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Meditation on the Pursuit of God: The root of faith and love
Is joy a necessary side effect of love, or is it both the
root of love and the fruit of love? I will argue the latter. First, definitions
are necessary. I will be using the terms "happiness" and
"joy" interchangeably-"happiness", as dictionary.com
defines the word "happy", refers to "feeling or showing pleasure
or contentment". When one asks "are you happy with your life",
they aren't asking "does your life make you giddy?" When one asks
"are you happy with your choice of college", they are asking of whether
you are satisfied with it. True happiness refers to the deep, lasting
satisfaction of the soul. It is a lasting pleasure of the soul in its state of
affairs.
If one were to say, "Go eat an apple so that your hunger will be satisfied", the purpose clause, indicated by the phrase "so that", is the cause or the foundation of the former clause. The pursuit of satisfying hunger causes the eating of the apple. A cause of an action, as it is used here, is the foundation from which the action springs. It is the reason for the action-the telos. It gives rise to the action. Hunger gives rise to the action of eating an apple. No one would ever say "Go eat an apple so that your hunger will be satisfied" if "satisfying your hunger" was not the purpose-and therefore the reason-for which one ate the apple. No one would ever say that the satisfaction of hunger at that point is a side effect of eating the apple.
A side effect, however, as an effect that happens as a result of a certain action, but isn't the intended effect (but not necessarily a bad effect either). It's not the consummation of the pursuit, but a welcome effect nevertheless. For example, one might "go eat an apple so that their hunger will be satisfied", and yet while on the way to eat the apple they meet a friend and converse. The meeting of the friend was not the consummation of the pursuit-the pursuit's consummation lies in the satisfaction of hunger. It was a side effect-a welcome effect that was peripheral. In fact, this is the common usage of the term "side effect". When one talks about a "side effect" of a certain treatment, they are talking about an effect other than the one that was pursued. I will argue that satisfaction/pleasure in God is not peripheral, but essential to the Christian life. It is not a side effect, but the wellspring of love and the fruit of love to God.
When Jesus says, in response to the Jewish people who ask Jesus to give them the bread of life always, He says, "I am the bread of life; whoever comes to me shall not hunger, and whoever believes in me shall never thirst." (John 6:35) In response to their question to "give us this bread", He says "come to me and you won't hunger". The Jewish people, while thinking of physical wants, are still asking the question from a heart of desire. Their pursuit of satisfaction is motivating their question, and Jesus says in response to their pursuit of satisfaction that He will satisfy them. He is encouraging-motivating-their belief by an appeal to desire.
Or one might note the chain of logic in John 14 and 15. In John 14:21, Jesus states that "whoever has my commandments and keeps them, he it is that loves me." In John 15:10-11, Jesus states, "If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father's commandments and abide in his love. These things I have spoken to you, that my joy may be in you and that your joy may be full." Note the chain of logic:
Loving God (14:21) --> Keeping commandments (modus tolens: If you love God, you will keep the commandments) --> abiding in His love (by keeping the commandments, you abide in the Father's love) that (hina clause-expresses the purpose of the previous clause, which is why it is translated "that") Christ's joy might be in His people, in their joy might be full. If loving God yields obedience, and we obey to abide in God's love, and if Jesus is telling us all this SO THAT our joy might be full, then He is motivating abiding in God's love, and therefore obedience to God, and therefore loving God, by having the fullness of His joy! The pursuit of joy-everlasting pleasure in God per Psalm 16:11-in God is what causes our love-otherwise why would Jesus say that He spoke these things (i.e abiding in God's love via keeping the commandments from loving God) so that our joy would be full? Joy is the consummation of love, not a side effect. The pursuit of joy is what Jesus is using to cause love.
This is explicit in 1 Peter 2:2: "Like newborn infants, long for the pure spiritual milk, that by it you may grow up into salvation --if indeed you have tasted that the Lord is good." The tasting of the Lord precedes growing up into salvation (i.e sanctification). We ought to have tasted that He is good before we long for the pure spiritual milk. This is also explicit in Psalm 30:
"Sing praises to the Lord, O you his saints
and give thanks to his holy name
For his anger is but for a moment, and his favor is for a lifetime.
Weeping may tarry for the night, but joy comes with the morning." (Psalm 30:4-5)
I note the connecting "for". We sing praises because His anger is but for a moment, but His favor with His saints is for our lives. We may cry, but joy comes with the morning. The "for" indicates that this is the basis of our praise. We sing praise to you-FOR your anger is but for a moment. The second half of verse 5 reiterates the first half: your anger is but for a moment, which leads to weeping. Yet your favor is for a lifetime is parallel to "joy comes with the morning". We sing praises to God and we give you thanks because His anger is temporary, yet His favor is enduring. Our weeping may come with the night, but your joy comes with the morning. In Psalm 27:4, David says, "One thing have I asked of the Lord, that will I seek after; that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, to gaze upon the beauty of the Lord, and to inquire (or meditate) in his temple.". Why doesn't David say, "one thing I have asked of the Lord: to love him?" Why does David say that he only asks one thing of the Lord, when clearly he has made plenty of other requests? It's because all of his other requests boil down to this one request. This is the chief thing David asks. His love for the Lord consists in David's longing to gaze upon His beauty.
Love for God, then, is this: the overflow of delight in God which yields longing for more of Him, and expresses itself in radical acts of obedience towards God and neighbor. As Jesus argues, joy in God is the consummation of love for God. Paul says that we must "believe in our hearts" that God raised Jesus from the dead, and Jesus identifies the heart as the place where our treasure is. That means that our Treasure must be the Lordship of Jesus Christ, implied by the Resurrection and manifest in the confession we make from our lips (Romans 10:9).
This then, is the test of a true child of God: do we have new affections for Him? God, in Jeremiah 2:13, boils down the multitude of the sins of the nation to two sins: "one, they have forsaken me, the fountain of living water, and two, they have hewn out for themselves cisterns, broken cisterns that can hold no water." God is claiming that the very reason for their sin is the fact that they are pursuing the satisfaction of their thirsts in something other than the fountain of living water. It is no surprise then that Jesus, who urges belief on the basis of the satisfaction of desire, identifies belief as the origin from which living water flows from our hearts (John 3:37).
In Matthew 13:44, Jesus says that "the kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field, which a man found and covered up. Then in his joy he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field." Jesus says that the kingdom of God is like treasure, and then he talks about a man who in his joy sells all that he has to buy this kingdom. Giving all that we have for the kingdom springs from joy, not from a sense of joyless duty or commitment, with joy sprinkled on top. Joy is the foundation of our commitment to the kingdom.
In Matthew 15:18, Jesus remarks that from the heart proceeds our speech, and our sinful thoughts and emotions and actions. In Matthew 6:21, He identified the heart as the location of our treasure. If sin proceeds from the heart, and our treasure is where our heart is, then sin proceeds from treasuring the wrong thing. The antidote, as I've argued, is treasuring the right thing-God Himself! In fact, in the same chapter, Jesus quotes Isaiah to rebuke the Pharisees in verse 8: "This people honors me with their lips, but their heart is far from me." External obedience without the heart being wholly God's is worthless to Him. Even Jesus' most oft-quoted command of self denial is motivated by gain: "If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world and forfeits his soul? Or what shall a man give in return for his soul? For the Son of Man is going to come with angels in the glory of his Father, and then he will repay each person according to what he has done." (Matthew 16:24-28)
But with all this emphasis on joy, might one say that I'm placing the emphasis in the wrong place? Jesus emphasized love, and I'm over here emphasizing joy, right? Wrong. In fact, to even make that accusation distorts what Jesus Himself meant by the term "love", and thus (potentially damningly) misleads God's people as to Jesus' own commands. As a Protestant, I believe in tota Scriptura-the whole witness of Scripture. Hence, isolating Jesus' command and ignoring everything else is a hermeneutic that leads to heresy. Jesus does in fact identify love to God as the most important command. Yet when we ask, "how must we love God", or "what does love for God look like or entail", we must listen to the entire witness of Scripture. As I summarized above, the Biblical evidence tells us that love for God originates in the affections, and is consummated in joy. Love is the overflow of delight in God, yielding desire for more of Him and radical acts of sacrifice. When David says, "one thing I have asked of the Lord-to gaze upon His beauty and inquire in His temple", he is expressing the very essence of what it means to love God. Loving God consists in delighting in God's radiant perfections and expressing that delight-otherwise David's statement that this is the "one thing" he asks of the Lord would be sinful, as love is the greatest command in the Torah as well and ought to be what we ask for. In other words, joy in God and love for God ought never to be pitted against each other as antithetical, nor the former as a mere side effect of the latter. Or when Jesus says that we ought to abide in God's love (aka keep His commandments-which is the overflow of loving God) that our joy may be full, He is saying that the purpose (i.e the reason and therefore cause) of our abiding (and therefore loving) is that the joy of Christ may be in us. Delight in the radiant perfections of God is the wellspring of love, and love for God yields more pleasure in His perfection and expresses itself through joyful obedience and love towards neighbor.
If one were to say, "Go eat an apple so that your hunger will be satisfied", the purpose clause, indicated by the phrase "so that", is the cause or the foundation of the former clause. The pursuit of satisfying hunger causes the eating of the apple. A cause of an action, as it is used here, is the foundation from which the action springs. It is the reason for the action-the telos. It gives rise to the action. Hunger gives rise to the action of eating an apple. No one would ever say "Go eat an apple so that your hunger will be satisfied" if "satisfying your hunger" was not the purpose-and therefore the reason-for which one ate the apple. No one would ever say that the satisfaction of hunger at that point is a side effect of eating the apple.
A side effect, however, as an effect that happens as a result of a certain action, but isn't the intended effect (but not necessarily a bad effect either). It's not the consummation of the pursuit, but a welcome effect nevertheless. For example, one might "go eat an apple so that their hunger will be satisfied", and yet while on the way to eat the apple they meet a friend and converse. The meeting of the friend was not the consummation of the pursuit-the pursuit's consummation lies in the satisfaction of hunger. It was a side effect-a welcome effect that was peripheral. In fact, this is the common usage of the term "side effect". When one talks about a "side effect" of a certain treatment, they are talking about an effect other than the one that was pursued. I will argue that satisfaction/pleasure in God is not peripheral, but essential to the Christian life. It is not a side effect, but the wellspring of love and the fruit of love to God.
When Jesus says, in response to the Jewish people who ask Jesus to give them the bread of life always, He says, "I am the bread of life; whoever comes to me shall not hunger, and whoever believes in me shall never thirst." (John 6:35) In response to their question to "give us this bread", He says "come to me and you won't hunger". The Jewish people, while thinking of physical wants, are still asking the question from a heart of desire. Their pursuit of satisfaction is motivating their question, and Jesus says in response to their pursuit of satisfaction that He will satisfy them. He is encouraging-motivating-their belief by an appeal to desire.
Or one might note the chain of logic in John 14 and 15. In John 14:21, Jesus states that "whoever has my commandments and keeps them, he it is that loves me." In John 15:10-11, Jesus states, "If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father's commandments and abide in his love. These things I have spoken to you, that my joy may be in you and that your joy may be full." Note the chain of logic:
Loving God (14:21) --> Keeping commandments (modus tolens: If you love God, you will keep the commandments) --> abiding in His love (by keeping the commandments, you abide in the Father's love) that (hina clause-expresses the purpose of the previous clause, which is why it is translated "that") Christ's joy might be in His people, in their joy might be full. If loving God yields obedience, and we obey to abide in God's love, and if Jesus is telling us all this SO THAT our joy might be full, then He is motivating abiding in God's love, and therefore obedience to God, and therefore loving God, by having the fullness of His joy! The pursuit of joy-everlasting pleasure in God per Psalm 16:11-in God is what causes our love-otherwise why would Jesus say that He spoke these things (i.e abiding in God's love via keeping the commandments from loving God) so that our joy would be full? Joy is the consummation of love, not a side effect. The pursuit of joy is what Jesus is using to cause love.
This is explicit in 1 Peter 2:2: "Like newborn infants, long for the pure spiritual milk, that by it you may grow up into salvation --if indeed you have tasted that the Lord is good." The tasting of the Lord precedes growing up into salvation (i.e sanctification). We ought to have tasted that He is good before we long for the pure spiritual milk. This is also explicit in Psalm 30:
"Sing praises to the Lord, O you his saints
and give thanks to his holy name
For his anger is but for a moment, and his favor is for a lifetime.
Weeping may tarry for the night, but joy comes with the morning." (Psalm 30:4-5)
I note the connecting "for". We sing praises because His anger is but for a moment, but His favor with His saints is for our lives. We may cry, but joy comes with the morning. The "for" indicates that this is the basis of our praise. We sing praise to you-FOR your anger is but for a moment. The second half of verse 5 reiterates the first half: your anger is but for a moment, which leads to weeping. Yet your favor is for a lifetime is parallel to "joy comes with the morning". We sing praises to God and we give you thanks because His anger is temporary, yet His favor is enduring. Our weeping may come with the night, but your joy comes with the morning. In Psalm 27:4, David says, "One thing have I asked of the Lord, that will I seek after; that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, to gaze upon the beauty of the Lord, and to inquire (or meditate) in his temple.". Why doesn't David say, "one thing I have asked of the Lord: to love him?" Why does David say that he only asks one thing of the Lord, when clearly he has made plenty of other requests? It's because all of his other requests boil down to this one request. This is the chief thing David asks. His love for the Lord consists in David's longing to gaze upon His beauty.
Love for God, then, is this: the overflow of delight in God which yields longing for more of Him, and expresses itself in radical acts of obedience towards God and neighbor. As Jesus argues, joy in God is the consummation of love for God. Paul says that we must "believe in our hearts" that God raised Jesus from the dead, and Jesus identifies the heart as the place where our treasure is. That means that our Treasure must be the Lordship of Jesus Christ, implied by the Resurrection and manifest in the confession we make from our lips (Romans 10:9).
This then, is the test of a true child of God: do we have new affections for Him? God, in Jeremiah 2:13, boils down the multitude of the sins of the nation to two sins: "one, they have forsaken me, the fountain of living water, and two, they have hewn out for themselves cisterns, broken cisterns that can hold no water." God is claiming that the very reason for their sin is the fact that they are pursuing the satisfaction of their thirsts in something other than the fountain of living water. It is no surprise then that Jesus, who urges belief on the basis of the satisfaction of desire, identifies belief as the origin from which living water flows from our hearts (John 3:37).
In Matthew 13:44, Jesus says that "the kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field, which a man found and covered up. Then in his joy he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field." Jesus says that the kingdom of God is like treasure, and then he talks about a man who in his joy sells all that he has to buy this kingdom. Giving all that we have for the kingdom springs from joy, not from a sense of joyless duty or commitment, with joy sprinkled on top. Joy is the foundation of our commitment to the kingdom.
In Matthew 15:18, Jesus remarks that from the heart proceeds our speech, and our sinful thoughts and emotions and actions. In Matthew 6:21, He identified the heart as the location of our treasure. If sin proceeds from the heart, and our treasure is where our heart is, then sin proceeds from treasuring the wrong thing. The antidote, as I've argued, is treasuring the right thing-God Himself! In fact, in the same chapter, Jesus quotes Isaiah to rebuke the Pharisees in verse 8: "This people honors me with their lips, but their heart is far from me." External obedience without the heart being wholly God's is worthless to Him. Even Jesus' most oft-quoted command of self denial is motivated by gain: "If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world and forfeits his soul? Or what shall a man give in return for his soul? For the Son of Man is going to come with angels in the glory of his Father, and then he will repay each person according to what he has done." (Matthew 16:24-28)
But with all this emphasis on joy, might one say that I'm placing the emphasis in the wrong place? Jesus emphasized love, and I'm over here emphasizing joy, right? Wrong. In fact, to even make that accusation distorts what Jesus Himself meant by the term "love", and thus (potentially damningly) misleads God's people as to Jesus' own commands. As a Protestant, I believe in tota Scriptura-the whole witness of Scripture. Hence, isolating Jesus' command and ignoring everything else is a hermeneutic that leads to heresy. Jesus does in fact identify love to God as the most important command. Yet when we ask, "how must we love God", or "what does love for God look like or entail", we must listen to the entire witness of Scripture. As I summarized above, the Biblical evidence tells us that love for God originates in the affections, and is consummated in joy. Love is the overflow of delight in God, yielding desire for more of Him and radical acts of sacrifice. When David says, "one thing I have asked of the Lord-to gaze upon His beauty and inquire in His temple", he is expressing the very essence of what it means to love God. Loving God consists in delighting in God's radiant perfections and expressing that delight-otherwise David's statement that this is the "one thing" he asks of the Lord would be sinful, as love is the greatest command in the Torah as well and ought to be what we ask for. In other words, joy in God and love for God ought never to be pitted against each other as antithetical, nor the former as a mere side effect of the latter. Or when Jesus says that we ought to abide in God's love (aka keep His commandments-which is the overflow of loving God) that our joy may be full, He is saying that the purpose (i.e the reason and therefore cause) of our abiding (and therefore loving) is that the joy of Christ may be in us. Delight in the radiant perfections of God is the wellspring of love, and love for God yields more pleasure in His perfection and expresses itself through joyful obedience and love towards neighbor.
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