A Blessed Invasion
by Rich Wagner
A Coke bottle drops from the sky. That’s the surprising introduction to modern society that a bushman gets as he walks through the Kalahari Desert in the 1980 screwball comedy The Gods Must Be Crazy. In the film, the bushman isn’t sure what to make of a bottle falling from a passing airplane, and so he concludes that it must be a gift from the gods. After he takes it back to his tribe, together they try to figure out what to do with it. A musical instrument. A fire starter. Perhaps a cooking utensil. But in the end, they give up. Thinking the gift is more trouble than it is worth, the bushman goes on a journey across the desert to return the bottle to the gods.

All my life, I viewed joy as something like that Coke bottle. It descended unexpectedly from the heavens and fell into my world. And like the bushman, I had been puzzled my whole life about what to make of the gift. I tried various ways to mold it into something I could understand and work with. But when my dumbed-down versions of joy let me down, the whole experience became disillusioning. In my mind, God must be crazy for making the kind of promises that he does.

I became determined to shed my pidgin understanding of joy once and for all. Over the years, I’d studied various passages in the Bible that deal with joy. I probably even led a Bible study or two on the subject. But I wanted to look again at the Scriptures in light of joy and see what I had always been missing.

It’s no exaggeration to say that joy, in all its many forms, is a driving force of Scripture, being sprinkled over 350 times from Genesis through Revelation. It sweeps through the Garden of Eden, the Promised Land, Jesus’ earthly ministry, the early church, and the future second coming of Christ. “Joy is the great note all through the Bible,” seconds Oswald Chambers.

There are several Hebrew and Greek words used in the Scriptures that express joy and its derivatives, such as to rejoice and joyful. But if I summarize these various terms, I can translate joy as an “extreme delight or gladness that is outwardly expressed.” A translator may be pleased with this definition, but I wasn’t. To me, it sounded far too much like the happiness that always produced a dead end in my life.

I became convinced that there was more to the story than textual analysis alone. As I read through more of the Scriptures, it dawned on me that even in spots of the Bible that do not explicitly talk about joy, there is a clear undercurrent of joy throughout the text. I realized that if I was going to fully understand joy, then the underlying motivations of God throughout the Old and New Testaments must also be considered.

Plainly speaking, the God who is revealed in the pages of the Bible is a God of joy. He’s a loving Father, bursting at the seams, so to speak, in his desire to share his delight with the people he created. “He will rejoice over you with singing,” exclaims Zephaniah (Zephaniah 3:17). Charles Spurgeon adds, “Man was not originally made to mourn; he was made to rejoice.” Jesus Christ emphasizes this truth in John 15. After calling his followers to obedience and remaining steadfast, he concludes, “I have told you this so that my joy may be in you and that your joy may be complete” (v. 11). Joy emerges from Scripture as one of the primary ways in which God chooses to reveal himself, to express his amazing love to humankind, and to equip us for living in a fallen world.

Like a bolt of lightning from above, the nature of joy finally hit me, and I discovered a meaty biblical response to the pidgin joy that plagued me. Joy is something worlds apart from an emotional reaction or a smiley face. Instead, joy is nothing less than the nature of God pumped through our bloodstream. It’s a blessed invasion of the Spirit of God deep into my soul. Oswald Chambers puts it like this: “Jesus does not come to a man and say ‘Cheer up,’ he plants within a man the miracle of the joy of God’s own nature.”

I know, defining joy in this way sounds a bit mysterious. After all, there is hardly anything more mystifying in the life of a Christian than trying to grasp the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. While the particulars of what goes on inside of us may be difficult or impossible to grasp, don’t take this definition as sounding too abstract to make any practical significance for your life.

I am convinced that if we can just grab hold of the fact that joy is really the nature of God living inside of us, then our Christian walk will never be the same. Our confusion and disillusionment will start to fade away, and the “joy gap”—the crack between God’s promises of joy and our actual experience in the real world—will begin to vanish.

From The Myth of Happiness: Discovering a Joy You Never Thought Possible by Rich Wagner