Sheldon writes in to ask, "I would consider myself a Christian hedonist and I'm familiar with the scriptures that extol God's own happiness. However, when I observe God interacting with humans in scripture, such as Jesus in the Gospels, or God with Israel in the Old Testament, He often does not come across as outwardly happy.

Am I just reading it wrong? Was Jesus' time on earth just full of hardship? How can I address this seeming disconnect between biblical theology that exclaims God's full unending joy and biblical observations of God in His actions, His speech, His behavior, that seem to show Him as not all that abounding in joy?" Professor John, what do you say?

Well, Sheldon, I found this to be one of the most provocative questions I've heard, had in a long time. This really forced me to ponder some things that I hadn't thought of before, so thank you. It's just a great example of how asking questions is the key to going deeper in the Bible than what we think.

So, I don't know that I have the answer here, but I'll tell you what I've been thinking about. Let's start with the truth that we Christians are joyful and sorrowful at the same time. 2 Corinthians 6:10, "Sorrowful yet always rejoicing." Even though the Bible says, "Rejoice always," and surely God rejoices always, we sorrow often, maybe always, because it's always something to be sad about, without losing our joy.

Now, I think it's this way with God. God can be grieved, Ephesians 4. He's angry, and He sympathizes with the sorrowful, weeps with those who weep, even while laughing at the wicked, Psalm 2, and rejoicing over sinners who repent, Luke 15. So, God is very emotionally complex, infinitely more so than we are, but we're emotionally complex, too, in His image.

So, let me try an analogy of God's peaceful, joyful, Trinitarian happiness. It's like the Pacific Ocean. From a satellite, it is perfectly beautiful and serene and blue. You've seen those pictures, the blue planet. It just looks wonderful. But if you're flying in a helicopter 500 feet above the waves in a hurricane, the Pacific Ocean is frighteningly and terrifyingly turbulent.

And that's the way, I think, the mind of God is. 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, and He can be angry or grieved. Jesus looked around on them with anger, grieved at their hardness of heart in Mark 3, I think.

So, grief and anger happening together. I think God can feel that when He looks through the narrow lens at your life. 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 and approve of the tapestry that He's weaving in history, including our own pain and sin in it, and thus rejoice over all His works.

So, He can be looking through the wide lens and rejoicing, looking through the narrow lens and grieving and suffering. And my answer to the question that He's asking is that in the Bible, what we have mainly is a record of God dealing with us in our sin and pain and looking largely through the narrow lens.

That's what the Bible is. It's between the fall and the consummation where the Bible mostly records God's interaction with man in rebellion, 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. There are hundreds of glimpses of God's joy and our joy in the age to come when we are done with sinning.

But mostly, the Bible is the story of our sinning and God's painful and merciful dealing with it. God enters into our pain-filled world in Jesus, and He's called a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief. So He's a high priest who can sympathize with us in our sorrows and in our pain.

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 almost every time we see Him, rather than a person who's chipper all the time, even though He went to parties and they called Him a glutton and a wine-bimber.

He was sorrowful yet always rejoicing. So it seems to me that the very problem that has been raised is a good news problem. God is not distant off in His Trinitarian happiness, but is identifying with us in our sorrow. The God we meet in the Bible is a God revealing Himself, not usually as before creation in perfect Trinitarian happiness or after consummation when all sinning is gone and all evil has been put out of the universe, but God with us now, agonizing over His recalcitrant bride, Israel in the Old Testament and in His Son suffering for us in the New.

But I would end my effort to answer this question, Tony, by saying, let's not forget all the places, and I have never counted them, but there are a lot, where God Himself reminds us, "The ransomed of the Lord shall return and come to Zion with singing. Everlasting joy will be upon their heads.

They shall obtain gladness and joy, and sorrow and sighing will flee away." And that means not only ours, but God's identification with ours will also flee away, and there won't be any of this kind of cloud hanging over the universe like there is now. Yes, and Lord, hasten that day.

Thank you, Pastor John, and thank you for listening to this podcast. Please email your questions to us at askpastorjohn@desiringgod.org. You will find thousands of free books, articles, sermons, and other resources from John Piper. I'm your host Tony Reinke. Thanks for listening. 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1