Psychiatrist Paul D. Meier writes,
I have had millionaire businessmen come to my office and tell me they have big houses, yachts, condominiums . . . , nice children, a beautiful mistress, an unsuspecting wife, secure corporate positions—and suicidal tendencies. They have everything this world has to offer except one thing—inner peace and joy. They come to my office as a last resort, begging me to help them conquer the urge to kill themselves.
In the midst of such hopelessness, God offers the good news of His transforming grace, mercy, love, and eternal happiness: “Let the one who is thirsty come; let the one who wants it take the water of life free of charge” (Revelation 22:17, NET).
There’s No True Happiness Without God.
Charles Darwin, near the end of his life, spoke in his autobiography of what he called his “loss of happiness”:
Up to the age of thirty, or beyond it, poetry of many kinds . . . gave me great pleasure, and even as a schoolboy I took intense delight in Shakespeare. . . . Formerly pictures gave me considerable, and music very great delight. But now for many years I cannot endure to read a line of poetry: I have tried lately to read Shakespeare, and found it so intolerably dull that it nauseated me. I have also almost lost my taste for pictures or music. . . . I retain some taste for fine scenery, but it does not cause me the exquisite delight which it formerly did. . . . My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts. . . . The loss of these tastes is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be injurious to the intellect, and more probably to the moral character, by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature.
Darwin may not have traced his diminished happiness to his gradual change in worldview, but it’s likely that the naturalistic perspective he embraced gradually undermined his early delight in studying God’s creation, resulting in a joyless, machinelike indifference.
Since God Himself is the happiness that overflows into His creation, every attempt to separate Him from happiness is futile.
In an 1847 letter to his father, Scottish author George Macdonald (1824–1905) wrote of the barriers he faced in turning to Christ:
One of my greatest difficulties in consenting to think of religion was that I thought I should have to give up my beautiful thoughts & my love for the things God has made. But I find that the happiness springing from all things not in themselves sinful is much increased by religion. God is the God of the Beautiful, Religion the Love of the Beautiful, & Heaven the House of the Beautiful— nature is tenfold brighter in the sun of righteousness, and my love of nature is more intense since I became a Christian. . . . God has not given me such thoughts, & forbidden me to enjoy them. Will he not in them enable me to raise the voice of praise?
Loving nature and beauty should indeed be enhanced by loving the God who made them and reveals Himself in them—how could it be otherwise?
Only a God-Sized Gospel Can Enable Us to Find True Happiness.
Satan is aware of a truth we often fail to see: sin sabotages happiness. According to Spurgeon, “Man was not originally made to mourn; he was made to rejoice. The Garden of Eden was his place of happy abode, and as long as he continued in obedience to God, nothing grew in that Garden that could cause him sorrow.”
The apostle John, aided by an angel, time-traveled to the New Earth. There he saw “the water of life, as clear as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb down the middle of the great street of the city. On each side of the river stood the tree of life.” He went on to explain what life will be like for those who live in the New Earth: “No longer will there be any curse. The throne of God and of the Lamb will be in the city, and his servants will serve him. They will see his face” (Revelation 22:1-4, NIV).
