Tuesday, March 11, 2014

College Study #67: "God's Blessedness and the Pursuit of Happiness"


 

‘Behold, the Lamb of God’

ide o amnos tou theou

College Study

67th teaching

3.10.2013

 

“God’s Blessedness: and the Pursuit of Happiness”

 

 

 

Project Scriptura: God’s Creativity

Review:

          What was our subject last week? What parable did Jesus tell the Pharisees which illustrated His Divine Mission? What did the word mission originally mean: a task to be completed or the act of sending? What does the word apostle mean? Who is the First Missionary? Is mission-work primarily a function of the church or a part of God’s loving nature? The church does missions because God does missions. God has a kind of mission-tendency or mission-mindedness. Mission, sending, is what God does in order to accomplish His goals. Thinking about God as being Mission-minded should cause us to reinterpret the Old Testament in that light. Why did God choose Israel? Because He loved them more than anyone else or because He no longer loved the rest of the world? Final question: why do we love God? Answer: because He first loved us.

          End of Review

 

          The Preamble of the United States Declaration of Independence reads: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness”.

          In modern terms, Americans think of the American Dream, the ideal of freedom and opportunity for prosperity and success made available in this country. James Truslow Adams, writer and historian, said in 1931: “Life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement…”

          For the many immigrants that came to this country, this is what they were searching for opportunity and happiness. For the many who live here as citizens, this is not only the American Dream, but the American way of life. This is the creed which the patriotic populace believes.

          But consider how much pursuit of happiness exists in our country, but how many fall utterly short of reaching happiness. The American Dream in simpler terms can refer to owning a home, owning a car, building a family and having a successful career. We’re practically hotwired to desire these things in the very deepest parts of our beings.

          Yet many millions of Americans have bought their homes, only to lose them to foreclosure, poor financial decisions or shattered marriages. Millions of Americans have purchased their cars, only to wreck them, watch them rust away or simply throw it away in search for the newer and the faster model. Millions of Americans have built their families, marrying because love is the label that covers mere physical attraction, only to find their marriages ending in divorce, their children scattered and disillusioned. And millions of Americans have found successful careers, the quote-unquote “Dream Job”, only to find that they’re no longer working to be happy, but working to keep things and buy things that cannot make them happy.

          Still the pursuit of Happiness marches on. Still flies this banner over all this fair country: “Buy! Consume! Purchase! Look at this! Here! This will make you happy!” And millions of us buy into the lie that this latest gadget, this new car, this great job or that beautiful person will make us happy. And at the core of the American heart, then, lies this great yearning and this great sadness, this great un-fulfilment.

          I love this country. And nothing makes me sadder to think of it as this great and glorious structure with nothing at all at its center: a kind of vast emptiness populated by sky-scrapers, streets, lights and business. America is this gorgeous mansion, full of rooms of every kind, and laden with every treasure and pleasure, but it is a house that stands empty.

          America, of all places, is the land of opportunity. America is the land where happiness should be found and where millions are running the race, this mad dash, in the pursuit of it. And yet America is just such a place where happiness, though pursued, is hardly ever found.

          Now my point tonight is not social commentary, so how do we turn this into a bible study? Well, sometimes you may hear people ask about whether America is in the Bible. Have you ever heard that? Maybe you’ve wondered that yourself. Where does America fit into eschatology, the end time events? Where’s America in the book of Revelation? Speculation indeed abounds. I’ve seen a few books here and there, where writers play around with the idea of America in biblical prophecy: “y’know, we’re the young lions in this prophecy or we’re going to take part in this battle” or what-not.

          But I can tell you for sure where America is in the Bible. Ironically, America is so invisible in the Bible, yet you can see this country clearly in one of the most famous stories in the gospels. Turn to Luke 15.

          Last week, we read the parable of the lost sheep in this same chapter when studying God’s Mission. This week, we’re turning to the same chapter and jumping a few verses down to the parable of the lost son, aka the prodigal son.

          And I suggest to you that this is America.

          Luke 15:11-16, “Then He said: “A certain man had two sons. And the younger of them said to his father, ‘Father, give me the portion of goods that falls to me.’ So he divided to them his livelihood. And not many days after, the younger son gathered all together, journeyed to a far country, and there wasted his possessions with prodigal [that is, extravagant and wasteful] living. But when he had spent all, there arose a severe famine in that land, and he began to be in want. Then he went and joined himself to a citizen of that country, and he sent him into his fields to feed swine. And he would gladly have filled his stomach with the [food] that the swine ate, and no one gave him anything.”

          This is a very familiar story probably to many. This son takes all the money of his inheritance, all the blessings his father had to give to him, and goes off and wastes it entirely on reckless and lavish living. No doubt he feasted. No doubt he hired women. No doubt he did not spare himself any pleasure he could think of. As far as the American Dream, this son was living it out. Viva Las Vegas, baby!

          He pursued happiness until the money he had received from his father ran out. Then he grew hungry. Then the women left him. Then all pleasure was gone. Then came loneliness, isolation, maybe bitterness, maybe resentment and even hopelessness.

          Still, note that he does not immediately return to his father. Even after having wasted all his money, he was not in real trouble until trouble came in the form of a famine in the land. Still he does not return to his father. Here he is poor in a country that is suddenly become poor itself.

          Rather, he joins up with a citizen of that country and ends up feeding swine out in a field. Understand that in the Jewish mind, there could be nothing worse. Pigs are labeled as unclean animals under the Law of Moses. But here he is so starving that he would even eat what the pigs are eating. He had pursued happiness, get this, almost to the point of death. He wanted to be happy so much that he was killing himself, nearly starving. Don’t miss that shocking thing that he almost died for the sake of pleasure.

          How bad did it have to get before he came to his senses?

          v.17-24, “But when he came to himself, he said, ‘How many of my father’s hired servants have bread enough and to spare, and I perish with hunger! I will arise and go to my father, and will say to him, ‘Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you, and I am no longer worthy to be called your son. Make me like one of your hired servants.’ And he arose and came to his father. But when he was still a great way off, his father saw him and had compassion, and ran and fell on his neck and kissed him. And the son said to him, ‘Father, I have sinned against heaven and in your sight, and am no longer worthy to be called your son.’ But the father said to his servants, ‘Bring out the best robe and put it on him, and put a ring on his hand and sandals on his feet. And bring the fatted calf here and kill it, and let us eat and be merry; for this my son was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found.’ And they began to be merry.”

          Tonight’s study is entitled: “God’s Blessedness and the Pursuit of Happiness”.

          The prodigal son had only one choice, just as America has only one choice. In the great pursuit of Happiness, there is only one Source to turn to and it cannot be found in the world. The prodigal son surely had fleeting happiness so long as his money held out, and just as surely, any American who can still afford their home, their car, their possessions and their entertainment, who has not yet ruined their marriage, their children or their relationships, may have a kind of fleeting happiness. But the Bible assures us that this world is passing away, along with its desires (I John 2:17).

          And so we must realize that in our pursuit of happiness, in our desire for pleasure, in our race for comfort, we can and must only find these things in the One who possesses them all. In order to find blessing, we must come to the Fount of every blessing, God Himself Who is Blessed forevermore, just as surely as the only choice the lost son had to make was to return to his father.

          So tonight let’s take a look at this idea of Blessedness. We have several points before us. Here’s our outline, five simple points:

1.    What is Blessedness?

2.    Biblical Basis for God’s Blessedness

3.    The Cause

4.    The Result

5.    The Cure

 

1.   What is Blessedness?

          The Bible uses words like bless, blessing and blessed, however its text never uses the word blessed-ness. But it isn’t hard to see what it means. Blessedness simply means the state of being blessed. That’s it. Point two.

          Just kidding. Where the real work comes in is to figure out what the word blessed means. What does it mean to be blessed? What is a blessing? How can you or I or God bless someone?

          It turns out the words bless, blessed and blessing in our English language can mean a whole variety of things, all of which are true in some sense. Let me give you a handful of definitions:

a.    Blessed means worthy of worship. Is that true? Yes. God is blessed in so far as He is worthy of worship and reverence.

b.    Blessed means having happiness, pleasure or contentment. Is this true? Yes. God is happy and takes pleasure in goodness and is certainly content, being perfect. More on that later.

c.    Blessed means to have well-being or prosperity. This is probably the most common definition for blessed. Sometimes we think of being blessed in material terms, in gift-receiving terms. That is, “such and such was blessed to get that new promotion” or “so and so was blessed to get that new car”. And God certainly blesses His creatures with tangible and material things, not exclusively wealth or prosperity, but also the air we breathe, our food, our health and so on. This definition comes from the Old English word bledsian, which itself interestingly comes from another word meaning blood. But bledsian is a word which meant “to wish happiness”.

          While there are several other English definitions for the word blessed, I think this will do for now. We get a picture here of God being Blessed as  being worthy of worship and as being self-content, and as blessing His own creatures with “blessings”.

          But to get a deeper, more exact understanding of what we refer to when we talk about God’s Blessedness, we need to get past the hodge-podge English language and look at some of the original words such as the Bible itself was written with.

          The New Testament uses the Greek word makarios which is translated as blessed, fortunate and happy. Essentially that’s was makarios means blessed and happy. So then you definitely get the idea of happiness tied together with the concept of blessing. Thus a person that is makarios is blessed: happy.

          The second Greek word the New Testament uses for blessed is the word eulogetos. Can you guess what English word comes from the Greek eulogetos? Our English word eulogy, which is the word of praise given in a speech at a funeral. When reflecting upon the life of the dead, someone, usually a close family member, gives the eulogy praising the good things the person did or the good person they were in their lifetime.

          Now strangely, of these two words, makarios and eulogetos, it is the second and not the first that is used when referring to God. Ironic that eulogetos gives us a word used for praising the dead, when in the New Testament, it is a word used to refer to the blessedness of God Himself.

          For example: Mark 14:61 says “Again the high priest asked Him, and said unto Him, ‘Are you the Christ, the Son of the Blessed?

          So then it is eulogetos, not makarios, which is a God-word.

          Kenneth Wuest was a Christian Greek scholar who produced some amazing Greek word studies. He wrote of the word eulogetos, “the word ‘blessed’ is eulogetos, made up of lego, ‘to speak’, and eu, ‘good’, thus, ‘to speak well of a person, to eulogize him… Thus, our Lord is spoken of as God, the One who is well-spoken of, eulogized, praised, forever.

          So we’ll take this as our base definition of Blessedness: that God is blessed and happy, to be favored, worthy of praise and spoken good of. But since we’re studying who God is in His attributes, we’re most interested now in not what men say about God but who God really is in Himself.

          And as you can see, then, Blessedness touches upon God’s character and personality. This doctrine of Blessedness tells us what sort of mood God is naturally (or should we say supernaturally?) in. His basic mind-set is happiness, since He is the Blessed One. Blessed people are happy people and God is the happiest blessed One of them all.

          We’ve often referenced the misconception that some people have of this great cosmic grumpy God, as if God were up in heaven just frowning angrily upon sinners, just totally grim and utterly solemn in His absolute power and regal majesty and sovereignty. But Scripture teaches that God is blessed, and that means happy. Now obviously, God experiences other emotions. But one of His primary emotions is apparently His happiness.

          Next let’s consider where in the Scriptures this teaching resides. Where does the Bible say that God is blessed?

2.   Biblical Basis for God’s Blessedness

          On come the Project Scriptura verses. And given what we’ve just learned, hopefully now we can read and discern whether the Word is speaking directly of God’s Blessedness or of the blessings He gives to His creatures. Both ideas are tied up in this doctrine of Blessedness, but these are two separate ideas we can now see clearly.

          What then did you find?

 

 

 

Consider also: Ephesians 1:1-3, Revelation 5:11-12, Romans 1:24-25

Next let’s examine the theology of this attribute of God.

3.   The Cause

          What we’re aiming to answer here is the question: “Why is God happy? What makes God blessed? What causes His Blessedness?”

          There are three things within God which cause Him to be blessed, three causes which make for His blessedness.

          The first thing is His Aseity.

          Now those of you here who remember God’s Aseity are probably only going to be the founding members. What is God’s Aseity?

          Acts 17:24-25 reads: “God, who made the world and everything in it, since He is Lord of heaven and earth, does not dwell in temples made with hands. Nor is He worshiped with men’s hands, as though He needed anything, since He gives to all life, breath, and all things.” So God needs nothing.

          The word Aseity means “of oneself”. It means that God gets everything from Himself, in Himself. Basically, we can think of it as God’s total independence from everything. God doesn’t need external energy sources or food or sleep or anything that we depend on to survive. He simply lives.

          Another way to phrase the attribute of Aseity is to call it self-sufficient. Self-sufficient means that only His Self suffices. He needs nothing else.

          And if God is self-sufficient, needing nothing, then He is in want of nothing and therefore content and happy, or blessed.

          We as human beings know and experience quite the opposite. From the very day you were conceived, when you depended upon your father for the spark of life, you survived the following months by depending upon your mother’s body. When you were born, you depended upon doctors and medical knowledge for a safe delivery and upon your parents for years to come for everything. There’s nothing in a human baby that is not dependent. We don’t even play around with the idea of being independent until our teenage years, and we would not have reached those years had we not had our dependence upon other things.

          But even as adults, there are plenty of things we need. Sustenance, nourishment, atmosphere, the laws of nature and physics, friendship and family, learning and education, the more material wants and needs, like clothes, and then even the things that we don’t need but that we just plain want: entertainment, toys, novelty, technology, experience and so on.

          But none of these things play a part in God’s essential nature. He’s already self-sufficient. He needs nothing to survive and is in want of nothing. Now this doesn’t mean that He doesn’t want the creatures He loves. But He chooses to love us and there’s a difference between desperate wanting for something we lack and choosing to love.

          So firstly, God’s Blessedness is caused by His Aseity, His Self-sufficiency. Since He needs nothing, He is want of nothing, and already has everything He needs in Himself, and as therefore content and happy, or blessed.

          Second cause for God’s Blessedness is His Goodness. James 1:17 says “Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and comes down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow of turning.”

          God gives good things because He Himself is good. He possesses chief goodness. Everything about God is good and perfection. Even sometimes you might read about God’s attributes being referred to as His perfections.

          And since God is good, all-good and perfect, then we can assume that He lacks nothing, for that is the meaning of the word perfect. In all that God has, there is no want for more. He already has perfect power, perfect wisdom, perfect knowledge, perfect life, perfect morality and so on.

          Thus just like Aseity, we discover with God’s Goodness that God needs nothing more. He already has all goodness. There’s nothing else that He desires that did not originally come from Himself, including our own lives.

          What’s more, God’s Goodness reminds us that God is not evil. Indeed, God is free from evil. He does not do evil nor can He do evil, even if He wanted to.

          Once again, you and I are on the totally opposite end of the spectrum from God’s contentment in Goodness. We human beings are wracked with the suffering that has infected a world and pained by the sins we commit and the sins of others around us. And all the things that go hand in hand with committing sin, such as shame, guilt, disorders, disasters, distress, unhappiness, embarrassment, frailty and death are all things that God Himself never experiences (again, aside from when He became a Man so that He could experience them). But in His Good nature, there are no shadows. He is perfect and perfectly free from sin. And though sin grieves His Spirit, sin cannot hurt God the same way that it hurts us.

          So firstly, God’s Aseity is a cause of His Blessedness. Secondly, God’s Goodness is a cause of His Blessedness.

          And thirdly, God’s Triunity is a cause of His Blessedness.

          We sang: “God in three persons, blessed Trinity!” Consider that friendship brings happiness. Fellowship brings happiness.

          We may speculate rightly that God could not have been happy if He were alone in eternity. He would have been a Being with all-power and knowledge and love but without anything to do, without any knowledge to share and with no one to love. He would have been isolated.

          I think that we as humans understand that other people make us happy. None of us wants to live our lives alone. Indeed, a punishment in some prisons is solitary confinement, total isolation from other human beings.

          And if God were only one person alone in eternity, we might say that of course He made the world and the people in it so that He wouldn’t be alone, so that He could love somebody. But that is not the case.

          The fact is that since God from eternity past is three persons, Father, Son and Spirit, that He enjoyed fellowship, He enjoyed friendship, indeed He enjoyed one of the most profound and affecting relationships we ourselves understand: the relationship between father and son.

          So there’s this third cause, then: God’s Triunity reminds us that God did not need someone to love. He could have total relationship-contentment from eternity past because He is three persons. And God was blessed from eternity past because the Father could bless the Son and the Son bless the Father.

          *See how this all fits together?

          Something we’ve touched on multiple times is the fact that God is this perfectly harmonious Being. Each of His attributes perfectly fit together in a beautiful mesh of qualities, none of them fighting for space or canceling the other out, none of them creating doubt or disorder or chaos. And in my mind, that concept of God as harmonious in His attributes is something which is summed up by God’s Blessedness.

          When everything fits together, it’s a beautiful thing. When everything falls into place in your life, when everything seems to fit, it’s just great. For God, everything fits together perfectly in Himself. And this great harmony is a fourth cause of His Blessedness: the fitting together of all of His attributes with one another.

          How fitting that we came upon this Blessedness of God near the end of our study of His attributes. We have seen nearly all of them and we have seen how neatly they come together.

4.   The Result

          So God is happy. So what? What comes of this Divine happiness? What does God do with His great self-contentment?

          Well one practical way in which we understand what comes of God’s Blessedness is in a somewhat kindred doctrine known as God’s Impassibility. Now some people can get hung up on Impassibility and indeed it can be a difficult attribute to understand. Abusing it or believing wrong things about it can lead to some theological problems.

          However, for the sake of our study tonight, we need only think of God’s Impassibility as God having stable emotions. The term impassibility basically means “without passions”. This doesn’t mean that God is not passionate. Indeed He feels very strongly about good and feels very strong about evil. Impassibility isn’t about what God feels about good or evil, but impassibility merely states that God always feels the same way about good or evil.

          In modern terms, impassibility means God has no mood swings. He will always feel the same way about good and He will always feel the same way about evil.

          As far as God’s Blessedness is concerned, God remains impassible: in other words, He will always be happy with Himself. He can be happy about other things, though never evil things, but He will never not be content and happy with Himself. Of course not, He’s already Good and Self-sufficient. See how it all fits together?

          But aren’t you glad that God is always happy with Himself. You and I both know how aggravating it is when talking with someone who hates their self-image or is fully devoted to their own lack of confidence. They’re always moping “I feel fat today”.

          God never looks in a mirror and says “I feel so fat today”. God is perfect, ladies and gentlemen. And He will always feel the same way about Himself: happy.

          Another result of God’s Blessedness lies in the statement that it is better to give than to receive

          One of the things that still keeps Christmas special is the giving of gifts. It is such a great feeling when you give someone something that you think will make them happy.

          Consider that with God, every day is Christmas, because God gives all the time. Because God is happy, He wants to make others happy. Happiness is contagious, at least in the divine case. And it is the Blessedness of God which results in our being blessed. God blesses because He Himself is blessed. Remember, we love Him because we discovered that He first loved us.

          It is the blessed who bless others. Remember that. We’re to be a people who give to others, recognizing that we have been given so much ourselves.

5.   The Cure

          The Blessedness of God is one of the most important truths for modern Christianity, but it is a truth which Christians have largely forgotten in practical living: that God is happy and that He makes for happiness.

          Coming back full circle: we realize that in our country, indeed in our world, there exists this mad dash we might call the pursuit of happiness, and if we’re honest, we’ll admit that it exists in our hearts as well. If we’re honest, we’ll recognize that we’re living, probably more often than not, for our own happiness and for the infinite pursuit of more of it.

          We choose our church, we pick our friends, we buy things, we plan our lives, we do so much all for the sake of our own happiness. And yet the great twist of life is that in the pursuit of happiness you so very often cannot find it. Billions of human lives that have had every tangible “blessing” are testament to the very fact that it is immensely hard to be happy and to stay happy. Just ask King Solomon.

          If we were to take one Old Testament character who embodied the pursuit of happiness, it’s got to be King Solomon. He pleased himself into misery. He made happiness his focus and found himself terribly unhappy. Just read Ecclesiastes, his magnum opus on the vanity, the emptiness of life under the sun even with all the wealth, all the pleasures, all the women, all the accomplishments and successes that were his own.

          Like the prodigal son, we find that happiness is fleeting when we wander from our father. And my friends, we’re at the age of wandering. College age is the age of wandering. You must know that within yourself lies this heart that is prone to wander from God. Suddenly, when you reach this age, the world is open to you with all its freedoms and with all its liberties and with all of its tantalizing and seductive pleasures. And how many of our friends our age do we know who have turned their hearts away from God, not realizing that pursuing happiness outside of pursuing God will land them in suffering, misery and sadness, anything but happiness.

          So then, we must ask ourselves practically, what do we do when we’re unhappy? How do you cope with depression, with feeling down, with sadness, with loneliness, with grief, with pain, with feeling unloved? How do you deal with these essential emotions in the human experience?

          Do you just run the pursuit even harder? Take a look at the world. Take a good, long look. Pursuing happiness in the world leads to unhappiness. Merely running faster after it and making the pursuit even more fiercely for happiness won’t change the fact that you’ll never reach the goal. Bliss is simply not to be found.

          And no amount of sedation will change that fact. After a certain point, that’s what the things we do become: sedation. We feel sad so we watch tv. We feel sad so we eat. We feel down so we get around as many friends as we can. We feel bad so we go out and buy something we don’t really need. But the next new thing, the next happy experience simply doesn’t last.

          We can’t sedate ourselves into bliss. We can’t medicate ourselves into happiness. If you have a real disorder, a real problem let’s say in your heart, medication is just covering up the symptoms. But what you really need is a new heart.

          Are you covering up the symptoms of your sadness, which is there because you’re heart and mind is far from God?

          “Le vent se leve, il faut tenter de vivre…”, “The wind is rising… we must try to live…”

          But oh, how to live? How to live when adversity comes, when the rind rises? We are built, it seems, to desire happiness, to want it so desperately, but where do we find it? Ironically, happiness is just the thing that cannot be found when you’re looking for it. It becomes invisible when you’re looking straight at it.

          The final chapter in C.S. Lewis’ Mere Chrsitianity contains these words: “The same principle holds, you know, for more everyday matters. Even in social life, you will never make a good impression on other people until you stop thinking about what sort of impression you are making. Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it. The principle runs through all life from top to bottom.

          “Give up your self, and you will find your real self. Lose your life and you will save it. Submit to death, death of your ambitions and favourite wishes every day and death of your whole body in the end: submit with every fibre of your being, and you will find eternal life. Keep back nothing.

          “Nothing that you have not given away will ever be really yours. Nothing in you that has not died will ever be raised from the dead. Look for yourself, and you will find in the long run only hatred, loneliness, despair, rage, ruin, and decay. But look for Christ and you will find Him, and with Him everything else thrown in.”

          Like the lost son, we can only find our happiness, oddly not in pursuing it for itself, but in pursuing the One in Whom all happiness resides. Just as the lost son returned to his father, we cannot expect happiness is we’re not living a life that pursues God the Most-Blessed.

          We cannot merely fool ourselves into contentment. We cannot merely think well I’ve just got to be content with what I have. I suggest to you tonight to never be content with what you have, because you can always have more fellowship with God, more communion with God, more of the Word of God, more of God the Blessed Himself.

          Don’t be content with anything less than the pursuit of God.

          So how do we cure the common ailment of humanity, our unhappiness? How do we keep from moping around and wailing about this or that that’s wrong? That’s just annoying. Nobody’s going to come to Christianity if we’re acting like that: complaining about not having him or her, or this job or that position or this amount of money or so on and on and on ad absurdum.

          We need only turn our eyes off of our troubles and set them on the One who is Perfect. You want to be happy? You want to not be depressed? There’s no medication for it. You’ve got to cure the problem by turning your heart and mind to God, by learning to rely upon Him, by walking in faith in Him, by keeping Him the central focus of your life. If God is your foundation, you’re life cannot be shaken. If God is your anchor, you won’t be swept away.

          As the wise words of an old hymn say: “Turn your eyes upon Jesus, look full in His wonderful face, and the things of earth will grow strangely dim in the light of His glory and grace.”

         

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