If God Is Joyful, Why Does He Seem So Mad?
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00:00:05.000 | Podcast listener Sheldon writes in to ask this,
00:00:08.000 | "I would consider myself a Christian hedonist, and I'm familiar with the scriptures that extol God's own happiness.
00:00:13.000 | However, when I observe God interacting with humans in scripture, such as Jesus in the Gospels, or God with Israel in the Old Testament,
00:00:20.000 | He often does not come across as outwardly happy.
00:00:23.000 | Am I just reading it wrong? Was Jesus' time on earth just full of hardship?
00:00:27.000 | How can I address this seeming disconnect between biblical theology that exclaims God's full unending joy,
00:00:34.000 | with this biblical observation of God in His actions, His speech, His behavior, that seem to show Him as not all that abounding in joy?"
00:00:42.000 | Pastor John, what would you say?
00:00:44.000 | Well, Sheldon, I found this to be one of the most provocative questions I've heard, had in a long time.
00:00:52.000 | This really forced me to ponder some things that I hadn't thought of before, so thank you.
00:00:59.000 | It's just a great example of how asking questions is the key to going deeper in the Bible and what we think.
00:01:09.000 | So, I don't know that I have the answer here, but I'll tell you what I've been thinking about.
00:01:15.000 | Let's start with the truth that we Christians are joyful and sorrowful at the same time.
00:01:25.000 | 2 Corinthians 6:10, "Sorrowful yet always rejoicing."
00:01:29.000 | Even though the Bible says, "Rejoice always, and surely God rejoices always,"
00:01:35.000 | we sorrow often, maybe always, because it's always something to be sad about, without losing our joy.
00:01:45.000 | Now, I think it's this way with God.
00:01:48.000 | God can be grieved, Ephesians 4.
00:01:51.000 | He's angry, and He sympathizes with the sorrowful, weeps with those who weep,
00:01:59.000 | even while laughing at the wicked, Psalm 2, and rejoicing over sinners who repent, Luke 15.
00:02:07.000 | So God is very emotionally complex, infinitely more so than we are, but we're emotionally complex, too, in His image.
00:02:17.000 | So, let me try an analogy of God's peaceful, joyful, Trinitarian happiness.
00:02:26.000 | It's like the Pacific Ocean.
00:02:29.000 | From a satellite, it is perfectly beautiful and serene and blue.
00:02:34.000 | You've seen those pictures, the blue planet.
00:02:36.000 | It just looks wonderful.
00:02:39.000 | But if you're flying in a helicopter 500 feet above the waves in a hurricane,
00:02:44.000 | the Pacific Ocean is frighteningly and terrifyingly turbulent.
00:02:52.000 | And that's the way, I think, the mind of God is.
00:02:57.000 | 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,
00:03:06.000 | and He can be angry or grieved.
00:03:08.000 | It's that Jesus looked around on them with anger, grieved at their hardness of heart in Mark 3, I think.
00:03:16.000 | So grief and anger happening together.
00:03:20.000 | I think God can feel that when He looks through the narrow lens at your life.
00:03:25.000 | Or He can open the lens to the wider aperture and see our sin and our pain in relationship to the whole panorama of His millions of purposes
00:03:37.000 | and approve of the tapestry that He's weaving in history, including our own pain and sin in it,
00:03:45.000 | and thus rejoice over all His works.
00:03:48.000 | So He can be looking through the wide lens and rejoicing, looking through the narrow lens and grieving and suffering.
00:03:55.000 | And my answer to the question that he's asking is that in the Bible,
00:04:01.000 | what we have mainly is a record of God dealing with us in our sin and pain and looking largely through the narrow lens.
00:04:09.000 | That's what the Bible is.
00:04:10.000 | It's between the fall and the consummation where the Bible mostly records God's interaction with man in rebellion,
00:04:20.000 | 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.
00:04:36.000 | There are hundreds of glimpses of God's joy and our joy in the age to come when we are done with sinning.
00:04:46.000 | But mostly the Bible is the story of our sinning and God's painful and merciful dealing with it.
00:04:53.000 | God enters into our pain-filled world in Jesus, and He's called a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief.
00:05:03.000 | So He's a high priest who can sympathize with us in our sorrows and in our pain.
00:05:09.000 | I mean, that's what we would expect is that this man who came into the world precisely to suffer is going to look like a sufferer
00:05:18.000 | almost every time we see him rather than a person who's chipper all the time,
00:05:25.000 | even though he went to parties and they called him a glutton and a wine-bibber.
00:05:33.000 | He was sorrowful yet always rejoicing.
00:05:37.000 | So it seems to me that the very problem that has been raised is a good news problem.
00:05:45.000 | God is not distant off in His Trinitarian happiness but is identifying with us in our sorrow.
00:05:55.000 | The God we meet in the Bible is a God revealing Himself not usually as before creation in perfect Trinitarian happiness
00:06:04.000 | or after consummation when all sinning is gone and all evil has been put out of the universe,
00:06:10.000 | but God with us now agonizing over His recalcitrant bride Israel in the Old Testament
00:06:19.000 | and in His Son suffering for us in the new.
00:06:24.000 | But I would end my effort to answer this question, Tony, by saying,
00:06:29.000 | let's not forget all the places, and I have never counted them, but there are a lot,
00:06:36.000 | where God Himself reminds us, "The ransomed of the Lord shall return and come to Zion with singing.
00:06:43.000 | Everlasting joy will be upon their heads.
00:06:46.000 | They shall obtain gladness and joy and sorrow and sighing will flee away."
00:06:51.000 | And that means not only ours, but God's identification with ours will also flee away,
00:06:57.000 | and there won't be any of this kind of cloud hanging over the universe like there is now.
00:07:03.000 | Yes, and Lord hasten that day. Thank you, Pastor John, and thank you for listening to this podcast.
00:07:07.000 | Please email us your questions at askpastorjohn@desiringgod.org.
00:07:12.000 | At desiringgod.org you'll find thousands of books, articles, sermons, and other resources from John Piper,
00:07:16.000 | all free of charge to you.
00:07:18.000 | Well, we talk a lot about the glory of God here at Desiring God, but what exactly is God's glory?
00:07:24.000 | Pastor John will help us get at a definition tomorrow.
00:07:28.000 | I'm your host, Tony Reinke. Thanks for listening to the Ask Pastor John podcast.
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