16. How God Safeguards Our Happiness

How God Safeguards Our Happiness

God has therefore sought so to safeguard man against both himself and all possible outside influences, that he would allow nothing to rob him of this divinely intended welfare. For this purpose He has set in the very fiber of man’s being one supreme and impelling urge from which no man can escape. This urge is not for a variety of ends so promiscuous, that a cross section of the desires of all varieties of people will reveal no uniform yearning underlying the outreach of the race. That would be but a blind, confused and purposeless outreach, with man stumbling on in the dark, he knows not whither, and God does not thus deal with the object of His love. The dominant urge of the whole race is rather for one single end so perfectly identical in all men, as to compel the conviction that God must be the Author of such a uniform and universal yearning.

Then along with this, man has been endowed with the intuitive conviction that to reach that goal for which all men alike crave, he will reach that perfect welfare for which he rightly believes he has the perfect right to seek, and that he will thus infallibly insure to himself the complete satisfaction of that innate craving by which all men are borne along.

Thus has God’s infinite wisdom seen to it that the end He purposes for men is at the same time the very goal toward which the whole race is reaching out with an urge that no man can escape. No one, therefore, is ignorant as to the goal he seeks. If he is in the dark, it is concerning the means of reaching that goal, not concerning the goal itself.

What is this goal which all men alike seek? It is the universal outreach for pleasure. This yearning is inescapable, for it comes out of the deepest need of every life, and is woven into the very texture of our beings. In all ages, lands and conditions, all men seek and have sought after happiness, shrink from the displeasing and the painful, and seem willing to pay any price and make any effort if only they may gain pleasure. Man’s inherent instincts and nature make it impossible for any rational being deliberately to seek misery and unhappiness, and it is equally impossible to keep from longing for and seeking happiness and joy. Man was not made for sorrow, and though God uses it to discipline us here, yet He lures us to Himself by the promise that He will wipe away all tears at last, if we are His, and also by the warning of weeping, wailing and gnashing of teeth if we are not (Matthew 13:49-50). The Shorter Catechism says that the chief end of man is to glorify God and enjoy Him forever, and what is our enjoyment of God if it is not happiness? It is true that most men are on the trail that ends in eternal misery. But it is also true that it is the urge for happiness which has lured them to that trail by the lying promise of its attainment. And God’s purpose in setting pleasure before us, as He holds the perfect happiness of heaven before our eyes, is that He may thus lead men to put themselves into that relation to His will which will permit Him to lavish His love on them forever, that thus their unalloyed happiness may be to His eternal glory. We glorify God by enjoying Him, for it was for that purpose that He built the insatiable craving for pleasure into the whole race.

Then God has sought still further to safeguard man against the eternal loss of pleasure by adding a passionate craving for perfection. No one can be satisfied with the partial and the imperfect in any realm of life. In the material realm man is always remodeling, improving, perfecting, and in the proportion in which perfection is approached, by that much is man’s pleasure in his works increased. And in the realm of daily life, the chief objection to the doctrine of sinless perfection is not that a perfect life is undesirable, but that those who profess it do not live it. The fact that men do not live a perfect life is never a source of satisfaction, but always of pain and disappointment. The more nearly one approaches the standards of perfection, the more the pleasure of living is increased. The passion for perfection is deeply imbedded in the human race.

Still further to safeguard man in his quest for happiness is the deep yearning God has given him for permanence. The more nearly men approach perfection in anything, the stronger the desire that it shall last. We are ready for a thing that gives joy through its near-perfection to pass away, only when there is something nearer perfection to take its place. And when the perfect appears, and our pleasure in it is complete, we can be satisfied only if we are assured that it will not pass away. For not only is “a thing of beauty a joy forever,” but that is true also of a thing that is perfect. In order therefore to put us on the way that leads to pleasure made perfect and permanent, that thus He may safeguard us from being misled in our quest for happiness, God has built into the very fabric of our moral constitution the inescapable “categorical imperative,” the imperial word “ought”—that most powerful word in all the realm of moral life and action. The root meaning of that word is something owed to someone, and it corresponds perfectly with every man’s ineradicable conviction of obligation to someone outside himself, to whom he is responsible for all he is, has and does. It is said that when Daniel Webster was asked what was the greatest thought that ever came into his mind, he said: “The thought of my personal accountability to God.” That imperial “ought” is a word of such moral weight that it outweighs all other moral values whatsoever. And it enters so fully into the very texture of every soul, that for one to disobey it in a final and irreversible moral choice, is for him to reach the end of all purposive living, and thus be cast as a worthless wreck upon the shore of eternally ruined hopes and forfeited possibilities.

If one owned the whole world and yet disobeyed that imperative ought, even the added wealth of the entire universe could not ease to the slightest degree the excruciating torment and unspeakable remorse that follows that word disobeyed. While if one obeys that word, neither the possession of all things, nor the total lack of everything, could have the slightest effect on the exquisite pleasure and ravishing joy that go with that word obeyed. “What shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul” by disobeying that word ought in the great and final choice of life! The entire universe is as nothing beside that word, for it outweighs all else as the universe outweighs the atom.

Then added to all these safeguards to man’s happiness, God has built into us a conscience which acts as a hedge of thorns between us and the endless misery of the moral ruin He would keep us from. And it is forever saying to us, “do right,” and warning us not to do wrong. In the realm of our moral intentions, it is as infallible as God Himself. Every man knows with absolute certainty whether, in any action, he intends to do right or wrong. Thus God would safeguard us from going wrong. The noted Joseph Cook, in his Boston Monday Lectures, set forth in luminous fashion the functions of our God-implanted conscience. He said:

“There is within us the power of perceiving the difference between right and wrong in the sphere of intentions.

“We have a feeling that right ought to be followed, and that wrong ought not to be.

“We have a sense of merit and demerit, of approval and disapproval of ourselves.

“Our instincts assure us that there is an approval or disapproval above our own.

“We have bliss or pain, according as we feel approval or disapproval from ourselves, and from Somewhat or Some One not ourselves.

“Lastly, there is in conscience a prophetic office, by which we anticipate that consequences closely concerning us, as conscious personal existences, will follow us beyond death.” And all this, as Dr. Cook goes on to say, is without any action of the will, but rather by a “mysterious necessity, which although in us, is not of us.”

What a God we have! What persuasions He surrounds us with to keep us from all that is outside His will for us. What compelling evidences are these of the infinite wisdom which instructs His love, as He pursues His ways with the sons of men.

Putting all these evidences of His heart’s desire for us together, He has built into our deepest being an insatiable passion for pleasure, which can be satisfied only by perfection made permanent. Then He has interwoven that passion with that mighty ought, and guarded it by the imperative command of conscience as it forever says, “do right,” that thus we may know beyond all possible doubt that these are the guide-posts to the goal of eternal happiness.

Then as the climax of it all, He seems purposely to have omitted from the faculties He gave us, all capacity for spiritual self-direction, that in our consciousness of its absence, we might not do the foolhardy thing of trying to find our way to happiness without a guide. This is how it happens that we are wholly incapable, by ourselves, of arriving at the certain knowledge of what that imperial ought demands of us. No one’s conscience, no matter how it may command him to do right, has ever been able to tell its possessor, either through intuition or by reasoning, what right is. Conscience is infallible in judging us on whether we intend to do right or wrong, but all knowledge of the standards of right and wrong must come to man from outside himself.