My apologetics teacher posed the question, "How do we find happiness." We had to give a short answer to this question. I enjoyed answering it and have pasted my answer. Enjoy and respond.
"Our happiness in something is entirely built upon an intellectual understanding of how long the happiness will last. The happiness that drunkenness, money, and sex can provide is often real happiness, but it is not ultimate happiness. In reality, the question is, “how can we find ultimate happiness?” Ultimate happiness can only be found in something that can offer the promise of eternal satisfaction. With this in mind, looking for ultimate happiness on this temporal earth will only lead to despair. Ultimate happiness can only be found in God, because only God can deliver on the promise of eternal satisfaction.
God is the only infinite entity in all of existence. The love, beauty, glory, justice, and happiness of God simply cannot be exhausted, therefore we can be assured that we will never run out of that which makes us happy. The problem is that right now, because of the effects of the fall, even our finding happiness in God can (and does) have physical draw backs (if you disagree, talk to those undergoing persecution for the name of Christ), which can limit our temporal enjoyment of it. How then can Christians defend the thesis that ultimate happiness can be realized when one finds his/her happiness in God? It all has to do with hope.
We live in the already/not yet. Our confidence and surety is that a time is coming when our unabridged enjoyment in Christ will be actualized. We but get a mere taste of it now, but will be wrapped in it for an eternity once Christ welcomes us to our heavenly abode. The mere taste of what we now enjoy (by faith) is much sweeter than what those who are finding their happiness in the temporal satisfactions of the world are tasting, and yet it is not even comparable to the satisfaction of what we will enjoy in heaven."
2 comments:
Excellent post Jimmy! As you know, I love this topic. You naughty boy! You've been reading Piper!!!!!!
A verse that sums it up by showing the glory of our future hope in happiness in Christ, and God's ultimate purpose for our everlasting, ever increasing, joy is in 2 Thessalonians 1:10 which tells us that one of the primary reasons for Christ's second coming is to be "marveled" at by His saints.
God wants us to be wholly, universally, and perfectly satisfied in Christ...so satisfied that any other appeal to satisfaction would seem as a digression from the experience of the satisfaction in Christ.
None says it better than Piper himself. I personally recommend his "God is the Gospel."
Actually, I haven't been reading Piper, I have been reading the Heidelberg Catechism. Just kidding.
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