The Puritans, Charles Spurgeon, John Wesley and a host of others constantly spoke of a God-made happiness. As I have traveled the world, I’ve met more suffering people who are happy in Jesus than I have ever found in America!

This is exactly what I talk about in my book Happiness, as I go through over twenty Hebrew words and fifteen Greek words used in Scripture that are part of the same semantic domain. They are happiness synonyms and can be readily translated not only joyful, but also glad, merry, happy, delighted, etc. For example, take any Hebrew dictionary and look up asher, or a Greek dictionary and look up makarios (both are translated as “blessed” in our Bible versions), and you will find that they mean happy.

Of course there is a false and godless happiness, just as there is a false and godless holiness! There is also godless “love” and “hope” and “holiness” (in religions that try to work their way to God). But the solution is not abandoning those words; rather, we can show how the biblical versions differ from the culture’s view of them. Since God has wired all people to want the happiness of Eden and the New Earth, and since He intended humans to be happy and secured His children’s eternal happiness on the cross, telling the world (and our children) to stop wanting happiness and that it is sinful to want to be happy is both futile and counterproductive! What we need to tell them is that they can find happiness/joy/gladness in Jesus.

Will they still suffer in this life? Of course! But the gladness and joy of God’s people has always been a happiness in Him that infuses them with hope and perspective in the midst of suffering. Trust me—countless Jesus-followers in prisons and hospitals all over the world experience this happiness in God in ways that we should learn from. May we follow their example and do the same!  

Sadly, the church's false and unbiblical distinctions between happiness and holiness, and between happiness and joy, contradict the “good news of happiness” we’re promised in the Messiah (see Isaiah 52:7, ESV and NASB, two of the most literal translations)!

Here’s my answer when I was asked, “Is it wrong to want to be happy?”

Photo: Unsplash