Keys to the true happiness

We all have had moments of happiness in our lives, maybe fleeting moments, but still, moments that we felt happy.

We know that feeling and we seek to have it again and again.

For some that moment is the childhood’s Christmas, or maybe going fishing with your father, baking with your mother, the game night or playing out together.

No matter if you are rich or poor, famous, or notorious, or just a normal person, the moments of happiness are quite alike.

The feeling of happiness is the same and we all long for it.

Sadly many times we, in vain, feel jealous and envious of the moments of happiness of others.

Or what we imagine as moments of happiness of others.

Fleeting happiness

We can assume that Job was a happy man.

He was one of them most highly considered men in the Middle East.

He was rich and he had seven sons and three daughters.

He had the keys to the happiness and success.

Job 29:7-20

The Message (MSG)

^7-20 “When I walked downtown
    and sat with my friends in the public square,
Young and old greeted me with respect;
    I was honored by everyone in town.
When I spoke, everyone listened;
    they hung on my every word.
People who knew me spoke well of me;
    my reputation went ahead of me.
I was known for helping people in trouble
    and standing up for those who were down on their luck.
The dying blessed me,
    and the bereaved were cheered by my visits.
All my dealings with people were good.
    I was known for being fair to everyone I met.
I was eyes to the blind
    and feet to the lame,
Father to the needy,
    and champion of abused aliens.
I grabbed street thieves by the scruff of the neck
    and made them give back what they’d stolen.
I thought, ‘I’ll die peacefully in my own bed,
    grateful for a long and full life,
A life deep-rooted and well-watered,
    a life limber and dew-fresh,
My soul suffused with glory
    and my body robust until the day I die.’

Job’s life was perfect.

But when he had lost his children, his wealth and his health, that happiness is only a fleeting memory.

Job 30:1-8

The Message (MSG)

The Pain Never Lets Up

30 ^1-8 “But no longer. Now I’m the butt of their jokes—
    young ruffians! whippersnappers!
Why, I considered their fathers
    mere inexperienced pups.
But they are worse than dogs—good for nothing,
    stray, mangy animals,
Half-starved, scavenging the back alleys,
    howling at the moon;
Homeless guttersnipes
    chewing on old bones and licking old tin cans;
Outcasts from the community,
    cursed as dangerous delinquents.
Nobody would put up with them;
    they were driven from the neighborhood.
You could hear them out there at the edge of town,
    yelping and barking, huddled in junkyards,
A gang of beggars and no-names,
    thrown out on their ears.

The happy moments had lasted for decades, and then they were all gone.

Where were the keys to the happiness now?

The world is filled with stories like Job’s.

Life can be unpredictable, no matter how well we live, how safe we feel and how good we behave.

Not everything depends on us.

It is good to have children, to build houses and have wealth.

It is good to enjoy the fruits of our work, our achievement and happiness.

Without Job’s story something very important would be missing from the Bible.

Too many times us Christians think we are invincible.

Too many times we close our eyes to the reality in which we live.

Ecclesiastes 9:1-3

The Message (MSG)

9 ^1-3 Well, I took all this in and thought it through, inside and out. Here’s what I understood: The good, the wise, and all that they do are in God’s hands—but, day by day, whether it’s love or hate they’re dealing with, they don’t know.

Anything’s possible. It’s one fate for everybody—righteous and wicked, good people, bad people, the nice and the nasty, worshipers and non-worshipers, committed and uncommitted. I find this outrageous—the worst thing about living on this earth—that everyone’s lumped together in one fate. Is it any wonder that so many people are obsessed with evil? Is it any wonder that people go crazy right and left? Life leads to death. That’s it.

True source of happiness

We cannot find the true happiness, before we have faced the reality in this world.

Life in Christ is true realism and seeing the world with eyes open, accepting both the beautiful and the ugly.

The truth is that Christians aren’t invulnerable, and we are as susceptible to pain, accidents, unhappiness and death as everyone else.

That is the condition of the world where we live in.

We are not called to be rich here, we are not called to be successful and to build a kingdom here.

The true keys to the happiness are elsewhere.

Psalm 73:25-28

The Message (MSG)

^25-28 You’re all I want in heaven!
    You’re all I want on earth!
When my skin sags and my bones get brittle,
    God is rock-firm and faithful.
Look! Those who left you are falling apart!
    Deserters, they’ll never be heard from again.
But I’m in the very presence of God—
    oh, how refreshing it is!
I’ve made Lord God my home.
    God, I’m telling the world what you do!

God is our home and happiness, the true happiness can be found in Him, in knowing Him, in His presence, in knowing and reading the Bible and from its realistic wisdom for life.

Bible is a very positive, life fitting book filled with the flavor of real life.

It tells us very clearly to enjoy everything good that the life has to offer; the beauty of the nature, our friends, family, husband or wife, children and grandchildren, good food, real parties, work and vocation.

A person without God can only see this life and that is why Job’s experiences (losing his family, health and wealth) crushed the happiness and joy in life permanently.

From the eternity’s point of view

For a Christian this life is just a part of the eternal life.

The life does not end in the physical death but continues on.

Only this helps to see the life from a wider point of view.

Joy and happiness are something much deeper and more profound, than the attachment to the gifts that God has created.

Weather those gifts are people, material things or our mission in life.

Like Leo Tolstoy says in War and Peace: “If there is a God and future life, there is truth and good, and man's highest happiness consists in striving to attain them. We must live, we must love, and we must believe that we live not only today on this scrap of earth, but have lived and shall live”

Or another great author C. S. Lewis, who has the habit of going straight to the point: “God can't give us peace and happiness apart from Himself because there is no such thing.”

Closer we are to Father, Son and Holy Spirit, the closer our relations becomes, further from the temporal does the happiness and joy move into the eternal.

2 Corinthians 4:16-18

The Message (MSG)

^16-18 So we’re not giving up. How could we! Even though on the outside it often looks like things are falling apart on us, on the inside, where God is making new life, not a day goes by without his unfolding grace. These hard times are small potatoes compared to the coming good times, the lavish celebration prepared for us. There’s far more here than meets the eye. The things we see now are here today, gone tomorrow. But the things we can’t see now will last forever.

It is important that we as Christians keep in central in our hearts and lives the eternal, the timeless.

If we remember to do that than our maxims and counsel about ordinary everyday life will create hope, happiness and true joy, even in our most difficult situations.

Only in presence of Jesus the true happiness and joy are possible.

Only He has the keys to this, and future, life’s happiness.

Why God accepts the evil in the world?

We Christians believe that there is an evil power that has made himself, at least for a while, the Prince of this World.

And this raises a problem.

Is this state of affairs in accordance with God’s will?

If it is in accordance with His will, it would seem that He is a strange God.

And if it is not, how can it be if He has absolute power?

“The better stuff a creature is made of – the cleverer and stronger and freer it is – then the better it will be if it goes right, but also the worse it will be if it goes wrong”.

C. S. Lewis

But if you have been in position of authority you know how things can be in accordance with your will in one way and not in another.

If you are a parent, it is even clearer.

As a mother, it makes a lot of sense for me tell my son that I will not clean his room but he must take care of it himself.

And if I go there one day and find his clothes all over the floor and the bed unmade, it would be against my will.

I would prefer the room to be arranged.

I would prefer my son to always keep it tidy.

But if I clean it up for him, he will never learn to keep it clean himself.

It is my will to leave him to be untidy, so he can learn to be organized.

And we can find the same problem everywhere where there are people.

If you make something voluntary, generally half of the people will do it and the other half won’t.

It is not what the authority has wanted but it was his, or her, that has made it possible.

According to C. S. Lewis “Gog created things which had free will. That means creatures which can go either wrong or right. Some people think they can imagine a creature which was free but had no possibility of going wrong; I cannot. If a thing is free to be good it is also free to be bad. And free will is what has made evil possible”.

“The moment you have a self at all, there is a possibility of putting yourself first – wanting to be the centre – wanting to be God, in fact. That was the sin of Satan: and that was the sin he taught the human race”.

C. S. Lewis

Why would God then give all these creatures a free will?

Why would He make evil possible if He really is good?

“Because free will, though it makes evil possible, is also the only thing that makes possible any love or goodness or joy worth having”, C. S. Lewis in Mere Christianity.

In a world full of preprogramed creatures that work like machines there would be no evil.

But it would hardly be worth creating.

Of course God knew what would happen if He made His creatures free and then they would use their freedom the wrong way.

But it seems He thought it was worth the risk.

It seems that He thought the price to pay little besides the rewards He had planned for His creatures.

In Lewis’s words, “The happiness which God designs for His higher creatures is the happiness of being freely, voluntarily united to Him and to each other in ecstasy of love and delight compared with which the most rapturous love between a man and a woman on this earth is mere milk and water. And for that they must be free”.

We might disagree with Him.

But there is a difficulty in disagreeing with God since He is the source from which all our reasoning power comes.

If we are disagreeing with Him, there is no way we can be right and He could wrong.

It just isn’t possible, more than it is possible for a stream to rise higher than its own source.

If I am arguing agains God, I am arguing against the very power that makes me able to argue at all.

And even though it is like cutting off the branch I am sitting on, God still has the patience to listen to me.

There is a reason that God sees this state of things worth giving us the free will.

Like Lewis says, “If God thinks this state of war in the universe a price worth paying for free will – that is, for making a live world in which creatures can do real good or harm and something of real importance can happen, instead of a toy world which only moves when He pulls the strings – then we may take it is worth paying”.

And I for one I’m glad for it, because it is the only way I can exist.

“What Satan put into the heads of our remote ancestors was the idea that they could “be like gods” – could set up on their own as if they had created themselves – be their own masters – invent some sort of happiness for themselves outside God, apart from God. And out of that hopeless attempt has come nearly all that we call human history – money, poverty, ambition, war, prostitution, classes, empires, slavery – the long terrible story of man trying to find something other than God which will make him happy”.

C. S. Lewis

This post is part of an on-going series.

To begin, read Natural law. A post about the law we all have in our hearts.

If you would like to know what comes after read the post about Moral law.

Having read that, you'll need to know Which moral law to choose. 

If you agree we need to choose a moral law, maybe you'll agree that We need God.   

After we have understood the need we have for God, it is time to research What is sin. 

Having accepted your need for God, what kind of God is exactly a Christian God? This you can find out about in What we Christians believe. 

Why is it so hard to follow Christian faith? What prevents you to believe in God?

Do not let yourself to be fooled by Christianity and water. 

Who was first? The chicken or the egg? Read the post Of good and band - who was there first? The chicken or the egg?