(upbeat music) - This week, Randy Alcorn joins us on the telephone. Randy, thank you for setting aside some time to sit in on the Ask Pastor John podcast for a few days. - Well, it's a pleasure, Tony. Great to be with you. - Randy is a friend of ours and a pretty well-known author to boot, and his new book is titled Happiness.

It is a book that is encyclopedic. I love it. I love those kind of books. And spoiler alert, his new book, Happiness, will be my selection for the book of the year 2015, for whatever that's worth. - Ah, it's worth a lot to me. - Well, thank you, Randy.

It was a very easy choice for me, and it's just about everything you ever wanted to know about a Christian understanding of happiness, as told by scripture and a long line of preachers and theologians throughout church history. It's really wonderful. I'm grateful for it. - Well, thank you. - Oh, certainly.

Randy, as you know, there's a longstanding division in Protestant theology that goes something like this. Happiness is a bubbly and superficial and circumstantial feeling that comes and goes. Joy, however, is a deep-seated and enduring affection. We see this dichotomy in books, and we hear this in sermons all the time.

Joy and happiness are fundamentally different, and yet you wrote your book to refute that discrepancy. So in summary fashion, how should Christians rightly think about happiness and joy as synonyms? - Well, I think the first thing we need to realize is that historically there was no such distinction in the church and in the English language.

You simply look up a secular dictionary, Webster's Dictionary, and you'll see joy defined as happiness, happiness defined as joy. They're synonyms. They have overlapping meanings. Biblically, I've asked people, "Could you show me any passage that suggests "some contrast or even substantial difference "between happiness and joy?" And there just is no such thing.

What I did was I used the Logos Bible software that we're both familiar with, and I went through the Puritans and Spurgeon and Wesley and found the words joy and happiness used in close proximity within five, six, seven words of each other and found again and again and again, they were used synonymously.

I mean, completely interchangeably. Example of that, Jonathan Edwards cites John 15, 11, that Jesus' joy might remain in you. To prove this point, that quote, "The happiness Christ gives to his people "is a participation of his own happiness," end quote. He didn't have to say, and by happiness, I actually mean joy.

I mean, well, of course that's what he meant. And Richard Baxter said, "The day of death "is to true believers a day of happiness and joy." And William Law spoke of the happiness of a lively faith, a joyful hope. And Spurgeon, again and again, he said, "The more often I preach, "the more joy I found in the happy service." And he said, "Despite your tribulation, "take full delight in God, "your exceeding joy this morning, and be happy in him." And he started off one sermon, "Oh, cheerful, happy, joyous people, "I wish there were more of you.

"Let the uppermost joy you have "always be Jesus Christ himself." And then one other Spurgeon, "May you so come, and then may your Christian life "be fraught with happiness and overflowing with joy." So this is just a really recent thing that developed. And actually, one of the first people I found who really spoke out against happiness and contrasted it with joy was Oswald Chambers.

And I love Oswald Chambers. I mean, "My Atmosphere is Highest," great book and other books that he wrote. But it's just pretty startling, some of the things that he said that were so dramatically anti-happiness. But if you look at different Bible translations, there's actually more than 100 verses in Scripture in various Bible translations.

Now, I'm not talking about paraphrases like the message, but actual Bible translations with teams of Hebrew and Greek scholars that also are English experts. And then they use happiness and joy together in these 100-plus verses. And for instance, in the NIV, "For the Jews, it was a time of happiness and joy, "gladness and honor," in Esther 8:16, or the Holman in Jeremiah 31, "I will turn their mourning into joy "and bring happiness out of grief," or the NLT, "Give your father and mother joy.

"May she who gave you birth be happy." And there's just all of these examples that go on and on in an English translation. "You, O Lord, have made me happy by your work. "I will sing for joy because what you've done," Psalm 92, 4, or Psalm 32, 11, "Rejoice in the Lord and be happy, you who are godly." And so it's just a really false affirmation that happiness and joy are fundamentally different.

John Piper writes about this very thing. If you have nice little categories for joy is what Christians have and happiness is what the world has, you can scrap those when you go to the Bible because the Bible is indiscriminate in its uses of the language of happiness and joy and contentment and satisfaction.

And John Erickson Tata says similar things. She says, "Scripture uses the terms interchangeably "along with words like delight, gladness, blessed. "There is no scale of relative spiritual values "applied to any of these." I just think it's absolutely true and it's one of those things that we need to say, look, don't talk of joy as this unemotional, transcendent thing and happiness as this worldly thing because when we do that, we are pushing people who all seek happiness away from the gospel.

Scripture says in the ESV and the NASB both, translates Isaiah 52.7 in the early context of Messiah's redemptive work in that great passage, it calls the gospel, quote, "The good news of happiness." - And you yourself did the lexical work behind all of this. I mean, how many Greek and Hebrew terms did you study?

- I think there were about 22 primary Hebrew words and about 15 primary Greek words, all interchangeable. I mean, it's just amazing. You'll have, especially in Hebrew, in the parallelisms and the Psalms, you have these different Hebrew words, sometimes four different Hebrew words for happiness or gladness used in the same verse.

And it's just like we do in English, if we say it's a bright, beautiful, sunny day, the sky is blue, we're not saying a bunch of different things, we're saying the same thing in different words. - Yeah. You mentioned Oswald Chambers distinguishing happiness from joy and it's problematic, of course.

His impulse and others is to distinguish Christian joy, it seems, from non-Christian happiness. So if we use the same language of happiness and joy, how do we make this distinction clear between the joy of the Christian and the joy of the non-Christian? - Well, it's interesting that in Acts 14, 17, the Apostle Paul, who's speaking to unbelievers, I think it was at Lystra, said, "He did not," said of God, "He did not leave himself without a witness, "since he did what is good by giving you rain from heaven "and fruitful seasons and satisfying your hearts "with food and happiness." And some translations say gladness, they could say joy, whatever.

But what he's saying is in God's common grace, he gives provisions such as food and even happiness to unbelievers. So an unbeliever being made in God's image, even under the fall and under the curse, can have a certain taste of happiness. So I think what Paul was doing was building a bridge to the gospel through identifying God as the universal source of happiness.

But yes, of course, there is a significant difference between the happiness of believers and unbelievers. David spoke of people whose reward is in this life in Psalm 17 and a number of the Psalms, and Abraham spoke to the rich man in hell saying, "Remember that in your lifetime "you received your good things." And what he's saying there is you had your opportunity and God in his common grace gave you an experience of good things, including taste of happiness, but they are over now that you have died because God is the primary source of happiness and the world is full of secondary reference points of happiness.

But even the atheist, when he takes a walk in the woods and sees the beauty and he just marvels at it, and he may in his own way celebrate the beauty and see a deer and just marvel at this, the happiness he is experiencing is coming from the hand of God.

The fact that he doesn't believe in God doesn't change the fact that God is the only source of happiness. Tragically, however, if he dies in his atheism and he goes to hell, hell is the one place in the universe where God is not present except in his wrath, and as a result, he is cut off from happiness.

So no God, no happiness. No God, no good. David Murray, who we both appreciate, identifies six different kinds of happiness. He talks about nature happiness, social happiness, vocational happiness, physical happiness, intellectual happiness, humor happiness, and really all of those in God's common grace are available except the final one, which David calls spiritual happiness.

And he calls it a joy that at times contains more pleasure and delight than the other six put together. And that's the thing that you can't have until your sins are forgiven and you are reconciled to God and you're made right with him. And that's why Psalm 32, using the Hebrew word asher, a very common word that means happy, says happy is the man whose sins are forgiven.

And then in verse two, happy is the one whose transgressions are not counted against him. Now you're made right with God, you have a deep reality-based happiness. It's based upon the truth that you are made right with the happy God of scripture who created you and wired you to be happy.

But up until now, up until your sins are forgiven, you've been trying to satisfy your happiness and find it in all of these cul-de-sacs and dead-end streets, but now you truly found it in God. And when you find it in God, then you can look at nature and have greater pleasure in it.

It's what Lewis talked about with the first things and the second things. If you put the second things first, then you lose in many ways the value of those second things. But if you put the first things first, and the first thing is really the first person who's God, then everything else falls in place.

- Yeah, and as Chesterton said, "The atheist sees beauty, but has no one to thank, "thus no one to be happy in." - Yes, exactly. - Randy Alcorn, thank you for your time. We're talking about Randy Alcorn's new book, "Happiness," my pick for the book of the year in 2015.

Check it out tomorrow. We return and I'll ask Randy, if God is so happy, why does he seem so bad-tempered in the Bible? I'm your host, Tony Reinke. I'll see you tomorrow. (upbeat music) (upbeat music)