"Rejoice, and be exceeding glad ..." Matthew. 5:12

Each first of January we wish each other a Happy New Year. In spite of the inauspicious auguries for the fulfillment of the wish the greeting is not wrong or misplaced. The desire for happiness is an inbuilt aspiration of the human heart; we would go further and say that it is a God implanted desire. It certainly is a perennial pursuit of the heart of man. It is also an ultimate of salvation for the consummation of redemption will witness the redeemed of God made "perfectly blessed in the full enjoying of God throughout eternity".

Contrary to popular belief the Christian religion is not anti-joy. This is a warped misconception fostered by a lying devil. The Bible certainly denounces and warns against the so-called pleasures of sin, but the religion it teaches is not kill-joy. There is nothing sour or ascetic about it. True, it has a place for the bitter-herbs with the paschal meal; it inculcates the godly sorrow of repentance, it speaks of taking up the Cross and following Christ, but the bitter-herbs are not the whole meal. The roast lamb of the Passover is the main part of the feast. The Christian life is a feast and not a fast. The Gospel is good news--not heavy tidings. There are "pleasures forevermore" at God's right hand; "in His presence there is fullness of joy" (Ps. 16:11). Happiness, or blessedness (the words are interchangeable) is of the very essence of the Christian religion. Rejoicing is a continual exercise of the Christian life. "Rejoice in the Lord alway; and again I say Rejoice" (Phil. 4:4).

(I) Happiness is a by-product

Yet in a very real sense happiness is a by-product of life.

If we make it our main goal it often eludes us as the rainbow's end recedes from the little boy who fondly seeks the legendary pot of gold! Though one of the main assets of the religious life, happiness itself is a by-product of duty and service, of righteousness and holiness. Those who see it independently of duty and service to God will find nothing but disillusionment and discontent in the long run. Like Moses' shining face, a by-product of his fellowship with God on the Mount, happiness is given often as an unexpected bonus to faith and service. Wordsworth uses the phrase in one of his poems, "surprised by joy", which C. S. Lewis aptly took as the title of his autobiography.

There are various recipes for happiness. They may be graded according to age. The child finds happiness (at least for a short time) in his toys, goodies, and sweetmeats. Youth finds it in fun and excitement, seeks it in sex, the dance-floor or discotheque. The man, in a well-paid secure job, in a home, in hobbies. Age T There is not much in the way of creature-happiness that age can look forward to with its limitations, physical and sometimes mental. There was a good deal of sound and sober wisdom in Barzillai's courteous refusal of king David's offer of a place at court. "I am this day four-score years old: and can I discern between good and evil? can thy servant taste what I eat and what I drink ? Can I hear anymore the voice of singing men and singing women T Wherefore then should thy servant be yet a burden to my lord the king?" (2 Sam. 19:35)·

Obviously we must look elsewhere for the ingredients of true and lasting happiness. These recipes for blessedness have an ingredient missing, or rather they are the wrong ingredients. These kinds of joy may give temporary satisfaction. They may divert but can never truly satisfy. There is an ingredient missing and it is the divine. God is left out of account and there cannot be any true happiness without God.

(2) The divine recipe

Scripture gives guidance here. Happiness, or blessedness, begins with God. One of Augustine's prayers in his famous "Confessions" is quoted until it should have become threadbare were it not for its intrinsic truth, "O Lord, our hearts were made for Thee and they are restless until they find their rest in Thee". No man, woman or child is happy, truly happy, who is leaving God out, who has no room for Christ in the house of his soul. Israel of old were pronounced happy because they were a people "saved by the Lord" (Deut. 33:29). Jehovah God was in their midst.

(3) Happiness founded on reconciliation to God

For sinful man one of the main ingredients in happiness is forgiveness. No man can be happy who is not at peace with God. An honest man who has unfortunately fallen into debt is miserable until that debt is cleared. We cannot be happy and be debtors to the Law of God, hopelessly, head-over-heels in debt! So the Psalmist exclaimed, "Blessed is he whose transgression is forgiven, whose sin is covered. Blessed is the man unto whom the Lord imputeth not iniquity ..." (Ps. 32:')· John Bunyan, in his own picturesque way, gives expression to this when he tells how his pilgrim lost his burden. The heavy, galling load, the source of all Christian's misery, unstrapped itself when the pilgrim came to the place where was a cross and a man hanging there--the Cross and the Man--and it rolled away out of sight into an empty tomb. A brilliant stroke of evangelical genius! In two or three sentences Bunyan sums up the theological truth that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures and that He rose again (the empty tomb) for our justification. Little wonder the freed Pilgrim gave three leaps for joy and sang,

Bless'd Cross ! Bless'd Sepulchre! bless'd rather be

The man that there was put to shame for me.

For the sinner happiness begins with forgiveness. And not just pardon but justification. The pardoned man has his debt cancelled but he remains poor; he has not a penny to his name. The justified sinner is, by way of imputed righteousness, a millionaire! He has Christ's untold riches of righteousness laid to his account. He can never be poor again. To quote Bunyan, in another connection, though on a similar theme, "It was glorious to me to see His exaltation and the worth and prevalency of all His benefits, and that because now I could look from myself to Him and should reckon, that all those graces of God that now were given to me, were yet but like those cracked groats and fourpence-halfpennies that rich men carry in their purses, when their gold is in their trunks at home! Oh! I saw that my gold was in my trunk at home! In Christ my Lord and Saviour. Now Christ was all; all my wisdom, all my righteousness, all my satisfaction, and all my redemption". Christ all my righteousness. It makes for happiness.

(4) Happiness linked with unselfishness

Another indispensable ingredient in true happiness is unselfishness. This is rather a negative way of expressing it, but then we live in rather a negative world. The positive virtue, or course, is love. No man devoid of love can hope to be truly happy. The selfish man has an insatiable appetite to cater for, like the sea, the grave and the barren womb, selfishness can never say, "Enough". Selfishness eats up happiness: it is self-consuming in a horribly cannabalistic way! But love does not think of itself; it thinks of others, it serves others, it suffers for others. And happiness come to it by way of bonus ! Our exemplar in this, as in so many things, is the Lord Jesus Himself. A man of sorrows yet, paradoxically, He could not be termed unhappy. It was His joy to do the Father's will and to save His people according to that will. He loved the Father, He loved His own in the world and Jesus knew what true happiness was. So may we if we follow His steps and fulfil His new commandment to love one another.

(5) Happiness dependent on consistent Christian living

Again, happiness is linked with the consistency of a Christian life. The first Psalm makes this clear. "Blessed (or happy) is the man who walks not in the counsel of the wicked ... but his delight is in the law of the Lord .. ." (Ps. 1:1-2). For if we are not saved by our keeping of the law, we are certainly saved to keep God's holy law. "Freed from the law, O happy condition!" was never meant to be construed as a pre-requisite for happiness, for blessedness is to be found by those who "walk in the way of the Lord to all well-pleasing". To stray out of the way is to court unhappiness. In spite of the ease of Bye-Path Meadow to pilgrim feet in comparison with the King's Highway, it eventually leads to Doubting Castle and the dungeon of Giant Despair. David found this out when he sinned grievously over Uriah's wife and for a time lost the joy of salvation. Without fearfulness but in the fear of the Lord we must look to our ways and watch our conduct if we would know the sunny side of the Christian footpath. We have constantly need of this prayer:

Hold up my goings, Lord, me guide

in those Thy paths divine,

So that my footsteps may not slide

out of those ways of Thine.

Ps. I7:5

(6) Happiness and the Cross of Salvation

The last ingredients in true happiness we would mention are, at first sight, surprising, even paradoxical. The characteristics of the happy man are set forth by our Lord in the opening of His great address to His disciples, the Sermon on the Mount. There He declares that the blessed, or happy, people are the mourners, the poor, the hungry, the persecuted, the meek. These rather seem to militate against joy and gladness: they appear rather as intruders into happiness. Not so! They give flavour to the meal like salt and vinegar. True, by themselves they do not make a meal, but they give taste and quality to it, as the bitter herbs to the paschal meal. So Jesus says, ". .. Blessed are the meek ... blessed are those that are persecuted for righteousness sake. Rejoice and be exceeding glad ... !" (Matt. 5' 3, 4·, 5, '0, 12). Such knowledge may be too strange for us, too high to understand. Yet it was exemplified in the early Christians persecuted for the Gospel's sake. They returned out of prison to their fellow-believers rejoicing that they were counted worthy to suffer for the name of Jesus. Paul and Silas not only prayed but sang praises as they sat with bleeding backs and their feet fast in the stocks. Little wonder Luke records that the "prisoners heard them"

(Acts 16:25). Heard them with astonishment. But they were merely repeating the experience of the Man of Sorrows Himself (though not in any penal, expiatory way) who is also the Man of Joy. And so the Christian believer learns to "glory in infirmities" (2 Cor. '2:9), to "glory in tribulations also" (Rom. 5:3)· He knows the secret which grace alone can teach to be "exceeding joyful in all his tribulations", not after they are all over. But if the Christian believer knows the secret of joy in the midst of troubles what will the joy be when they are all past !

Happiness? Not an impossibility even in a world in which "man is born to trouble as the sparks fly upward" (Job 5:7), rather a reality for those who are in Christ reconciled to God by His blood, stayed by His grace, for all who live by faith in Christ Jesus and are obedient to the heavenly vision.

 

Rev James W. Fraser (deceased) was minister in Wick, Plockton & Kyle, Buccleuch & Greyfriars and the Free North. He was also Professor of Old Testament at Free Church College.