G.K. Chesterton once said, “Joy . . . is the gigantic secret of the Christian” (Orthodoxy, 231). Christianity does not deny sadness and suffering but knows them as fleeting and temporal. From its God to its gospel to its view of man, joy rests right at the bedrock of the Christian story.
What are we to do with such a sweeping claim? It sounds too good to be true. Yet this is exactly what Christian Hedonism teaches: God made man for joy, a joy that reflects God’s own Trinitarian delight. On this account, the story of reality begins in joy and ends in joy.
But how could one verify such a massive proposal? C.S. Lewis gives us one way to test it:
Supposing you had before you a manuscript of some great work, either a symphony or a novel. There then comes to you a person, saying, “Here is a new bit of the manuscript that I found; it is the central passage of that symphony, or the central chapter of that novel. The text is incomplete without it. I have got the missing passage which is really the centre of the whole work.” The only thing you could do would be to put this new piece of the manuscript in that central position, and then see how it reacted on the whole of the rest of the work. If it constantly brought out new meanings from the whole of the rest of the work, if it made you notice things in the rest of the work which you had not noticed before, then I think you would decide that it was authentic. (“The Grand Miracle,” 77–78)
One way we can test the claim is by assuming it’s true and seeing how it lights up the rest of the story. In this article, I want to trace the theme of joy through the major acts of redemptive history: God, Creation, Fall, Redemption, New Creation. In Lewis’s words, I want to put joy in the “central position, and then see how it react[s] on the whole of the rest of the work.” I think you will see that the beauty, unity, and symmetry it brings to the whole shows that joy deserves the central position Chesterton assigned it.
Before telling the story, why does joy matter? Who cares if it’s the central theme? In short, God does — and you should. God made you to magnify him, but that cannot happen without joy. As Lewis puts it, “Fully to enjoy is to glorify” (Reflections on the Psalms, 112). You exist to glorify God by enjoying him forever. This is the central claim of Christian Hedonism: God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in him.
Joy matters because it’s what you were made for. Joy is the gigantic secret to glorifying God.
I. Triune God: Fountain of Joy
If joy is central in the universe, then it must be essential to the source of the universe — and that is exactly what we find. Before, behind, and underneath everything in creation is a fellowship of infinite joy. From all eternity, the Father has known the Son, and they have loved and delighted in each other by the Spirit (John 1:18; 17:24; Luke 10:21–22). The clearest picture of this glory comes at the baptism of Jesus, where the Father pronounces his divine pleasure in the Son, and that affection appears as the Spirit (Matthew 3:16–17). Jonathan Edwards, who thought more about joy than almost anyone, put it like this: “The whole of God’s internal good or glory, is in these three things, viz. his infinite knowledge, his infinite virtue or holiness, and his infinite joy and happiness” (God’s Passion for His Glory, 244).
God’s internal (ad intra) glory refers to the fullness of life that blazes at the center of the Trinity (see John 17, especially verses 4–5). God is so full that he needs nothing beyond himself to be infinitely, unchangeably, unassailably happy (1 Timothy 1:11). Wrapping our heads around this blessedness of God is like trying to free dive to the bottom of the Mariana Trench. We are not heavy enough or hard enough or alive enough to explore such depths. Tony Reinke says it so well: “Joy is the essence of God’s inter-Trinitarian dance of delight, between the Father and the Son, through the Spirit. Joy is divine enthrallment in the Godhead, and it is too much for us” (The Joy Project, 114).
Just as light and heat radiate from the sun at the center of the solar system, joy pulses at the heart of reality because the Trinity is there, holding all things together. The triune God is the fountain of all joy (Psalm 16:11; 36:8).
II. Creation: Overflow of Joy
But if God is perfectly happy in his own triune company, what are we to make of creation? Why did God make a world?
This question has proved a wrecking ball for the faith of many over the centuries, which is why Edwards took it head-on. He refused to say God needed creation, but he also rejected the idea that God had no designs in creation. Instead, the triune God is so full of life, love, and joy that he is inclined to share (John 10:10; 15:11; 17:26; Acts 17:25).
For Edwards, creation reveals God; it is “the excellent brightness and fullness of the divinity diffused, overflowing and . . . existing ad extra” (God’s Passion for His Glory, 243). After all, “the heavens declare the glory” (Psalm 19:1), and God’s invisible attributes are made visible “in the things that have been made” (Romans 1:20). However, Edwards argues that knowledge of God is not enough. Joy that reflects and participates in God’s own delight was always the endgame because God is not fully glorified unless he is fully enjoyed. Creation — in all its vast and variegated wonder, in all its beautiful and (often) baffling diversity, in all the dappled and the delicious, in all that grows and flows — invites us into the pleasures of God (Genesis 1:31; Psalm 104:31).
The purpose of creation is to invite creatures into God’s own joy because our delight in him magnifies his worth. Thus, Edwards concludes that God’s ultimate end in creating and sustaining the world is the pleasure he takes in his self-knowledge, holiness, and happiness, eternally increasing in a glorious society of created beings.
III. Fall: Longing for Joy
God made man to enter that happy society. He designed us for the peculiar privilege of embodied dominion over his wild and wonderful creation. He charged us, his image-bearers, with being sub-creators and under-kings, rightly ruling his world, enriching and enhancing the beauty we found there, and seeing and savoring him in all (Genesis 1:28; Psalm 8:6–8).
We were made for this joy, and for a time, Adam and Eve participated in this grand charge. But our time in paradise, alas, was short-lived. Our first parents gave ear to the ancient dragon, despised the offer of unbroken fellowship with God, and instead chose to make mud pies in a slum. At the fall, we were severed from the triune God, crippled in our calling of dominion, and left with an inconsolable longing for joy.
Sin plagues mankind on this side of Eden. We are sinners who sin, bent away from God and refusing to seek our happiness in him. We rebel against joy. Sinners will not (and cannot) come to God as the living fountain of all that is good, true, and beautiful and sate our deepest longings in him. Instead, we seek to smother our appetite for the infinite with teaspoon pleasures and tinsel toys (Jeremiah 2:13). We do not glorify the Creator because we trade pleasure in him for that of creatures (Romans 1:18–25; 3:23). Everything we do bears this smudge, and nothing we do can reverse the tragedy.
We are cut off from joy, yet an awareness of this huge happiness still haunts us. You know of what I speak: a longing we feel we cannot live with yet cannot live without. So, we try to ignore it or distract ourselves long enough to forget, but it’s always there — stalking us, ensuring that nothing in this world can stop the ache. And how could it? We have eternity in our hearts (Ecclesiastes 3:11). Our souls wear the imprint of paradise. We suffer from cosmic nostalgia, “our longing to be reunited with something in the universe from which we now feel cut off” (Lewis, The Weight of Glory, 42). The world and everything in it can never satisfy our insatiable desire; they only remind us of the one who can.
Pride, greed, wrath, envy, lust, gluttony, sloth — in fact, everything that’s wrong with the world — emerge from this ache for a transcendent, full, and lasting joy. We writhe violently to silence this God-hunger, hurting ourselves and others. “And when our tiny loves go unsatisfied (as they must for people untethered from their Maker), we bemoan our lot and rage against the stars” (Ben Palpant, Letters from the Mountain, 92).
IV. Redemption: Freed for Joy
Of course, if that were the end of the line, reality would not be a story of joy but of sin, sadness, and death. But man’s fall did not catch God off guard. He storyboarded the plot long before it happened; before the foundation of the world, he planned a triune conspiracy of redemption (Ephesians 1:3–14).
The Father elected us for joy. None of the fallen has any claim to his grace. No sinner can call in a debt God owes. By rights, our rebellion against joy merits death (Romans 6:23). Yet before the ages began, the Father set his love on a peculiar people. He unconditionally elected some to enter into joy (1 Peter 1:3–9). Why would he plot such a scandalous act of grace? “In election, God pursues his own exaltation by inviting sinners to enjoy him forever” (The Joy Project, 40).
But this joy comes at great cost. Sin, with a voice that cannot be gainsaid, demanded punishment. Someone had to pay. So, at just the right time, the Son came to purchase our joy. He did so by becoming a man of joy (and for a short time, sorrow). Jesus — fully God and fully man — entered the tale at the darkest point, glistening with the oil of God’s gladness (Hebrews 1:9), and what he accomplished is breathtaking.
He defeated the dragon that wrought havoc in the garden. He initiated the doom of the rebel rulers of this world. He began to reverse the curse and undo death. He secured himself a cosmic kingdom and an everlasting throne. And his greatest triumph: For all this joy set before him, he endured death on a cross, bearing the punishment of the Father’s elect so that he could justly declare them just (Hebrews 12:2; Romans 3:24–26). Now those justified by faith are free to “rejoice in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now received reconciliation” (Romans 5:11).
As if that wasn’t enough, when the King of joy sat down on his throne, he sent the Spirit of joy to call and claim those whom he purchased (Romans 14:17; Acts 13:52). Now that same Spirit, God’s own joy, dwells in the saints. This is what Jesus meant when he promised that his joy would be in us and our joy would be full (John 15:11). The Spirit guarantees our joy.
In short, the triune God, through the incarnation and work of Jesus, accomplished absolutely everything necessary to bring his elect into his own life, love, and joy through the grand drama of redemption. The gospel is the good news that God made a way for us to fully glorify him by fully enjoying him forever!
V. New Creation: Destined for Joy
With the coming of Christ, the tale turned, setting us on course for the Happy Ending. But we do not yet see the climax of joy. We are still, in many ways, on the outside of the door, knocking to get in. Much of our happiness has an already–not yet quality. But it will not always be so.
One day — Lord make it soon! — our King will return and set up a new heaven and new earth in which our joy will eternally increase (Revelation 21:1–7). The Bible captures this always-improving, never-regressing bliss with two main descriptions.
First, we shall see God. Any remaining barriers between us and the Fountain of Joy will be finally removed, and we shall drink delight from the headwaters (Revelation 22:17). At present, much about this beatific vision remains mysterious and beyond our imagination, but the core of the experience is simple. Samuel Parkison summarizes it:
The hope of one day satiating one’s insatiable desire for happiness in the infinitely self-happy God is what we mean by the beatific vision. . . . Creaturely happiness, in the fullest sense, is . . . a begraced participation in the ceaseless self-happiness of Father, Son, and Spirit.
This is what we were made for — to get into the joy that made the sun and other stars.
What more could we want than this? It may seem unspiritual to add anything to the beatific vision, but God does — and we must not try to be more spiritual than God. Together with seeing God, we will be sub-creators and under-kings over the new creation. We will reign with our King (Romans 8:17; 2 Timothy 2:12; Revelation 3:21). As sons of God, we will practice embodied dominion over God’s very good world, making it a brighter mirror of God’s glory for eternity. In this way, we will aid in God’s original design for creation and (in Tolkien’s words) “actually assist in the effoliation and multiple enrichment of creation” (On Fairy-stories, 79).
We are destined for joy. That’s where the story ends — or better yet, where it really begins. But we dare not delay in pursuing it. The stunning truth that emerges from this story is that God wants you to, made you to, freed you to pursue happiness in him — every day, all the time, relentlessly. So, rejoice in the Lord always, and again, I say rejoice! He is highly honored when you are deeply satisfied in him.
From eternity to eternity, reality is a story of joy — the joy of the triune God poured out in a world, purchased for man, and prolonged forever. Joy is the central note of this symphony. In a rare instance, Chesterton may have understated his case. For the Christian, joy is not merely gigantic; it’s glorious and God-like.
Desiring God