We must have our hope set upon him. We must believe that if there is happiness to be found, it will only be found because of him. If we are not looking to him for our answers, we will be essentially untethered — in which case, anything goes, and any advice will be worth a shot. But we are his people, and so we have a better hope than that.

What is the chief end of man?

You probably know that it is to glorify God and enjoy him forever.

But we could just as easily reverse this, and say: to enjoy God and glorify him forever.

I think the reason the Westminster divines chose to put glorifying before enjoying is because they wanted to emphasize what we owe to God, over what we receive from him — lest any hint of humanism corrupt their pure doctrine. This is well and good, but the actual order of being is from God to man and then back again; rather than from man to God and then back again. God is always the first mover, so to speak — and so man always receives before he gives.

We can give nothing that we did not first receive.

Indeed, without first receiving our very existence from God, we could not give anything at all!

This is the reciprocal pattern that I talked about last time. There and back again. In and out. One, then the other.

If we put the Westminster Catechism into this reciprocal pattern, then the chief end of man is to enjoy God — that is, to receive God’s goodness — and then to glorify him forever — that is, to return that goodness to him transformed and beautified.

It is the relationship between these two things that I want to think about today. I would like to suggest to you — I think this is what scripture is patterning for us — that it is only in this reciprocal action, of receiving and returning, that true enjoyment, true fulfillment, and true transformation of our own minds and hearts is possible.

This relates back, of course, to how “to be consuming is also to be consumed.” When we take in God’s word with the intention of returning it transformed and beautified, we cannot help but be transformed and beautified in turn. The very process of trying to transform and beautify it will transform and beautify us. When we take it in, not just passively through reading, but actively by praying it, and doing it, it forms us into something more God-like.

The problem of unhappiness

When we’re thinking about consuming God’s word, I think Reformed Christianity especially has tended to theologize this — to treat it as something we just have to do because it is our duty, and it is good for us, like eating brocolli. We should like it, but we often don’t. Yet scripture does not speak this way. God’s word is not a bitter herb in scripture, but sweet honey. And so the Bible has much to say about the happiness of those who consume it.

O the happiness of the man that goeth not in the counsel of the wicked, and in the way of the sinful hath not stood, and in the seat of the scornful hath not sat; but only in the law of Yahweh is his pleasure, and in his law he murmureth by day and night. (Psalm 1:1–3)

This is what I want to particularly focus on today. It is hard to imagine a more pressing topic in the modern day. By every account I have read, we as a society are becoming less and less happy, and it is happening at an extraordinary rate. Anxiety and depression have skyrocketed, especially among women, and especially among young women — and especially since smartphones and social media became normalized. But men, too, are much less happy than they used to be. So this is a topic that the church ought to be searching the scriptures on. As I have been trying to grapple with what “digital piety” looks like — the piety of the digital age, of rightly using smartphones in ways that will not form us into something wicked, or disintegrate or consume us — I can’t help wondering why the whole church has not been doing this for years. Why am I the one saying this stuff?

We should already have a clear theology around this; we should already have straightforward and practical guidance to give.

But we don’t. If you are looking for answers about relieving your anxiety, or alievating your depression, I don’t think your first instinct would be to look for theological answers. It would not be to ask a churchman. It would be to ask your doctor, or to ask Jordan Peterson. These things ought not to be so, but the church has (by and large) avoided ownership of this issue. We have believed that it is too hard for us. We have believed that it is outside our lane. We have gone along with the cult of expertise, where you need a professional qualification to deal with difficult issues.

In fact, we have largely created that cult of expertise through our perversion of the pastorate into a professional job requiring academic credentials, contrary to scripture. The church leads the rest of culture. But that will take me somewhat far afield right now. Suffice to say that, not just in recent times, but for generations, we have handed over what we now call psychology and psychiatry — but scripture would call spiritual disciplines — to secular professionals who believe that a person is just a physical body, and therefore everything we think and feel is just a result of bodily functions and chemical interactions, and so the “cure” (and that is the appropriate word in their minds) should essentially be medical.

Here in New Zealand, we now have one in ten people taking antidepressants, and I don’t even know what the number is for anti-anxiety meds. Let alone for all the people using cannabis and other illegal drugs on the reg — which my wife’s cafe workplace experience suggests is surprisingly high. More importantly, it is also why even Christians have come to think of emotional problems as being the domain of professionals, rather than of pastors, and to seek chemical or sometimes psychological solutions, rather than spiritual ones. I say this, not out of some desire to take over dealing with these problems myself — because I know how much experience and wisdom is required to counsel people who are suffering, and to help them in any appreciable way. I also know how great the danger is of doing terrible harm to people through bad counsel. I am not suggesting that being a pastor automatically makes you know how to “fix” someone’s chronic depression, for instance.

But I do think that scripture contains wisdom sufficient to fully equip us for every good work — because that is what God himself claims (2 Tim 3:16–17). And this must certainly include the good work of learning to be joyful.

The Bible furnishes us with the wisdom required to treat the problem of unhappiness. I don’t mean that scripture is a textbook for counseling. And I don’t mean, either, that it directs us to ignore the role of the body in what we feel and focus exclusively on the heart. Certainly bodily ailments can cause us to be, shall we say, emotionally disregulated; and there may well be certain ailments, which we don’t yet understand well, that especially cause us to feel very down. Scripture tells us quite directly that moods are experienced in the body, so it would be rather surprising if problems with the body did not affect us spiritually. Think of what Jeremiah says:

My anguish, my anguish! I am pained at my very heart (Je 4:19)

But in fact, what he says in the Hebrew is,

My entrails, my entrails! I am pained at the walls of my heart (Je 4:19)

I think the postmillennial future will see a great deal more cooperation and study between experts on the body — which is of course a legitimate field of study in natural revelation — and experts on the spirit — who certainly benefit from natural revelation, but must begin with God’s own words. We will see this cooperation because man is a complete soul: an indivisible composite of both body and spirit. Scripture in many places speaks of how our spiritual attitudes are felt or expressed in the body, and certainly the interplay between the spiritual and the physical should come as no surprise to those of you who follow my work over at True Magic. For instance, I have read one study where they found that,

those who had been remembering emotionally chilly times also literally felt chillier, even though the room’s temperature remained constant during the experiment. People who had recalled feeling ostracized estimated the temperature to be about 71 degrees Fahrenheit, on average. Participants who were remembering the warm, fuzzy feeling of social inclusion felt the room to be a balmy 75 degrees Fahrenheit, on average. The discrepancy is a statistically significant difference. (Social Isolation Makes People Cold, Literally)

You see a similar effect with food: socially isolated people prefer to eat warm foods, as if warming their bodies will help warm them spiritually.

But that is a considerably more complicated topic than I want to tackle today. My goal today is to simply begin to understand happiness from a biblical perspective, and in doing so, I am taking for granted that the spiritual does have primacy over the physical. I don’t mean that bodily ailments can never hinder, or even prevent, our happiness. But I am supposing that, normally, seeking to transform our hearts and minds in the way that scripture directs, will have a true and powerful effect on our hearts and minds. It will change how we think and feel. To give you an analogy, most fat people can get thin through discipline. But there may be some people for whom such discipline is never very effective, because of some physical disorder. In the same way, perhaps, there may be some people who are unable to fully break themselves out of depression, or perhaps only rarely are able to do so — because of a bodily problem. But if this is the case, I think it is by far the exception rather than the rule — and more importantly, spiritual discipline is even more vital for that person (the person who struggles with depression or anxiety) in the same way that healthy eating is for the person who struggles with their weight (actually healthy eating is probably just as critical to the person with depression). Someone with an illness that causes obesity shouldn’t throw up his hands and say, “what is the point in eating healthily?” He may not be able to achieve a normal weight, or be completely healthy — but he can certainly set a trajectory. He can make himself a bit thinner and more healthy — or fatter and less healthy. In the same way, the less able you feel to be happy, the more I think it is your responsibility to seek happiness, for otherwise you will only fall deeper into joylessness and despair and anxiety. Scripture says:

exercise thyself unto piety: for bodily exercise is profitable for a little; but piety is profitable for all things, having promise of the life which now is, and of that which is to come. Faithful is the saying, and worthy of all acceptation. For to this end we labor and strive, because we have our hope set on the living God, who is the savior of all men, especially of them that believe. (1 Ti 4:7–10)

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