God Is More Happy Than Harsh

“What comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us,” wrote A.W. Tozer in the opening lines of his classic The Knowledge of the Holy. For many Christians, what comes into our minds when we think about God is that he is harsh.

We know God is holy and God is powerful. And God sees all and knows all, so our sin and failures live always before him. We think, therefore, he must also be exacting and harsh. We imagine God a sovereign master to fear—not with the good kind of reverence and awe but with the kind of trembling that paralyzes us.

But Jesus lived and taught in a way that showed God is not harsh. The rest of the Bible shows this too.

The Parable That Tells Us So

Jesus once told a parable about how different views of God affect the way we live. We call it the parable of the talents, but it might be clearer to call it the parable of venture capital. Many Christians are familiar with the math of the parable: two servants double their investments, while one servant earns nothing. We’re often less familiar with what happens after the final accounting. To the servant who had five talents and made five more, and to the servant who had two talents and made two more, Jesus says the same happy words.

We can appreciate what they both hear from their master by highlighting what they do not hear. They do not hear, “Well done, servants. I’m a harsh tyrant; now you may join my forever manpower machine and slave for your master in eternity.” And they do not hear, “You may enter, but know that I only sorta tolerated you on earth, and I’ll only sorta tolerate you in the forever fullness of the kingdom.”  

Even though this might be the harsh picture we craft of God, this is not at all what they hear. Instead they hear of God’s glad favor: “Well done, good and faithful servant. You have been faithful over a little; I will set you over much. Enter into the joy of your master” (Matt. 25:21, 23). The master is, apparently, joyful.

But one servant did not make a return on his investment. He actually didn’t even make an investment at all. He dug a hole and hid his master’s talent. Why would he do that? We don’t have to guess. “Master, I know you. You’re a harsh man,” the servant says. “So I was afraid and went off and hid your talent in the ground” (Matt. 25:24–25 CSB).

Behold the truth of A.W. Tozer’s words: What we think about God might actually be the most important thing about us. Because the servant viewed God as harsh, he froze in fear. In the parable, when the master learns that this is how the servant viewed him, the master erupts in anger. “You wicked and slothful servant! . . . take the talent from him and give it to him who has the ten talents” (Matt. 25:26, 28). This response seems so strange to us, so out of character. But the master wants us to know that we do not have a high view of God if we think of him as harsh. Harshness is beneath him.

God is certainly more than happy—but he’s not less. He is happy and holy. His holiness is a kind of happy holiness, and his happiness is a holy happiness. What we often put asunder, God keeps together. In heaven we will glorify God and enjoy him forever.

The Bible Tells Us So

Indeed, a God who is more happy than harsh shines throughout the whole Bible. In the psalms we read of the pleasures at God’s right hand (Ps. 16:11). Isaiah describes God’s relationship with his people in joyful language: “as the bridegroom rejoices over the bride, so shall your God rejoice over you” (Isa. 62:5). Rather famously, in Zephaniah God’s joy erupts in song: “he will rejoice over you with gladness; he will quiet you by his love; he will exult over you with loud singing” (Zeph. 3:17). And the Gospels brim with stories and parables that show Jesus and his Father to be happy—happy at weddings, joyful in prayers, glad while paying daily laborers.

British author and pastor Andrew Wilson recently published a book about happiness, and he opens the book discussing the happiness of God, the source of happiness. “Every time we see the inner life of the Trinity revealed in Scripture, we see a Father, Son, and Spirit who utterly delight in each other, permanently rejoicing in their manifold union” (Happiness, 8). No wonder, then, that God is “blessed forever,” as Paul calls him (Rom. 9:5).

Making It Our Aim to Please the Happy God

Building on this view of God, Paul frequently encourages Christians to live in light of who God actually is, not the taskmaster we imagine him to be. To the church in Corinth, Paul tells Christians we “make it our aim to please him [Christ]” (2 Cor. 5:9). To the church in Thessalonica, he urges Christians “to please God” (1 Thess. 4:1). 

I think the standard way to preach verses about aiming to please God is to say something like, “Look, we’re all selfish people. But God is the one who deserves all praise and all the glory and honor. It’s right that we spend our lives making it our ambition not to please ourselves but to please God.”

That’s all true, of course. But it could overlook the point I’m making. When Paul tells Christians to make it their aim to please God, he’s not telling Christians to do something that can never be done, even though many Christians believe that about him. Looking closer at the passage in 1 Thessalonians 4, we see that even as Paul tells them to please God, he notes that they are already doing so. “Finally . . . we ask and urge you in the Lord Jesus, that as you received from us how you ought to walk and to please God, just as you are doing, that you do so more and more.”

Now, it is true that if we are not Christians, we can’t please God. God is not pleased when we try to do good deeds to impress him. Jesus came to earth, lived a perfect life, suffered on the cross, taking the punishment for our sins, and rose again. He took on a new, glorified body, ascended to the throne of the universe, and from there promises forgiveness to anyone who has faith in him. Our joy is to receive what we cannot earn. So, no, aiming to please him can’t mean earning what can only be given.

We see this kind of inability to please God described in many places. Consider Romans 8:8, which says, “Those who are in the flesh cannot please God,” and Hebrews 11:6, which says, “And without faith it is impossible to please him.” These verses stress that in a sinful, unredeemed state, we can’t earn anything from God or please him because, in that state, our efforts do not come from a heart of faith.

But Paul makes a different point in 2 Corinthians 5 and 1 Thessalonians 4. He’s talking about those who have already joyfully received the free gift of grace, and it’s they who should make it their aim to please God—because he can be pleased. We see the Father’s pleasure overflow when Jesus was baptized. “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased” (Matt. 3:17). If you are in Christ, when God sees you, he sees you with the same affection he has for his own Son. The Father’s favor over his children is so overwhelmingly true that Paul can describe the Christian’s life as hidden with God in Christ (Col. 3:3).

Rather than theology being merely an academic conversation—something intellectually interesting but irrelevant to daily living—our theology is upstream of how we live. What comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us, as Tozer says, because what we think about God shapes how we live. If we think of God as harsh, we might just bury our talents in a hole. If we think of him as a joyful Father who loves his children, we’ll invest and risk; we’ll sacrifice and serve.

These truths encourage me when I think about our church in our current season of change. We’ve always wanted to be more of a church-planting church, and, by God’s grace, we were able to plant a church a few years ago. But now our church is full again, actually more full than before we planted, and we sense the Lord calling us to find a bigger, new location. At times this all sounds so fun. Who doesn’t like new stuff? At other times, however, reality hits me: all the cost, the sacrifice, the diversion of attention, the thinness of the staff and volunteers, the criticism and potential for disunity, the giant headache of fundraising. And what will people say if I mess it all up? What will God say? Maybe I should just bury my efforts in a hole and coast until retirement, which is like twenty years away. Your current struggles and fears might be different—they likely are. But at the core, they are probably similar.

What encourages me is when God’s happiness comes into my mind. And sometimes when I’m most discouraged, the reminder of God’s happiness only gets into my mind when another member at church reminds me that it should be there. This is part of what it means when Paul commands, “Let each one of you speak the truth with his neighbor” (Eph. 4:25)—it means church members reminding their beleaguered pastor of who God really is.

But perhaps even more important than affecting how we live, what we think about God affects who we are and who we are becoming. Theology isn’t just upstream of our doing but our being. Which means every Christian must ask the uncomfortable question: if God is more happy than harsh…am I?