Never could a title for a diptych of articles about happiness be more fitting, for Christ Himself spoke it. Of earthly happiness His disciples would have little, for their Godly happiness can no more be of this world than Christ was. From heaven only, whence Christ came to show the Father’s love, a mission for which Christ suffered death. And Christ’s followers are of this world and shall not yet be taken from it. Here, they may expect, as Christ expected, tribulation, persecution, and even death. And because they are frail and limited with ears that do not hear, sore disappointment.
Christ’s most extraordinary gift to us in this world, granted just before His crucifixion, and His signature seal against tribulation and disappointment, is peace. “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give unto you. Not as the world giveth, give I.” (John 14:27)
Peace that “passeth all understanding” (Philippians 4:7), as Paul experienced even when imprisoned, dumbfounding the warden. To Isaiah, God’s peace is “perfect peace” for minds stayed on God (Isa 26:3). When facing divorce or a disappointing son or daughter, when becoming senile, in bomb shelter or hospice, peace is the sign that we are under Christ’s sheltering wing. To have His peace, Christ is not only with us but in us. If you radiate such peace your friends will recognize it and desire it too.
That God’s happiness which is peace is not of this world cannot be repeated too often, repeated and repeated and ascend as a cantata of praise. But our minds are Satan’s captives, and though we have ears to hear we do not hear. What only Christ can give against what the world gives, just does not sink into ears that cannot hear.
Whereupon Satan jeers, “Did Christ tell you THAT!? That ‘peace’ He offers, it’s just another feeling like He says happiness is. If peace-feelings are what you want, have I got a cornucopia chock of peace-peace-when-there-is-no-peace for you, ersatz peace. I give you costly, aged Grand Cru chateaus, or cheapos with the cork the costliest component. Now therapeutic cannabis abounds at supermarkets, and fentanyl on streets, and absinthe for artists and poets – all plant-based.
Yes, as the apple in Eden was. Worldly happiness, even Jefferson’s ideal kind, but actually Satan’s, is death, too often too soon, by overdose.
Christ is life, life eternal. “I am the way, the truth, and the life.” (John 14:6) He is the bread of life, the breath of life.
And this cannot be repeated enough but would it sink in even to an Einstein? God is both meek and mild and the cosmic power, power somehow in merely spoken words when spoken by the infinite God who by His words creates and then guides the galaxies in orbits and shapes the bubbles of black matter and clouds of cosmic dust thousands of light years in dimension, or axions and bosons of a billionth of a billionth the mass of an electron, or as waves, or strings of infinite or infinitesimal length, or creates life. And, even more incomprehensible than quarks or cosmic dust, God’s love, love more infinite than galaxies.
In the beginning, before sin, God gave innumerable beautiful and everchanging gifts, everything for consummate happiness. Even now He continues to give us the distant mountains of hard granite transformed by dusk’s brief flame into violet planes of translucency. Kaleidoscopically He changes backlit clouds with dancing outlines of hard light and shafts of gentle light beaming through. He empowers buds to change into apricots, eggs to caterpillars to pupae and, every organ having been dissolved, into butterflies the most colorful of all animal creatures, and tiny calcified eggs into iridescent hummingbirds. Happiness with loved ones, like the mountains of granite going translucent, was granted by God at the beginning, not by Satan.
Satan wrested ownership of this earth and its happiness from its divine creators, but could not plunder their character or love for fallen man. God’s love for us is not merely a manifesto but a manifestation of His character and His love, and is infinite.
“God so loved the world that He gave His only Begotten Son that whosoever believeth on Him should not perish but have everlasting life” (John 3:16). That is the message of every quark and every nightingale and should be of every human throat repeating and singing it endlessly.
We are so loved by God that He gave His only Begotten Son to be Jacob’s ladder between heaven and earth, between His rejected immutable law and His immeasurable love. God’s blessed gift of His Son to our race as our Brother makes us closer to God than if we had never sinned. EGW was inspired to say so.
Our creators formed us in Their image. Then Satan molded us into His image, and we can hardly comprehend, or refuse to comprehend, being in the image of God, or His Son who died to enable our sinful image to be made again like God’s. Darwin has apes as our ancestors. Christ tells us God is “our Father” and Himself is our Brother, and gives us the right to be God’s own adopted sons and daughters.
Christ sent the Holy Spirit, the Comforter, to be His own comforting presence in His absence. No longer walking among us, Christ, through the Holy Spirit would yet be more perceived than when He was physically present, bringing unearthly happiness and peace.
Fun? Fun, of which Satan claims God wants us to have none of. No, earthly fun Christ does not offer. Instead He offers better gifts than the world can give, His love, joy, and, yes, blessed peace, and Himself.
But there would also be wars, earthquakes, plagues. And He promised the End Times that would be a time of trouble such as, upon this world of naught but tribulation, there never was.
Already we have COVID, as invisible as a tornado, as real-time as a riot and a burning chair being thrown through a store window, just one of a train of prophesied disasters, which has over-night struck more nations more devastatingly, or so our thought leaders have proclaimed, than any previous pestilence, and generating panic, paranoia, masks, and utter confusion, craziness, chaos. Vocabularies, racial relations, economy, society, culture, religions, and families even though separated by social distance all collapse perhaps intentionally upon each other like a house of cards, smothered beneath now-awarded but once-feared blasphemies against nature and gender, the blackest evils that prophets deign not detail, and the most sacrosanct of Jeffersonian values, smothered like lava from Vesuvius.
Too many Laodiceans have been habituated by Hollywood to popcorn and suspension of disbelief at the theater door, and happily accept that these are the happy days when masks are for goalies dodging hockey pucks, or for eyes and worn only at costume balls or by the Lone Ranger, or cartoon racoons. And good ole unifying wartimes were when the enemy, except for a few moles and spies and everywhere the gestapo, was over in the other side’s trenches or tanks and wore enviable, collectable insignias, uniforms, and helmets. Let us slap-happy people join the mighty Wurlitzer and sing along the happy song of FDR’s campaign in the midst of the Great Depression, “Happy Times Are Here Again!” Sweet memes to you, my facebook friend.
Lo, we Laodiceans are rich in doctrines eagerly sucked up from the world’s knowledge and superstitions, not Scripture, nor the red books, nor even the Fuller Seminary. Laodiceans yearn for the days of wine and roses and the leeks of Egyptian captivity. Delighted we are indeed that the Lord dilly-dallyeth His coming. And hardly disappointed that all things continue as they have been so that we who would be higher than the Highest may impose our 3 stolen messages: social justice, social distance, and LGBTWOBLM.
No, no! Wrong! All things do not continue as they have been. Now there is lockdown in lockstep and goosestep. You are being sliced into data-demographics, even genes are being sliced and inserted promiscuously and chimeras engineered, and syllables dissembled and, thanks to hi tech, AI and spiritualism, reassembled into Siri and Alexa running in endless audio loops in brains at all levels. The End Times have come! And worse is yet to come!
Oh come on, it isn’t THAT bad!, you old conspiracy-monger, you toxic doomsayer! You’re an evil demon spewing hate, racism, and disinformation. You’re an embarrassment to our emergent, woke church and a dire threat to evolving utopian society. Keep on like this and you’ll be cancelled.
Sigh! Well, OK, kids, what would you prefer to hear? That we’re on spring fun break, like a happy-days movie musical starring Mickey Rooney, choreographed dancing and popcorn galore? And here we are in the casinos among the banks of slot machines, and at every one we hit the happiness jackpots and with our cupped, craving hands catch the thirty pieces of silver that come clanking down the chutes? Naught there is but a drug-induced peace and partying, and more of the same? Perchance we are enjoying a happy Disneyesque Death valley with happy little Fantasia clouds floating above? The pandemic was a false alarm?
False alarm? The hard fact is that Christ is soon to return to repossess the world that He created, this time in such blinding glory as to cause the wicked to crave the opaque granite mountains to fall upon them, while the unspeakably glorious Christ welcomes the righteous to be where He and our happiness are. Heaven.
Heaven is our supreme, uttermost happiness,– the quintessence and essence, the consummation of happiness, embellished by joy and peace as only Christ and heaven giveth. It’s what both parts and articles have been building up to. Although metaphor or fancy writing, especially mine, can not do justice to heavenly magnificence, surprisingly few details are given of it. More specifications were given Noah for the ark or Moses for the tent tabernacle.
What detail the Bible supplies is alien to us moderns, like ancient-type city walls, huge gates, streets of transparent gold, bejeweled crowns, and gleaming white unisex robes. The world mockingly supplies cartoons depicting heaven as clouds for saints to sink knee-high into, their heads orbited by hula-hoop halos. Indian religion informs of Nirvana, consummate nothingness and thus consummate happiness.
But Paul and Ellen White were granted reality visions of heaven and exclaimed that it is as tangible as we are, as Christ who became one of us was, as God and Christ who created us in their image, and who has gone there to prepare a place for us. It is wonderful beyond expression in any human language or vocabulary. Unutterable. “If it were not so,” Christ assured us, “I would have told you.”
But even if heaven could be fully described in profuse and literal detail, God Himself has decreed otherwise. Ellen White explains that we are not now, nor for eternity, to be preoccupied with the material things of heaven, as wonderous as they must be. We are to have faith in our God’s creative power and promises thereof.
The promised new earth is indeed a recreation of Eden and the redeemed are to repossess it, but our focus will be God and Christ who created both Edens and, with whom we are to rejoice for eternity. “And this is life eternal, that they might know Thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom Thou hast sent” (John 17:3KJV).
Only in eternity can we begin to know the cost of our redemption to the Father – the sacrifice of His Son. And this consummate sacrifice is the Father’s glory, as He proclaimed from heaven by proclamations within a thunderclap (John 12), perhaps rattling quarks and pulsating the cosmic strings throughout the universe. And Christ knew that the cost He would pay in divine status, humility, suffering, and a grisly death, even momentary separation from God as required of us by sin, would purchase eternal life for His redeemed brothers and sisters. Glory! Glory! Glory!
To the natural, captive man, the cost of loss of worldly pleasure much less the strange glory is hardly a deal at all. To buy into such foolishness is whimsy, laughable, stupid. But to Christ’s brethren no cost is too great, even life, this life. Because the Father and the Son spared no cost for us, even a grisly death.
Such a cost and glory! A certain song will ascend throughout eternity that only the redeemed of earth can sing, and do sing over and again, each time with ever more joy, while the angels and unfallen universe can only look on. Then the angels join the redeemed to sing the song of the Lamb, worthy is He who was slain for mankind’s redemption and who has swallowed up Satan and death in victory, and who now stands smiling sans mask and with outspread nail-pierced hands, welcoming His liberated brothers and sisters. All this is climaxed by one inimitable singer with the sound of many voices, no voice in the universe has such power, for it is God the Father Himself “exalting over you with loud singing” (Zephaniah 3:17 ESV) – altogether a polyphony swelling to embrace in celestial harmony and pure happiness the whole universe.
The author is a converted Laodicean, a graduate of the College of Medical Evangelists in the olden days when the blueprint was still important.