By Erika Schwibs
God created us to be happy. But that means living closely with Him, and on His terms, in neverending perfect harmony -- what Adam and Eve couldn't keep, and no human being has been able to, either.
It was apt, though, that the composers of the U.S. Declaration of Independence wrote that our God-given human rights were "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." For the pursuit of happiness drives every human being God created, as well as every animal.
That is, the pursuit of happiness "as we understand it." And most of the time, that's not too well at all. Not too well at all because our sinful, carnal inclinations have us follow our hearts and our own understandings, as well as Satan's manifold lies and deceptions, into spiritual ignorance, confusion, and blindness, followed closely by sin and unhappiness. Adam and Eve were following their beliefs on happiness, as they were coached to by Satan, when they rebelled against God.
Still, we must pursue it. That's what life is about. Our complicated drive for happiness can mean, sometimes, merely pursuing what might make us happier, or the least unhappy, when all of our options are undesirable, or suffering a great deal of unhappiness in the present in the hope of attaining future happiness.
BUT WHAT ABOUT GOD?
Our interest in our own happiness is so strong that we are pleased to know that God really does want us to enjoy perfect happiness in Heaven.
But what about Him? What about HIS happiness?
The Bible says we are to be the bride to the Lord, and as Jesus teaches us in several parables, a bride who really loves the bridegroom will prepare herself and want to please her husband. She won't need to be told to have extra oil on hand for whenever He shows up unannounced. She'll make sure she has the oil on hand because she's afraid of something going wrong and she doesn't want to be eternally separated from Him out of some lack of care and concern on her part.
The Bible, and the New Testament most explicitly, instructs us on what makes God happy, and what doesn't.
Unfortunately, God's Word today often isn't given much fearful reverence, much less true love. Although we should take the "Eternal Revenue Service" code more seriously than the IRS code, the reverse is too often true. That we are "saved by grace through faith" often means that there's a mentality to find and excuse loopholes in God's instructions. It's not law, after all. Yet, we're warned over and over not to be deceived as people will reap as they sow.
"Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world. If any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life, is not of the Father, but is of the world. And the world passeth away, and the lust thereof: but he that doeth the will of God abideth for ever." (1 John 2:15-17).
God wants to give us all good things, but as He knows them, and in His wisdom and timing. Some of them can only come in the next world. Yet, if we set aside everything else besides Him that we can embrace as idols, and renounced all false, worldly baptisms into competing loves for worldly things, our cup will always overflow with true goodness in this world. Esther said, "If I perish, I perish." Stephen perished -- in this world -- yet his cup overflowed and he received the hidden manna in the next.
Do we really want to be with the Bridegroom? If Jesus walked the earth today as He did 2,000 years ago, would we want to be with Him, or would we find excuses not to be around Him?
We're to live in this world without being of it, which in some ways is increasingly difficult as modern society works to create the one-world Beast system.
We aren't to love the world, but we are to partake of some of it. We can do that by standing in the gap. Rather than being devotees of anything worldly, we can reject that full immersion into anything besides faith in the Lord, and instead take a godly portion -- a limited portion, and a prophetic and transformed portion.
The carnal self will hate and rage against a godly portion. It brings back self-control and God's hated standards. And it brings prophetic light from God's Word rather than uncritical indulgence and unbridled lust and passion. The carnal self can't get enough of ungodly, antichristian entertainment, for one thing. Distorting Scripture in desperation, it loudly objects claiming to godly limits, claiming that's Phariseeism, or heretical "salvation by works."
We really can't discern for ourselves what a godly portion is, but the Holy Spirit can and will. We need to come into right relationship with everyone and everything that isn't God, and He'll do that for us, if we'll accept His limits and boundaries and definitions. In doing so, we'll unexpectedly find happiness in small, purified portions of worldly things. And we'll find out that we've made our Bridegroom happy.
If we embrace faith in Christ and keep embracing it, then we'll know Him as Wonderful (Hebrew "pele" or "peleh"), the first name of the Messiah. And like Peter, who at the news he heard from John that it was the resurrected Lord on the shore, we'll want to fling ourselves in the water and swim to Him with all our might. Because He's happiness. Though accompanied sometimes by worldly trouble, in the hidden manna of Wonderful is Heavenly joy and fun.