Once I had a friend who dated this woman.

She was nice, as I recall her, smart and extremely studious. She had ambitions to be top of her class. Yet her drive to excel wound her up a bit tight, in my opinion. She had this wide, bright smile — when she allowed her face to relax. She lived braced for the next exam, which, for her, seemed a year-round sport. Comparing her work with mine, it’s almost as if we attended different universities — or as if she were secretly training for the CIA.

My friend dated this woman, and he assured me they enjoyed “fun” times together. But all I remember is their study dates, quick trips to the cafeteria between library marathons, and endless flashcards. They were a power couple, too busy for a normal life, destined to leave their mark on this world. Until they broke up. I don’t have all the details, but soon after the relationship ended, I heard him do what I hadn’t truly heard before: he laughed.

Sure, I had heard him chuckle before, but never laugh. That’s the difference between grinning and smiling, speaking and praying, singing and worshiping. And his laugh was music not easily forgotten. Colorful as Joseph’s coat, alive as a rainforest, the sound of his joy brightened his listeners. His laugh, unkenneled, became a trademark. The contagious sound erupted from far deeper than the chest.

My friend was happier. And to all appearances, that newfound bliss was due to ending the relationship with this woman. The whole situation serves as an illustration of why Satan is so relentlessly after your joy in God. Let’s connect those dots.

Killed Joys Point to Killjoys

The mathematics of my friend’s gladness seem obvious: friend minus girlfriend equals happiness.

Fairly or unfairly, her presence and his deepest laughter couldn’t coexist. As one disappeared, the other appeared — like Clark Kent and Superman. Such a sudden change in demeanor reflected unfavorably upon the relationship and, right or wrong, upon her influence on his life. With her gone, he loosened up enough to laugh his real laugh; the clouds parted.

Back to Satan. He knows all too well about this connection between our joy (or not) in relation to some person, and how onlookers perceive that person. If the other kills our joy, others will see them as a killjoy. And so, Satan seeks to make us look miserable in relation to God.

Our audible joy (or not) says something about our God. No matter how we assure them otherwise, unbelievers assume our Christian lives are little more than morning study dates in Scripture, making flashcards of rules to memorize, and sneaking brief guilty pleasures during the week between Sunday services. They need to see our delight in God, hear the newfound happiness in our voices. Do they? They often see us more serious than we used to be, but do they also see us happier? Do they suspect we were more satisfied in our previous lives, dead in sins and living for the world?

You see, spiritual warfare rages over who appears to make people most satisfied: God or Satan.
Thus, sounds of human gladness in God taunt Satan’s ears. Saints have understood their joy as a polemic: “You have put more joy in my heart than they have when their grain and wine abound” (Psalm 4:7). This kind of combatant joy affronts Satan, especially when the boast comes from the man deprived of all worldly explanations for his happiness. Such a man provokes the darkness. He causes onlookers to wonder, gets them talking: What does he have that we don’t?

Satan’s Sermon

So count on it. If Satan cannot break you from God, he will attempt to make you look as miserable as possible while serving God. He means to preach about God through you, his manuscript. Your sighs and groans and complaints under the lordship of Christ begin his sermon:

Friends, relatives, neighbors, look at this man formerly free of religion now wasting away under its yoke. He was happy once, bright once, knew how to have a good time and carry a normal conversation to entertaining ends. But now the miserable creature has found God, receiving the wage of anxious toil. Further, he would attempt to evangelize you all into his same burdens and groans. He offers all that which he unhappily bears. Mark him well. Beware this uphill, narrow, and laughterless life of the Christian.

The point is not that we audibly laugh in every circumstance. There is “a time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance” (Ecclesiastes 3:4). The point is that we should be known for bursts of laughter and dancing, not endless weeping and weightiness. Our regular expressions of joy serve as an act of spiritual warfare against one who labors tirelessly to make us curse God to his face and grumble behind his back.

Here is the inconsistency that the enemy loves. God is my Father, you say — yet you’re always fretful. He is the Joy of my joy — yet you’re consistently gloomy. He is my all in all — yet even your children weary from your dissatisfaction. Christ is my Prince of Peace — yet you’re short-tempered. Jesus is my Good Shepherd who gives all by grace — yet you’re seldom grateful. Everyone can see it but us.

In other words, God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in him — and God is greatly dishonored in us when we are consistently curmudgeonly and dissatisfied in him.

Laugh, Christian

Our duty, then, is to make it abundantly clear: Our best joys and laughter were had not before coming to Christ but after. We aim to make it plain that before the Spirit made us new, we did not know what real happiness was. But now that we have him, we have more than we could ask for, more than we deserve. We live in the desert, testifying that we have water the world knows not of.

Consider how this relates to the use of our mouths. One reason God hates the grumbling of his children is this relation between our satisfaction and his glory. “Do all things without grumbling or disputing, that you may be blameless and innocent, children of God without blemish in the midst of a crooked and twisted generation, among whom you shine as lights in the world” (Philippians 2:14–15).

Consider what disrespect this respectable sin of grumbling offers to God. It says we have no Father in heaven, no Friend on earth, no Shepherd able to provide for us. The sound of our anxieties indulged ignores the birds of the air and the splendor of the flowers, claiming that whoever cares for these has not been caring for us. Complaining tells the sad tale of the orphan. But our God has not left us orphans.

So laugh, Christian. Make a habit of smiling. Relax those face muscles and rejoice, for he has destined you not for wrath but for eternal life. Put to death those grumbles and petty complaints that consume those without our hope. Yes, weep with those who weep, and sing of God’s goodness to you, of his love for you, which towers over every creeping dissatisfaction of this life. Show a world desperate for answers, desperate for life, desperate for a cure that you have happily found all in him.

Our typical images of romantic, married love picture a couple facing each other, eyes locked in mutual affection. And for good reason.

Adam’s first words to Eve were a serenade. In the Song of Solomon, the whole world serves as backdrop to the beauty of the beloved. And one day, our Lord Jesus will “present the church to himself in splendor” (Ephesians 5:27), a bride adorned and deeply adored. While friends typically stand “side by side, absorbed in some common interest,” C.S. Lewis writes, “lovers are normally face to face, absorbed in each other” (The Four Loves, 61).

And yet, as most couples know, marriage calls for more than tender clasping. In fact, the inward gaze, if allowed to exclude all else, will turn sick; the Solomonic song will spiral out of tune. For from the beginning, God built into marriage another gaze, another song.

When we hear the Lord God say, “It is not good that the man should be alone,” we may assume the not good refers to a relational lack, an emotional hole in Adam’s heart. No doubt Adam felt that lack, that hole. But God’s next words turn our eyes, surprisingly, to Adam’s vocational need: “I will make him a helper fit for him” (Genesis 2:18). God had given Adam an outward mission (Genesis 2:15–17), and Adam needed help. He needed not only a face before him, but a shoulder beside him.

Marriages today still need a mission. And that means men today still need a mission.

Woman and Helper

This dynamic picture of marriage, this inward and outward posture, finds beautiful expression in Eve’s two titles in Genesis 2. She is, one the one hand, woman. When Adam awakes from his deep sleep, and finds his rib returned to him transfigured, he breaks out in verse:

This at last is bone of my bones     and flesh of my flesh;she shall be called Woman,     because she was taken out of Man. (Genesis 2:23)

Lest we imagine marriage as a union of mere usefulness, a practical arrangement for the doing of tasks, God shows us the first husband singing the wonder of his wife. Here, standing before him, is woman — his own humanity refracted through the prism of triune diversity. She answers the longing of his heart, and he hers.

Yet Eve is, on the other hand, helper. When she enters Eden, she meets a man already on a mission to work and keep the garden under the authority of their Maker (Genesis 2:15–17). And then, together, she and her man receive the commission to “be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it” (Genesis 1:28). By God’s good design, the mission of the garden required not just one, but two; not just man, but woman. Adam needed a compatible co-regent, a queen to assist in his reign, a helper of the highest honor. Together, in complementary glory, they would garden the world.

In the pattern of Genesis 2, then, a husband loves his wife as woman, and he leads his wife as helper. He waxes poetic about her beauty, and he labors with her beside him. He rises up to praise her (Proverbs 31:28–29), and he empowers her dominion (Proverbs 31:11–27). He embraces her as lover, and they stride forth as fellow rulers. Their inward romance, like the trunk of a great tree, branches up and out, bearing fruit for outward mission.

Marriage on Mission

Men today, of course, do not receive a direct, specific mission from God as Adam did. Nevertheless, God’s original pattern of creating a man, giving him a mission, and then granting him a wife as both woman and helper tells us much about God’s lasting designs for marriage.

Today’s Adams may not have a literal garden to work and keep, but we have our own spheres for mission: homes to manage, children to father, churches to love and lead, jobs to work, and neighborhoods to reach for Christ. Each is a field to de-thorn and un-thistle, to plow and sow, to take dominion (Genesis 1:28) and make disciples (Matthew 28:18–20). And any honest man, gazing upon those fields, will agree with God’s ancient verdict: “It is not good that the man should be alone.”

Some men, like the apostle Paul, will advance their mission unmarried, with the help that comes from friends and fellow laborers rather than a wife. Most, however, will follow the creation norm, and with their wives they will expand the garden of God’s kingdom in their surrounding spheres. Together, he and she will look with longing — at each other, and also at all the land around them, waiting to be claimed for Christ.

Too often, I fear, I act as if the mission of marriage were simply marriage — that merely a happy home, and not also a happy world, were God’s aim in our union. I live like an arrow at home in the quiver, forgetting the feel of the bow, the rush of outward flight.

How, then, might men like me recover, in Christ, the lost design of Genesis 2? How might husbands live with our wives as treasured women and as precious helpers, together building something beyond ourselves? I find help from a simple three-part framework: dream, draw, do.

Dream

Adam’s leadership began with a vision of what could be: a garden worked and kept, an earth filled and subdued (Genesis 1:28; 2:15–17). A husband’s leadership, likewise, often begins with a dream. He looks out upon home, children, church, neighborhood, imagining what they might look like under the total lordship of Christ — and what he and his wife might do about it. How might they disciple the kids better? How might neighborhood hospitality become more routine? How might the family join the church for corporate prayer more often?

Unlike the sluggard, who “does not plow in autumn,” and therefore “will seek at harvest and have nothing” (Proverbs 20:4), he takes thought for the future long before it comes — anticipating needs, discerning opportunities, noticing possible threats, and learning to plant and plow more faithfully in autumn. And as the seasons of family life change — as new children are born, as the kids grow, and as normal years run their course through spring, summer, fall, and winter — he keeps dreaming, developing fresh vision for the family’s various spheres.

Any godly wife, of course, will do her fair share of dreaming too. She will feel a holy discontent and imagine better ways the family might fulfill their callings. A godly husband will cherish such dreams. As head of the home, however, he also will feel his special responsibility to take the family forward, rather than waiting for his wife to lead the charge. And so, he dreams — and as he dreams, he labors to draw her.

Draw

If the responsibility to dream counteracts the passivity in a man, the calling to draw undermines any tendency he may have toward domineering leadership. As with Adam and Eve, God intends a couple’s mission to be theirs and not just his. So, with patience and tenderness, with wisdom and humility, a man draws his wife in and out.

“God intends a couple’s mission to be theirs and not just his.”

In drawing her in, he welcomes his wife into his dreaming — gathering her impressions, asking for her feedback, hearing her counsel. He knows his dreams are often incomplete and immature without her complementary perspective. He knows, too, that her dreams may often surpass his own in sound judgment. Like the Proverbs 31 woman, “she opens her mouth with wisdom” (Proverbs 31:26) — and he is not too insecure to hear it.

In drawing his wife out, he imagines how their mission together might make full use of her abilities. How might he draw out her strengths rather than diminish them, unleash her potential rather than cage it, see her bloom and flourish rather than wither? Or as Herman Bavinck writes, how might he help her assist him “in the fullest and broadest sense, physically and spiritually, with her wisdom and love, with her head and her heart” (The Christian Family, 6)?

Do

Finally, having dreamed for his family and drawn his wife, a husband does — he acts — taking the first steps toward the garden’s uncultivated edge. Practically, as John Piper has said, he seeks to be the one who says “let’s” most often: “Let’s gather the kids for family devotions.” “Let’s plan a block party for our neighbors.” “Let’s get away just the two of us.” “Let’s go early to serve at church this Sunday.”

Some of us may find dreaming and drawing easier than actually doing. Adam seems to have: though he knew his mission and drew Eve into it, he failed to actually do it in the face of opposition (Genesis 3:6). Doing lays a burden on a man in the most inconvenient hours, attacking his laziness and selfish use of time, calling for energy after long workdays, bidding him rise and step when he would rather sit. I need help remembering that family leadership is not a one-time vision, a momentary inspiration, but a day-in, day-out pursuit, a fashioning of dreams from difficult moments.

“What a gift to a home — and what a reflection of Christ, when a man acts as the first mover most of the time.”

Can a wife take initiative in similar ways? Yes, she can — and sometimes should. Just because her husband says “let’s” most doesn’t mean she never does. But what a gift to a home, and what a reflection of Christ, when a man acts as the first mover most of the time.

The mission of marriage calls for all of a man. And therefore, it calls for a man to give all of his heart to God, and submit all of his life to Christ, and yield all of his will to the Spirit. Such an all-in, all-out man will embrace his wife as woman: his perfect match, his lily of the valley, his home on earth, his heart’s best song. And he also will embrace her as helper: his lover on mission, his indispensable partner, his queen with crown and scepter. And so he will love her, and so he will lead her.

“I am a servant of the Secret Fire, wielder of the flame of Anor. You cannot pass.” Fans of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings first heard the wizard Gandalf utter these words in 1954, bravely standing against the balrog on the bridge of Khazad-Dûm. Gandalf’s declaration now rings out in the memories of millions of those who have never read the original text, thanks to Sir Ian McKellen’s portrayal in Peter Jackson’s films.

But there is more to this line than an epic oration. In the creation myth of Middle-earth, not divulged to eager readers until four years after Tolkien’s death, we learn that the Secret Fire, or Flame Imperishable, is a gift bestowed only by God — the very gift of Being. And all the way back before 1920, Tolkien had penned a short entry in a lexicon focusing on Elvish linguistics and phonology that is the key to understanding this fire. Tucked away on page 81, the entry reads, “Sā: Fire, especially in temples. etc. A mystic name identified with Holy Ghost.”

That pattern of discovery perfectly encapsulates most people’s experience with The Lord of the Rings. A rousing story draws us in, but it takes deeper delving to unearth the rich veins of Christian theology that spread like mithril through Tolkien’s constructed world.

Perhaps you’ve been put off from reading The Lord of the Rings because Elves and Dwarves seem frivolous. Perhaps you feel content to watch the film adaptations instead. Perhaps it was simply something you read as a child, without ever considering that it might contain hidden depths. Whatever your reason, I’d like to invite you into Middle-earth to see how Tolkien approached his storytelling with an attitude of praise. We see in The Lord of the Rings a stellar example of the way a worldview can affect every facet of life.

The Open Secret of Middle-earth

Tolkien was not a professional theologian. He was not even a professional novelist. He was perhaps the greatest living authority on the history of the English language, a full professor at Oxford who mumbled his way through lectures on obscure Anglo-Saxon grammar. But when the stories he told his children gained attention and were published as The Hobbit, Tolkien became an immediate sensation. He spent the remainder of his life letting the public into the secret world he had been building in his imagination since he was a soldier in the trenches of World War I.

The basic plot of his magnum opus is now so well-known as to barely need a summary. Frodo Baggins, a diminutive Hobbit of the Shire, finds himself in possession of the One Ring, a thoroughly evil artifact that shares the essence of the Dark Lord Sauron (who was long thought destroyed). But Sauron (the eponymous Lord of the Rings) is rising again, and he wants his most powerful weapon back. Frodo, along with a small Fellowship, must undertake a mission to travel into the very heart of Sauron’s impenetrable kingdom without being discovered, and destroy the Ring in the very fires in which it was forged.

“That is the purpose for which you are called hither,” Elrond explains to the Fellowship.

Called, I say, though I have not called you to me, strangers from distant lands. You have come and are here met, in this very nick of time, by chance as it may seem. Yet it is not so. Believe rather that it is so ordered that we, who sit here, and none others, must now find counsel for the peril of the world. (The Lord of the Rings, 242)

Not chance, but a hidden ordering, orchestrated the assembly of the Fellowship at Rivendell. This sort of subtle providence appears everywhere throughout the tale, and yet it remains hidden until and unless the reader asks the next (and necessary) question: “Ordered by whom?”

Divine Design

Once the question is posed, the answer seems inevitable. The very nature of the narrative drives it. Who keeps this seemingly impossible mission from devolving into chaos? Why does chance always seem to favor the side of the good? Gandalf, again, shows us more than is immediately obvious.

There was something else at work, beyond any design of the Ring-maker. I can put it no plainer than by saying that Bilbo was meant to find the Ring, and not by its maker. In which case you also were meant to have it. And that may be an encouraging thought. (56)

This is the divine design of Middle-earth.

The Lord of the Rings keeps its Christian metaphysic under the surface. Tolkien deliberately set the story in the mythical past of our own world, before the special revelation to Abraham or the incarnation of the God-man. Yet, aside from its strong portrayal of providence, it also models the life of common grace.

“We see in ‘The Lord of the Rings’ a stellar example of the way a worldview can affect every facet of life.”

Frodo refuses to kill Gollum (who deserves it) because he insists that Gollum still possesses an inherent dignity and the possibility of redemption. Aragorn’s kingship manifests not in his seizure of military power, but in his works of healing and righteousness. Sam Gamgee, the blue-collar gardener, not Boromir, the realpolitiker captain, is the highest model of heroism. In all these ways, Tolkien is seeding the ground for spiritual harvest, creating art that has its own integrity while organically illustrating truth.

The World as Art

A staunch Roman Catholic who recited his prayers loudly in Latin even after Vatican II allowed for Mass in English, Tolkien didn’t set out to write “Christian fiction,” whatever that term may mean. He has no Aslan-allegory waiting to pounce upon us. “I was primarily writing an exciting story in an atmosphere and background such as I find personally attractive. But in such a process inevitably one’s own taste, ideas, and beliefs get taken up,” he explains (The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, 267).

Tolkien’s art is, first and foremost, just that: art, made by a professing Christian. Not a hidden sermon, not an evangelistic allegory, not a work of imaginative apologetics — at least, not directly. But Tolkien had an incredibly robust doctrine of creation, which makes the category of “art” something much more than mere entertainment. For him, the whole world is a work of Art that the Creator has made real, giving it what Tolkien calls “secondary reality” (Letters, 279).

And if the world is art, then it all must mean something. God, the true Being, gives other beings their existence, and because God is their source, they point back to him. All creation is sacramental: God reveals his own Being through the gift of being and his own invisible nature through visible nature. This is what creation means. It’s designed to lead us to glorify its Creator.

Stories Can Elevate the Heart

If the world really is art, then not just the sacramental, imaginative, aesthetic experience of creation, but also our instinct for poetic vision, reveal the divine Poet. If creation is art, then all art mirrors creation in some way.

Tolkien ties this vision of a universe teeming with unique, wonder-full creatures to his theory of sub-creation. We make because we are made in the image of a Maker, and we extend and enrich God’s creation through our own derivative creative efforts. Tolkien’s “exciting story,” in which a Christian mind imitates its Creator, doesn’t have to be a gospel allegory. It glorifies God by being itself, just as trees glorify God by being trees and the rocks cry out before Christ. All art imitates creation to a greater or lesser degree. God’s character is more translucent in some works than others (more evident, for instance, in The Brothers Karamazov than Iron Man 2).

The Lord of the Rings is not just popcorn fare. It is deeply theological, meditating on themes of death, fall, mercy, and idolatry. Its atmosphere strikes even non-Christians as redolent of a certain sanctity, of a high, clear nobility that elevates the heart. Here, Tolkien’s fantasy environment allows for such elements to be magnified beyond their ordinary scale and contemplated more directly. He invented this genre for a profound reason.

Joy as Poignant as Grief

In his magisterial essay “On Fairy-Stories,” Tolkien articulates the threefold theological movement of fantasy. First, it helps us to escape from the claustrophobic realm of materialism and all our quotidian burdens. Escaping into a new perspective then helps us to recover our view of the truth. Our eyes have been clouded by sin and possessiveness, and packaging the old familiar goods in unfamiliar forms helps us to see them afresh. But the key characteristic of all good fantasy is consolation, the joy of the happy ending.

Tolkien terms this specific sort of joy eucatastrophe, “a sudden and miraculous grace: never to be counted on to recur.” While acknowledging that we live in the midst of much sorrow, failure, and pain, eucatastrophe instead “denies (in the face of much evidence, if you will) universal final defeat and in so far is evangelium, giving a fleeting glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief” (Tolkien On Fairy-Stories, 75).

Fantasy echoes the story of redemption. Lost in our sin and with no hope of escape, we are alienated from God the Creator, but in an astonishing grace he himself becomes one of us in order to do what only he can. And when things seem darkest — when we reject, violate, and murder God himself — that is the exact moment at which God’s greatest triumph occurs. It leads our hearts to exult in immeasurable joy. The fairy tale has come true. “Legend and History have met and fused” (Fairy-Stories, 78).

As such, Tolkien believes that fantasy can train our hearts for truth. He writes of the gospel as a form of fairy tale:

This story has entered History and the primary world; the desire and aspiration of sub-creation has been raised to the fulfillment of Creation. The Birth of Christ is the eucatastrophe of Man’s history. The Resurrection is the eucatastrophe of the story of the Incarnation. This story begins and ends in joy. It has pre-eminently the “inner consistency of reality.” There is no tale ever told that men would rather find was true, and none which so many sceptical men have accepted as true on its own merits. (Fairy-Stories, 78)

A Classic for Christians?

If all good art reflects the divine artist, and all good fantasy foreshadows the gospel, what might we gain from reading a work like The Lord of the Rings, crafted by a Christian who self-consciously leaned into this state of affairs, seeking to make excellent art that goes with the grain of creation?

The Lord of the Rings offers a picture of a good and beautiful cosmos. It refuses to glamorize evil. It pictures heroes who are actually heroic in the biblical sense, not just glory-driven killing machines. Tolkien doesn’t need to make his fantasy Christian; instead, he can simply recognize and cultivate a narrative process that God has already designed to lead us to himself.

The Evangelium has not abrogated legends; it has hallowed them, especially the “happy ending.” The Christian has still to work, with mind as well as body, to suffer, hope, and die; but he may now perceive that all his bents and faculties have a purpose, which can be redeemed. (Fairy-Stories, 78–79)

Tolkien’s great text models for us what it might mean to redeem this aspect of God’s good creation, to participate in the work of making all things new. In this way, he too is a servant of the Secret Fire.