Newly engaged, I was searching for a good book on marriage. I remember coming across one, commended as a modern classic, with this memorable question on the cover: “What if God designed marriage to make us holy more than make us happy?”

Hmm. I didn’t like that way of framing it. Why pit holy against happy? Granted, it’s a “what if” teaser on the cover. Still, this didn’t seem like a worthwhile risk to me, even if the tagline was taking aim at a common idol in our generation.

Of course, at one level, I understand, and grant, that many people have a superficial definition of, and associations with, happiness. To the degree that “happiness” refers to our experiencing momentary, superficial, comfort-based, suffering-free, pleasant feelings — and requires no new birth — then yes, true holiness, on God’s terms, will often (if not relentlessly) be at odds with such “happiness.” However, I’m not ready to cede the word happiness to such thin, shallow assumptions. That is not what we find when we come to the Scriptures. Nor do we find a holiness in tension with true happiness. In fact, the two are tied together intimately.

Strange Notions of Holiness

Some of us, favored beyond words to be raised in Christian families and faithful churches, have needed to have our concept of holiness renovated after coming to genuine faith as teens or adults. Looking back, and being sober-minded, the fault was likely not our parents’ or our church’s (for many of us) but our own: we were dead in our sins (Ephesians 2:1, 5), alive in the flesh but lifeless in spirit; we needed to be born again. And when God made us alive in Christ (Ephesians 2:5), we began to see our Creator and his world with new eyes, and eventually also his holiness, and our call to be holy as he is.

The challenge to come awake to real holiness is not unique in our generation. Three hundred years ago, a young Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758) encountered such a barrier, and found it, with God’s help, to be surmountable. Writing about the 16-year-old Edwards, biographer George Mardsen says,

Self-discipline had failed as much as it had succeeded. Self-examination was not encouraging either. As early as he could remember, he had resented much of the endless tedium of his parents’ teaching and discipline. Holiness seemed “a melancholy, morose, sour and unpleasant thing.” He did not find delight in lengthy church services. He still had a rebellious nature. He was proud. He had a difficult and unsociable personality, and he did not have signs of charity that were evidence of grace. He struggled with sexual lusts which, despite prodigious efforts, he could not wholly control. (Jonathan Edwards: A Life, 36)

Here Marsden surmises Edwards’s thoughts as a teen (in quotes) based an admission Edwards made later in life, when writing on “the beauty of holiness”: “We drink in strange notions of holiness from our childhood, as if it were a melancholy, morose, sour, and unpleasant thing” (The Works of Jonathan Edwards, 13:163).

Edwards is not alone, in his generation or ours. Many of us, in our own unbelief, have imbibed “strange notions of holiness” that seem at odds with happiness, however thinly sliced and temporal our idea of happiness. Having been born again, we need to consider holiness afresh, starting with God’s own holiness, then ours.

Holiness Himself

Holiness begins with God. He is its epicenter. In fact, we might think of holy as an adjective for God himself. We would be hard pressed to take our bearings from any place better than Isaiah’s astounding glimpse of God in his holiness in Isaiah 6. In God’s presence, we overhear the seraphim call to each other, ascribing to God his infinite worth,

“Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts;the whole earth is full of his glory!” (Isaiah 6:3)

Perhaps you’ve heard that God’s holiness refers to his otherness or separateness — that he is set apart from his creatures and their sin and their world. They are common; he is holy.

Otherness does get at an important aspect of God’s holiness, but it doesn’t include a vital dimension of what holiness is, as seen in the worship of the seraphim. When they say, “Holy, holy, holy,” they are not just crying, “Separate, separate, separate.” They call out in worship; they are praising God as holy, and delighting in him as holy. They are not disinterested. He is not just other, but good. The seraphim have seen and perceived God’s infinite intrinsic value and worth, and now declare, in the awe of glad worship, “Holy, holy, holy.”

And before the seraphim, and redeemed humans, see and perceive it, God himself perfectly sees and perceives his own value and worth. In other words, God is happy in himself. He is the blessed, happy God (1 Timothy 1:11; 6:15). As Edwards, having put away his formerly “strange notions,” came to see it,

God’s holiness is his having a due, meet, and proper regard to everything, and therefore consists mainly and summarily in his infinite regard or love to himself, he being infinitely the greatest and most excellent Being. (Works, 20:460)

“In Scripture, we do not find a holiness in tension with true happiness. The two are tied together intimately.”

At the heart of God’s own holiness is his perfect regard or love to, or happiness in, himself. Before God is holy with respect to his creation, he is holy with respect to himself — meaning he perfectly sees, perceives, enjoys, loves, and delights in own perfections as “infinitely the greatest and most excellent Being.” Far from holiness in God being in tension with his own blessedness or happiness, they are inextricably linked. The holy God is first and foremost happy in himself.

Heart of Holiness

What about “holiness,” then, in us, his creatures? Unavoidably, holiness refers to our living in this world, our words, our actions, and whether they accord with the value and worth of God. However, we should ask, What is the heart from which springs such external manifestations of creaturely holiness? The essence of holiness in redeemed humans is the heart that regards, loves, and delights in God according to his worth.

The process we call “sanctification” (meaning, to become more holy, to grow in holiness), writes John Piper, is “the action by which we bring our feelings and thoughts and acts into conformity to the worth of God” (Acting the Miracle, 36). Holiness in us, as God’s finite creatures, begins with our truly perceiving and duly prizing God’s excellence and value.

So, not only does true holiness give the greatest happiness, but happiness in God is the heart of holiness. As Piper says elsewhere, “Try to explain holiness without happiness, and you will fail. The essence of holiness is happiness in God.”

And holiness does not end, or stayed contained, in the human soul.

Holiness with Hands and Feet

Holiness also is to be lived in the world. The holiness that has its essence in our hearts is to be expressed and extended into words and actions that make God’s otherwise unheard and unseen value known to other humans. Just as God’s own happiness in himself “went public” in his creating the visible, audible, tangible world, so God means for our happiness in him to “go public” in his created world through our audible words and visible, fruitful lives.

True happiness in God is the heart of true holiness in us. And genuine holiness in us, soul and body, begins with souls happy in God, leading to bodily words and works that conform and testify to his worth.

Happy and Holy

Back to that book tagline that seemed to play off holiness against happiness. I wanted to ask, Why split friends into enemies? Why give place to that ancient scheme, that what God requires of his creatures must inevitably soil our happiness?

“To be truly holy in the world, we must be truly happy in God. And those truly happy in him will be holy.”

There is a kernel of truth we can acknowledge: God cares more about our holiness than the “happiness” that comes from mere temporal comforts. If our definition of “happiness” takes its bearings from secular society, as merely our experiencing momentary, superficial, comfort-based, suffering-free, pleasant feelings that require no new birth, then yes, God does indeed care more about our holiness than that. But I’m not ready to let the world have the word happiness without a fight.

When we see true happiness as deep, thick, enduring, God-rooted joy in God — dazzling in the radiance of the person and work of Christ — we find that such happiness, far from having nothing to do with holiness, is the heart of what it means to be holy. Which dispels our strange notions of holiness as melancholy, morose, sour, and unpleasant. Come, see holiness as beautiful, desirable, and wonderful.

True holiness in the world begins with true happiness in God. And those truly happy in him will be holy.

Part 1 Episode 120 When Martin Luther discovered the gospel in the Scriptures, everything changed for him and the future of the church. In this episode of Light + Truth, John Piper begins a 3-part series exploring Luther’s relationship with the Bible.

In 587 BC, after an agonizing two-and-half-year siege, the great pagan king Nebuchadnezzar finally breached the walls of Jerusalem. Babylon’s chokehold on Jerusalem for those couple of years had devastated the city, driving its starvation-crazed inhabitants to the unimaginable point of cannibalism.

But now, the foreign military unleashed its full fury, reducing to ruins much of the holy city, “the perfection of beauty” and “the joy of all the earth” (Psalm 50:2; 48:2). And it thrust a spear into its spiritual heart by destroying the great temple Solomon had built nearly four centuries earlier (Jeremiah 52:4–14). The conquest is still felt among observant Jews, who commemorate it annually with fasting and laments on the ninth of Av, the fifth month of the Hebrew calendar (Jeremiah, Lamentations, 441).

The Bible preserves the inspired record of one saint who managed to survive the carnage. We know it in our English Bibles as Lamentations, a collection of five beautifully composed, honest, raw poems, in which the anonymous poet gives an inspired collective voice to the grieving nation of Israel.

He captures in verse the devastating and disorienting psychological, emotional, and spiritual distress suffered by those who lived and died during the darkest, most tragic chapter in Israel’s old-covenant history, when the Lord, in judgment, had “become like an enemy” to his own people (Lamentations 2:5). It is the saddest book in all of Scripture.

Which is why it is remarkable that smack-dab in the middle of this book of tears is, arguably, the Bible’s most well-known, most beloved declaration of God’s love, mercy, and faithfulness:

The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases;     his mercies never come to an end;they are new every morning;     great is your faithfulness. (Lamentations 3:22–23)

Driven into Darkness

To truly appreciate this beautiful, beloved declaration, we need to keep in mind the kinds of shock this author and his people had experienced.

They had seen Jerusalem’s beloved walls, strongholds, and palaces — the structures that for centuries had been symbols of God’s strength and protection for the Jewish people (Psalm 48:12–14) — turned to rubble (Lamentations 2:5, 8–9). They had seen priests massacred in the temple and the sacred building burned to the ground (Lamentations 2:6–7, 20). They had seen infants die of starvation in the arms of their mothers (Lamentations 2:11–12), parents eat the remains of their children (Lamentations 4:10), young women brutally raped, and once-free men enslaved and humiliated (Lamentations 5:11–13). They had seen bodies of young and old, common and noble, lying in the streets where they had been slaughtered, left to become shriveled horrors (Lamentations 2:21, 4:7–8).

And they knew this was God’s doing: “The Lord has done what he has purposed; he has carried out his word, which he commanded long ago” (Lamentations 2:17). After centuries of prophetic warnings issued to his stiff-necked, disobedient people (Isaiah 1:7–9; Amos 2:4–5), God at last brought upon Israel the dreadful covenant curses Moses described in Deuteronomy 28:47–57.

The sovereignty of God over this human anguish pours out through the poet’s pen as he writes,

[The Lord] has driven and brought me     into darkness without any light;surely against me he turns his hand     again and again the whole day long.

He has made my flesh and my skin waste away;     he has broken my bones;he has besieged and enveloped me     with bitterness and tribulation;he has made me dwell in darkness     like the dead of long ago.

He has walled me about so that I cannot escape;     he has made my chains heavy;though I call and cry for help,     he shuts out my prayer;he has blocked my ways with blocks of stones;     he has made my paths crooked. (Lamentations 3:2–9)

Therefore,

my soul is bereft of peace;     I have forgotten what happiness is;so I say, “My endurance has perished;     so has my hope from the Lord.” (Lamentations 3:17–18)

We can barely fathom such multilayered darkness and suffering: afflicted by God, decimated by man, alone, with no light, no peace, no happiness, no hope.

And then.

Light in Deep Despair

Suddenly, we come to one of the most unexpected, jarring literary pivots in all of Scripture — one might even call it a resurrection of one who had been “like the dead” (Lamentations 3:6).

“Into this darkness of destruction, death, and despair comes light, and in this light hope revives.”

Nothing about the horrific circumstances of the city, the nation, or the author gives any reason for hope. By all appearances, all has been lost. God, in his righteous wrath, administered through a foreign superpower, has slain his “firstborn son” (Exodus 4:22). The tomb has effectively been sealed. All one can do now is weep beside the grave — or hide from those who had done the killing.

Then into this darkness of destruction, death, and despair comes light, and in this light hope revives. For suddenly, unexpectedly, the lamenting author breaks into this beautiful, and now beloved, declaration:

But this I call to mind,     and therefore I have hope:

The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases;     his mercies never come to an end;they are new every morning;     great is your faithfulness.“The Lord is my portion,” says my soul,     “therefore I will hope in him.” . . .

For the Lord will not     cast off forever,but, though he cause grief, he will have compassion     according to the abundance of his steadfast love. (Lamentations 3:21–24, 31–32)

What revives the author’s dead hope? Answer: not what, but who. The very sovereign God who had brought the darkness and anguish.

‘This I Call to Mind’

Specifically, his hope revives by the word of this sovereign God that the author has stored in his heart (Psalm 119:11). And he has stored a lot of it in his heart. Read Lamentations carefully and you’ll notice many allusions to passages found throughout the Law, the Prophets, and the Psalms — especially the Psalms. For example, read these excerpts from Psalm 103 and listen for their echoes in that beloved Lamentations text:

Bless the Lord, O my soul,     and forget not all his benefits,who forgives all your iniquity,     who heals all your diseases,who redeems your life from the pit,     who crowns you with steadfast love and mercy. . . .

The Lord is merciful and gracious,     slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love.He will not always chide,     nor will he keep his anger forever.He does not deal with us according to our sins,     nor repay us according to our iniquities.For as high as the heavens are above the earth,     so great is his steadfast love toward those who fear him;as far as the east is from the west,     so far does he remove our transgressions from us.As a father shows compassion to his children,     so the Lord shows compassion to those who fear him. . . .

The steadfast love of the Lord is from everlasting to everlasting on those who fear him,     and his righteousness to children’s children (Psalm 103:2–4, 8–13, 17)

God’s word revives this grieving author’s hope. He calls Scripture to mind in this dark, desperate moment. He recalls the Lord’s promises that his steadfast love will never cease toward those who fear him, and neither will his mercies. And he remembers that God’s great faithfulness is inextricably connected to his unceasing steadfast love (Psalm 57:10).

For the author (and the saints he speaks for), passages like this become “a lamp to [his] feet and a light to [his] path” (Psalm 119:105). Even here in the darkest pit, even now when all seems lost, as he and his nation suffer the terrible consequences of sin, in God’s light, he sees light (Psalm 36:9). And this light resurrects his hope.

Darkness Will Not Overcome the Light

The anguished poet of Lamentations, recording his hope amidst grief, reminds us of God’s power to unexpectedly resurrect dead hope. And the horrific nature of his circumstances, as an expression of God’s righteous judgment on Israel, remains a potent reminder that we are never in a pit so deep, and we never endure tragedies so severe, that God cannot, with a word, bring light to our path that overcomes our darkness with hope.

“Jesus knows tragic carnage and destruction, and all the darkness we experience, from the inside.”

I doubt this poet realized that these words — the words of “a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief” (Isaiah 53:3) — would so powerfully foreshadow Christ. Jesus knows tragic carnage and destruction, and all the darkness we experience, from the inside. That’s why he is for us the “light that shines in the darkness” (John 1:5).

It’s also why, when we are in our most hopeless pits, when our “soul is bereft of peace,” when we “have forgotten what happiness is,” when it feels like our “endurance has perished” and “so has [our] hope from the Lord” (Lamentations 3:17–18), Jesus, through his Spirit, loves to resurrect our hope by helping us call to mind God’s “living and active” word (Hebrews 4:12). And when his light shines in our darkness, “the darkness [will] not overcome it” (John 1:5).