The Happiness of God

According to the glorious gospel of the blessed God, which was committed to my trust. (1 Timothy 1:11)

Ask most people to picture the face of God, and you will get a frown. A stern old man leaning over the banister of heaven, mildly displeased, waiting for the music to stop. Even believers carry that picture further than they would admit. We will readily grant that God is holy, sovereign, and just, and we somehow leave the room before anyone says He is happy. The Apostle Paul, however, says it without hesitation.

Consider the word blessed in this text. It is not some fancy, stained-glass decoration. It actually means happy. The happy God. Paul has just finished cataloguing the ugliest sins a man can commit, and when he reaches for the standard those sins offend against, he doesn’t name the angry God or the God who watches closely, but the blessed God, the God of gladness that cannot be spoiled.

The blessed God. Here is a truth we rarely sit with. Before there was a world to govern or a sinner to save, before the first morning, God was perfectly and infinitely happy. The Father, the Son, and the Spirit dwelt in a fellowship of joy that needed nothing and no one added to it. God did not make the world because He was lonely or bored or short of something. He was already full. He has never had a restless moment, never been anxious about the outcome, never once been less than completely glad in Himself, according to Scripture.

That changes the kind of God you are dealing with. A needy God would use you, and maybe a bored God would toy with you. But the God of Scripture, who is already and forever happy in Himself has nothing He must get from you, which means everything He does toward you is sheer overflow. He did not save you to fill a hole in Himself. And while I’m at it, you do not have a “God-shaped hole in your heart that only He can fill”. But that’s for another time. He saved you to share a fullness.

Psalm 16:11 tells us that “in your presence there is fullness of joy; at your right hand are pleasures forevermore.” Notice where the joy is kept. Not in better circumstances or in a changed world, but in His presence. The happiness of God is not a mood you hope to catch Him in on a good day. It is the climate of the place where He is, and heaven is simply being brought inside that climate at long last.

We who love the sovereignty of God ought to be the last people on earth to preach Him as grim, but too often we are the first. We can describe a God who rules every atom and molecule and never once let a glad word cross our lips while we do it. But a sovereign who is not happy is only a tyrant with good aim. The God of Scripture rules all things and rejoices over His people with singing. He does His work, as the old writers loved to say, with infinite delight.

And this is why our joy and His are not, in the end, two separate things. When the master in the parable welcomes the faithful servant, he does not say, here is your reward, take it and go. Oh no. He says, enter into the joy of your master. (Matthew 25:21) Did you get that? The reward is His own happiness, thrown open. Salvation, in the end, is being brought inside the gladness God has enjoyed from eternity. Your little candle of joy was always meant to be carried into that furnace and lost in its blaze.

So when the lust of sin tempts you today with its small, anxious pleasures, remember what it is asking you to trade. It offers you a thimble and asks you to turn your back on the ocean. Now in real life, and I tell my wife this, mankind has no business being in the ocean without a good boat, where the inhabitants of the ocean live. It’s their home, and some of them will eat you. You don’t want that. But the deepest tragedy of sin is not merely that it breaks a rule. It is that it walks out on the happiest Being in existence to go chase scraps. Come back to the blessed God. He is not grudging. He is glad, and He means to make you glad in Him forever. We need to and must stop fighting that.

Our God is the happy God, and in His presence is fullness of joy. Yes, Lord. Bring us all the way in.