12:27.040 | "Happiness," my pick for the book of the year in 2015.

00:12:30.320 | Check it out tomorrow.

00:12:31.280 | We return and I'll ask Randy,

00:12:33.360 | if God is so happy,

00:12:34.440 | why does he seem so bad-tempered in the Bible?

00:12:38.200 | I'm your host, Tony Reinke.

00:12:39.200 | I'll see you tomorrow.

00:12:40.300 | (upbeat music)

00:12:42.880 | (upbeat music)

00:12:45.460 | [BLANK_AUDIO]

Is Happiness Different from Joy?

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