The Delightful Reality of God’s Happiness

How Do You See God?

In an art museum in the beautiful Tuscan city of Siena hangs a five-hundred-year-old oil painting that captures nearly everything that is wrong with our view of God.

It was painted in 1513 by the Renaissance artist Domenico Beccafumi as an altarpiece for a hospital chapel and entitled the Trinity Triptych.¹ It consists of three panels. The right- and left-hand panels show John the Baptist and John the Evangelist flanked by the martyred twins Cosmas and Damian. In the center is a picture of the Trinity at the crucifixion with the Father holding the cross on which Christ is dying and the Holy Spirit perched as a dove on top of it. The grey storm clouds and alarming cherub-like creatures that swirl around the cross give the whole scene an air of menace.

But the scariest feature of the painting is its portrayal of the Trinity. (When God prohibited people from making images of gods in the second commandment, you wonder if this is one of the things he had in mind.) Jesus is dead: head bowed, hands nailed, eyes closed. The Spirit is so small, static, and impersonal that you might initially not even notice him; I have shown this to people who have mistaken the Spirit for something entangled in the Father’s beard. And the Father is frankly terrifying, with an austere countenance and fierce scowl that remind you of Christopher Lee as Saruman in the film adaptation of The Lord of the Rings. If this visual depiction is anything close to the truth about God, then the idea of approaching him to ask for mercy, let alone spending eternity in his presence, is the stuff of nightmares.

Happiness

Andrew Wilson

Andrew Wilson uniquely weaves multiple approaches to explore 6 important questions about happiness. He combines practical wisdom with a rich study of our deepest longing—a relationship with the Lord Jesus Christ.

Fortunately, it is not. In reality, Jesus is alive: head raised, eyes open, hands raised in triumph and prayer. The Spirit is powerful, joyful, and life-giving, just as divine and personal as the Father and the Son and blowing wherever he wills as he fills the world with love and peace. The Father is smiling and singing, not scowling and staring, and his arms are outstretched because he is embracing the world with forgiveness in Christ and welcoming us to himself. Nobody in the universe is happier than the triune God.

The best way of making this case is not to replace this painting with a different one (although Andrei Rublev’s The Trinity gives a far warmer vision of the divine life). Rather, it is to open the Scriptures and see how God is described. For anyone whose image of God has been distorted by pictures of God, hearing the words of God can be a deeply refreshing experience.

Consider the way Jesus talks about God in his parables and elsewhere. Once there was a king who threw a wedding banquet and wouldn’t let it start until all the places had been filled (Luke 14:12–24). Once there was a man who found his sheep that had wandered off; he went home rejoicing and invited everyone in the village to rejoice along with him (Luke 15:3–7). Once there was a woman who found a lost coin and invited everyone to rejoice with her as well (Luke 15:8–10). Once there was a vineyard owner who was so generous to his laziest staff that it drove everybody else crazy (Matt. 20:1–16). Once there was a father whose son returned from a far-off country; and he celebrated with a hug, a kiss, new clothes, a feast, music, dancing, and an insistence that everybody had to celebrate and be glad (Luke 15:11–32). Once there was a master who gave lots of money to his servants, and when they used it well, he invited them to “come and share your master’s happiness!” (Matt. 25:21, 23 NIV). (Things did not go so well, however, for the people who turned down the wedding invitation because they had more important things to do, or for those who chose to sit outside the party sulking, or for the servant who was afraid of his master because he was a “hard man.” Domenico Beccafumi, take note.) A surprising number of the parables involve a party or feast of some kind, and the character who represents God is always the party host.

Jesus spent a lot of time at parties too. Indeed, this is one of the most historically certain things we know about him; you can be absolutely sure that the early church did not invent the allegation that Jesus was “a glutton and a drunkard” (Luke 7:34). Clearly, the charges of drunkenness and gluttony were untrue. But you only get a reputation like that if you spend a lot of time with people who are eating and drinking too much. Then there is the fact that Jesus starts his public ministry by miraculously providing wine—the great symbol of joy in the Jewish prophets—at an under-catered wedding (John 2:1–11); and he concludes his ministry by serving wine to his anxious disciples, while promising that the next time he drinks, it will be with them in his Father’s kingdom (Matt. 26:27–29). On the night that he is betrayed, he keeps returning to the subject of joy in his teaching, discussion, and even prayer (John 15:11; 16:19–24; 17:13).

The Serious Joy of God

Many of us struggle with this idea of divine happiness because we think joy is incompatible with seriousness. We associate laughter with frivolity; we do not naturally think of grinning zealots or jolly judges. But that association does not come from Jesus. Both Old and New Testaments present God simultaneously as abounding with joy and ruling with justice. The separation of the two has more in common with the stern words of the Ayatollah Khomeini: “There are no jokes in Islam. There is no humor in Islam. There is no fun in Islam. There can be no fun and joy in whatever is serious.”² Scripture paints a very different picture, nicely summarized by C. S. Lewis’s remark that “joy is the serious business of heaven.”³

On several occasions, the Gospels even give us a glimpse into the rejoicing that happens within the Trinity. The Father expresses his pleasure in the Son as the Spirit descends on him (Matt. 3:16–17). The Son promises that his disciples will have irrepressible, inextinguishable joy when the Spirit comes, and he prays to the Father that they will have the full measure of his joy within them (John 16:12–24; 17:13). The Son is full of joy through the Holy Spirit because of what the Father has been pleased to do (Luke 10:21). The Father declares his delight in the Son and puts his Spirit on him (Matt. 12:18).

The Gospels are not innovating here. The book of Psalms shows God the Father exalting God the Son by anointing him with the oil of joy, which we could be forgiven for thinking represented the Spirit (Ps. 45:6–7; see Heb. 1:9). Proverbs has Wisdom (the Son) rejoicing at the side of God (the Father), saying,

I was daily his delight,
rejoicing before him always. (Prov. 8:30)

Every time we see the inner life of the Trinity revealed in Scripture, we see a Father, Son, and Spirit who utterly delight in each other, permanently rejoicing in their manifold union. It makes sense when you think about what it means for God to be God. He is the only being who does not depend on anything outside of himself for complete joy: God “blessed forever,” as Paul puts it (Rom. 9:5).

God delights in absolutely everything he does.

Deep happiness and rich delight also characterize God’s relationship with his people, including you. Many of us find that hard to accept because we don’t feel delightful in the slightest; we know how holy he is and how sinful we are, and we worry that God simply sees through us, like a disapproving schoolmaster who knows we will never be good enough. But Scripture pictures God more like a lovestruck bridegroom than a thunderstruck headmaster. “You shall be called My Delight Is in Her,” says the prophet Isaiah, “for the LORD delights in you” (Isa. 62:4).

As the bridegroom rejoices over the bride,
so shall your God rejoice over you. (Isa. 62:5)

Jeremiah, switching the metaphor, compares God’s joy in his people to a father’s joy in his children:

Is not Ephraim my dear son,
the child in whom I delight?
Though I often speak against him,
I still remember him.
Therefore my heart yearns for him;
I have great compassion for him. (Jer. 31:20 NIV)

An even more exuberant description of divine delight comes in Zephaniah 3:17:

The LORD your God is in your midst,
a mighty one who will save;
he will rejoice over you with gladness;
he will quiet you by his love;
he will exult over you with loud singing.

When you picture God, is he singing over his people? Delighting, making music, exulting in his children? Celebrating his bride at his own wedding? Because that is how Scripture presents him. For the psalmist, God’s delight in us is one of the reasons that we delight in him:

Let them praise his name with dancing,
making melody to him with tambourine and lyre!
For the LORD takes pleasure in his people;
he adorns the humble with salvation. (Ps. 149:3–4)

God is not only happy in the fellowship of the Trinity or in his people but also delights in all of his works and everything he has made. Psalm 104, for example, is a beautiful song about the range of things God has created, and as it concludes it says simply,

May the glory of the LORD endure forever;
may the LORD rejoice in his works. (Ps. 104:31)

To get a sense of what it sounds like for God to “rejoice in his works,” read through Job 38–41 and notice God’s enthusiasm for a remarkably random list of created things: seas and storms, snow and stars, lions, goats, donkeys, ostriches, horses, hawks, Behemoth, Leviathan, and so forth.

We can push this even further: God delights in absolutely everything he does. Psalm 115 declares,

Our God is in the heavens;
he does all that he pleases. (Ps. 115:3; cf. Ps. 135:6)

And if he does all that he pleases, then he takes pleasure in all he does.⁴ This is part of what it means to be God: Nothing and nobody can prevent him from doing what he delights in, which is why he can say, “I will accomplish all my pleasure” (Isa. 46:10 my translation), and why Paul can say that God works all things according to his pleasure (Eph. 1:5, 9).

The Scriptures abound with examples of things that God delights in. He delights in the obedience of the righteous, the destruction of the wicked, the wellbeing of his servants, the fear of the Lord, hope, justice, and the prayers of the upright (Deut. 28:63; 1 Sam. 15:22; Pss. 35:27; 147:11; Prov. 11:1; 15:8). He rejoices in doing good to his people with all his heart and all his soul (Jer. 32:41). It is his “good pleasure” to give the kingdom to a little flock like us (Luke 12:32). Even the cross, despite the painting we saw earlier, is motivated by the pleasure of the Father and the joy of the Son (Isa. 53:12; Heb. 12:2).
That has wonderful implications. If at the heart of reality is an unchangingly happy Trinity—if the God of all things is overflowing with joy; permanently delighting in the fellowship of Father, Son, and Spirit; taking pleasure in his creation; rejoicing in his purposes; delighting in his people; prone to feasts, songs, and jubilant celebration; and working all things toward a future in which everyone lives happily ever after—then it means marvelous things for all of us.

Think about it: It means by definition that becoming more like God means becoming happier. It means that eternity will be spent in the presence of one who is forever drawing us, like a giant magnet, toward his own unbounded joy. It means that the world was not created to ensure God’s happiness, as if there was something he needed that only the universe could provide, but to express it. It means God is an overflowing fountain rather than a needy drain, a sunrise rather than a black hole. That is some of the best news you will ever hear.

Notes:

I am grateful to my friend Adrian Birks for introducing me to this painting and its theological implications.
Broadcast by Radio Iran, 20 August 1979, as quoted in Amir Taheri, The Spirit of Allah: Khomeini and the Islamic Revolution (Hutchinson, 1985), 259.
C. S. Lewis, Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer (Harcourt, Brace, and Co., 1964), 93.
See John Piper, The Pleasures of God: Meditations on God’s Delight in Being God (Multnomah, 2020), 37–38.

This article is adapted from Happiness: What It Is, Where to Find It, and How to Make It Last Forever by Andrew Wilson.

Andrew Wilson (PhD, King’s College London) is the teaching pastor at King’s Church London and a columnist for Christianity Today. He is the author of several books, including Remaking the World and God of All Things. Andrew is married to Rachel, and they have three children: Zeke, Anna, and Sam.

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