If God Is Happy, Why Does He Seem Angry?

00:00:00.000 | Sheldon writes in to ask, "I would consider myself a Christian hedonist and I'm familiar

00:00:09.040 | with the scriptures that extol God's own happiness. However, when I observe God interacting with

00:00:14.720 | humans in scripture, such as Jesus in the Gospels, or God with Israel in the Old Testament,

00:00:20.040 | He often does not come across as outwardly happy. Am I just reading it wrong? Was Jesus'

00:00:25.280 | time on earth just full of hardship? How can I address this seeming disconnect between

00:00:29.880 | biblical theology that exclaims God's full unending joy and biblical observations of

00:00:34.880 | God in His actions, His speech, His behavior, that seem to show Him as not all that abounding

00:00:40.660 | in joy?" Professor John, what do you say?

00:00:43.560 | Well, Sheldon, I found this to be one of the most provocative questions I've heard, had

00:00:49.160 | in a long time. This really forced me to ponder some things that I hadn't thought of before,

00:00:56.000 | so thank you. It's just a great example of how asking questions is the key to going deeper

00:01:06.240 | in the Bible than what we think. So, I don't know that I have the answer here, but I'll

00:01:11.480 | tell you what I've been thinking about. Let's start with the truth that we Christians are

00:01:19.100 | joyful and sorrowful at the same time. 2 Corinthians 6:10, "Sorrowful yet always rejoicing." Even

00:01:28.120 | though the Bible says, "Rejoice always," and surely God rejoices always, we sorrow often,

00:01:37.360 | maybe always, because it's always something to be sad about, without losing our joy. Now,

00:01:43.840 | I think it's this way with God. God can be grieved, Ephesians 4. He's angry, and He sympathizes

00:01:53.960 | with the sorrowful, weeps with those who weep, even while laughing at the wicked, Psalm 2,

00:02:01.520 | and rejoicing over sinners who repent, Luke 15. So, God is very emotionally complex, infinitely

00:02:10.280 | more so than we are, but we're emotionally complex, too, in His image. So, let me try

00:02:19.480 | an analogy of God's peaceful, joyful, Trinitarian happiness. It's like the Pacific Ocean. From

00:02:27.600 | a satellite, it is perfectly beautiful and serene and blue. You've seen those pictures,

00:02:33.400 | the blue planet. It just looks wonderful. But if you're flying in a helicopter 500 feet

00:02:40.180 | above the waves in a hurricane, the Pacific Ocean is frighteningly and terrifyingly turbulent.

00:02:51.560 | And that's the way, I think, the mind of God is. Another way to see it is that God sometimes

00:02:58.240 | looks at our lives through the narrow lens that focuses on our sin or our pain, and He

00:03:04.400 | can be angry or grieved. Jesus looked around on them with anger, grieved at their hardness

00:03:10.800 | of heart in Mark 3, I think. So, grief and anger happening together. I think God can

00:03:20.480 | feel that when He looks through the narrow lens at your life. Or, He can open the lens

00:03:25.480 | to the wider aperture and see our sin and our pain in relationship to the whole panorama

00:03:32.640 | of His millions of purposes and approve of the tapestry that He's weaving in history,

00:03:40.280 | including our own pain and sin in it, and thus rejoice over all His works. So, He can

00:03:46.720 | be looking through the wide lens and rejoicing, looking through the narrow lens and grieving

00:03:52.600 | and suffering. And my answer to the question that He's asking is that in the Bible, what

00:04:00.280 | we have mainly is a record of God dealing with us in our sin and pain and looking largely

00:04:06.240 | through the narrow lens. That's what the Bible is. It's between the fall and the consummation

00:04:13.000 | where the Bible mostly records God's interaction with man in rebellion, in sin, before the

00:04:21.040 | final day, which I think accounts for why the tone is so regularly bleak and agonizing

00:04:30.160 | and struggling and grieving and painful. There are hundreds of glimpses of God's joy

00:04:39.200 | and our joy in the age to come when we are done with sinning. But mostly, the Bible is

00:04:46.400 | the story of our sinning and God's painful and merciful dealing with it. God enters into

00:04:52.960 | our pain-filled world in Jesus, and He's called a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief.

00:05:01.880 | So He's a high priest who can sympathize with us in our sorrows and in our pain. That's

00:05:08.000 | what we would expect, is that this man who came into the world precisely to suffer is

00:05:14.800 | going to look like a sufferer almost every time we see Him, rather than a person who's

00:05:22.040 | chipper all the time, even though He went to parties and they called Him a glutton and

00:05:28.680 | a wine-bimber. He was sorrowful yet always rejoicing. So it seems to me that the very

00:05:37.360 | problem that has been raised is a good news problem. God is not distant off in His Trinitarian

00:05:46.560 | happiness, but is identifying with us in our sorrow. The God we meet in the Bible is a

00:05:54.800 | God revealing Himself, not usually as before creation in perfect Trinitarian happiness

00:06:01.800 | or after consummation when all sinning is gone and all evil has been put out of the

00:06:06.800 | universe, but God with us now, agonizing over His recalcitrant bride, Israel in the Old

00:06:16.200 | Testament and in His Son suffering for us in the New. But I would end my effort to answer

00:06:25.040 | this question, Tony, by saying, let's not forget all the places, and I have never counted

00:06:32.520 | them, but there are a lot, where God Himself reminds us, "The ransomed of the Lord shall

00:06:38.440 | return and come to Zion with singing. Everlasting joy will be upon their heads. They shall obtain

00:06:45.320 | gladness and joy, and sorrow and sighing will flee away." And that means not only ours,

00:06:51.840 | but God's identification with ours will also flee away, and there won't be any of this

00:06:57.260 | kind of cloud hanging over the universe like there is now.

00:07:01.160 | Yes, and Lord, hasten that day. Thank you, Pastor John, and thank you for listening to

00:07:05.040 | this podcast. Please email your questions to us at askpastorjohn@desiringgod.org. You

00:07:12.280 | will find thousands of free books, articles, sermons, and other resources from John Piper.

00:07:16.600 | I'm your host Tony Reinke. Thanks for listening.

00:07:18.360 | 1

00:07:19.360 | 1

00:07:20.360 | 1

00:07:21.360 | 1

00:07:22.360 | 1

00:07:23.360 | 1

00:07:24.360 | 1

00:07:25.360 | 1

00:07:26.360 | 1

00:07:27.360 | 1