THE PROMISE OF PLEASURES
Psalms 16:11 … You will fill me with joy in your presence, with eternal pleasures at your right hand.
God want us to feel joy. Joy is happiness, inner peace, and having a settled spirit, not based on outward circumstances and events, but on an inner stability that comes from the presence of the perfect, loving, and compassionate Spirit of God. It causes us to be content whether we have little or much (Phil 4:11-13). It refocuses all the negatives of the world and inspires us to rise above them (Jn 16:33). Joy is acceptable language in religious circles, both promised and expected among believers, but what of the next word we see here? Pleasures!
God not only wants us to feel joy, He wants us to feel pleasure as well; in fact, God Himself is a God of pleasure! He feels it. He desires for His people to feel it, and thus, as a generous God, He gives it. As I have heard said, God is happy to be God and enjoys the world He created. How much do we speak of this in church circles? Oh, we speak of pleasure, but it is usually in a negative context. To have this idea that God is some kind of killjoy who is overly serious, usually in a bad mood, and intent on robbing us of all enjoyment in life is a lie, and perhaps heresy in its most devastating form. For when we think God has forbidden all fun and enjoyment, we get bitter, and temptation becomes more inviting. Being created in God’s image, we were made for pleasure, and do not think the tempter doesn’t know that? If he can get God’s people believing the lie that all pleasure is somehow bad, he can get them mad at God and open to compromise, promising pleasures of another sort, ones that we know all to well and bear harsh consequences. By the way, pleasure in itself makes negative things not seem so negative. It builds neural connections in our brains that set automatic thinking and actions in place, which is why, when turned negative, so many fall prey to addictive behavior that drain life rather than give it (Jn 10:10).
Notice that God actually promises pleasures to His people. Pleasures, plural! They come in many different kinds and forms, and He wants us to experience them, which will effectively re-frame life for us. The world’s pleasures lead us on a downward spiral of gut-wrenching, painful living with many unbearable consequences, but God’s pleasures do the opposite by leading us in an upward path toward healthy, fulfilled living. This is crazy, powerful language, and if that is not enough, our Psalmist tells us that God wants us to feel them to such a degree that we cannot contain them; in other words, if anymore gets in, they spill over. This is what Jesus meant when He said that He will give us “rivers of living water” that will flow out from us (Jn 7:38), and I’m guessing that over the centuries this is what drove many Christian martyrs to approach their deaths in song and praise. Can we trust God in this? That His commands are not meant to rob us of pleasure, but to actually show us the most healthy way to experience it, both in the here and now, and in the hereafter. When we speak of heaven, we should remove from our minds the ideas that have us boringly floating around and playing harps forever, this too is a lie. Heaven is experiencing the never-ending pleasures of God, and if we can get a glimpse of this here on earth, our devotion to Jesus might soar to new heights, and we might just show the world something they don’t see too often – Christians who are happy to be Christians.
