Happiness Is Not Trivial

(Found here)

“…Our longing for happiness is hardwired into us. By God.

God created human beings for happiness. That’s what God provided and promised Adam and Eve. The only thing he originally forbade them was a choice that would destroy their happiness (Genesis 2:16). Even the deception that enticed them to choose what God forbade was a false promise of greater happiness (Genesis 3:4–6).

Seeking happiness is not sinful. Sin is seeking happiness apart from or in defiance of God.

But doesn’t this make an idol out of happiness? By elevating and encouraging the pursuit of happiness, are we making it a competitor with God?

While a particular pursuit of happiness might indeed be idolatrous, to contrast the experience of happiness itself with God is a confusion of categories. John Piper brings helpful clarity:

‘When I say I desire happiness, I mean, “I want to be happy.” But when I say, I desire a biscuit, I do not mean, “I want to be a biscuit.” Happiness is not an object to be desired. It is the experience of the object.

So it may not be idolatry to say, I want happiness more than I want any other experience. God is not in the category of “experience,” and so you are not ranking him. You are (know it or not) preparing to find him.

Idolatry is not wanting happiness supremely. Idolatry is finding supreme happiness in anything other than God.’

This is why C. S. Lewis said, ‘It is a Christian duty, as you know, for everyone to be as happy as he can’ (A Severe Mercy, 189). He, like all the great saints of Scripture and history, knew the ‘unblushing promises of reward’ — of the happiness God holds out to us throughout the Bible. And that these are not invitations to idolatry, but to true worship. For our greatest pleasure is always the measure of our greatest treasure.

Everyone everywhere seeks this profound happiness. But sooner or later, we all come to the realization that the happiness we most want isn’t found in anything on earth. We have an inconsolable longing deep in our souls. We hear this longing in the Preacher’s ancient lament of ‘Vanity!’ (Ecclesiastes 1:1–11) and in David Foster Wallace’s modern lament, ‘We’re all lonely for something we don’t know we’re lonely for’ (Infinite Jest, 1053, note 281).

But the inconsolable nature of this longing is a clue, as Pascal says,

‘What is it then that this desire and this inability [to realize the good we long for] proclaim to us, but that there was once in man a true happiness of which there now remain to him only the mark and empty trace, which he in vain tries to fill from all his surroundings, seeking from things absent the help he does not obtain in things present? But these are all inadequate, because the infinite abyss can only be filled by an infinite and immutable object, that is to say, only by God himself.’ (Pensées, Loc. 2049)

The whole of Scripture bears witness to this: that only in God is ‘fullness of joy’ and ‘pleasures forevermore’ (Psalm 16:11); that besides him, apart from him, there is nothing worth desiring, nothing that will bring satisfaction, on earth (Psalm 73:25); that only in God will our restless, happiness-seeking souls find rest (Psalm 62:5–7; Matthew 11:28–30). Only the infinite God can fill our infinite abyss.”
~Jon Bloom