Is Seeking Happiness Unspiritual?

Is seeking happiness unspiritual?

Everything God created is good, and nothing is to be rejected if it is received with thanksgiving, because it is consecrated by the word of God and prayer. 1 Timothy 4:4-5, NIV

The faint, far-off results of those energies which God’s creative rapture implanted in matter when He made the worlds are what we now call physical pleasures. . . . What would it be to taste at the fountainhead that stream of which even these lower reaches prove so intoxicating? Yet that, I believe, is what lies before us. The whole man is to drink joy from the fountain of joy. C. S. LEWIS

WHEN MY BOOK HEAVEN was published in 2004, one of my favorite professors from Bible college had serious objections. In the book I develop the doctrines of the Resurrection and the New Earth, and I envision what I believe Scripture teaches: an embodied life of loving and serving God as we reign over the New Earth.

I point out in the book the clear statements of Jesus that we will eat and drink on the New Earth. Depictions in Scripture lead logically to the conclusion that most of what we do in our current bodies on Earth we will do with greater happiness in our new bodies on the New Earth. I speculate, for instance, that as resurrected people on a resurrected Earth, we might invent, write, read, play games, and ride bikes.

This troubled my professor. Over coffee together, this godly man furrowed his brow and said, “When we can see God, why would we ever want to ride a bike?”

Both his countenance and his tone of voice told me that in his mind, seeing God was spiritual, while riding a bike was secular—almost sinful.

Respectfully, I asked him what Scripture means when it gives us this command: “Whether you eat or drink, or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God” (1 Corinthians 10:31). Eating and drinking are not only necessities but also physical pleasures that we’re to do for God’s glory. I told him that I ride my bike to God’s glory in this life. And I worship God while joyfully playing tennis and snorkeling, just as I worship him while enjoying music, reading God’s Word, and playing with dogs.

Why would we not be able to do that on the resurrected Earth? Couldn’t a bike ride in the wondrous beauty of a new creation, alongside other worshipers of the King, lift our hearts to great praise, drawing us closer to him?

My beloved professor and I are just two voices in a larger conversation about the role of the physical versus the spiritual when it comes to faith. For centuries, believers have wrestled with questions about how tangible, concrete, and physical our eternal happiness will be. When we see God, will we spend all our moments motionless, simply gazing at him? Or will we go about our days as physical beings, worshiping God while also enjoying each other’s company and exploring the wonders of his creation?

Some Christians are wary of physical pleasure because of an unbiblical belief that the spirit realm is good while the material world is bad. I call this Christoplatonism, a term I coined in my book Heaven.^a It’s a widespread belief, sometimes spoken and sometimes not, that has plagued countless Christians and churches over the years, convincing people that physical pleasures are unspiritual and therefore that many of the things that make people happy are unworthy and suspect. The anti-body, anti-Earth, anti-culture assumptions of Christoplatonism naturally lend themselves to an anti-happiness viewpoint. Instead of spiritual being seen as the opposite of ungodly, it’s seen as the opposite of physical and pleasurable.

Scripture contradicts this antagonism between body and spirit. God created body and spirit; both were marred by sin, and both are redeemed by Christ. Our bodies aren’t prisons. Nor are they something we can occupy or abandon at will as a hermit crab does a shell. They’re an essential and God-designed aspect of our being. Our bodies weren’t created to distract from our Creator but to disclose him. God made the material world not to hinder our walk with him but to facilitate it.

Why did God give us our ability to find joy in a cool swim and a hot shower, in listening to music and audiobooks, in eating pistachios, planting flowers, or running through a park? Why did he give us physical senses if not to know him better and to be far happier in him than we ever could be if he had instead made us disembodied spirits who couldn’t enjoy physical pleasures?

God could have given us tasteless nutrients instead of filling the world with great-tasting food and giving us the taste buds to enjoy it. He could have easily devised some mechanistic means of conceiving children; instead, he devised the elaborate and pleasurable process of sexual relations. He could have looked at his creation and said, “It is functional.” Instead he said, “It is very good!”

If we buy into, even subconsciously, the misguided perspective that bodies, the Earth, material things, and anything “secular” are automatically unspiritual, we will inevitably reject or spiritualize any biblical revelation about bodily resurrection or finding joy in God’s physical creation.

We must be careful not to make idols out of God’s provisions. But God is happy when we, with the proper perspective, enjoy his gifts to us. He’s not up in Heaven frowning at us, saying, “Stop it—you should find joy only in me.” This would be as foreign to our heavenly Father’s nature as it would be to mine as an earthly father if I gave my daughters or grandchildren Christmas gifts, then pouted because they enjoyed them too much.

Yes, God wants us to find our joy in him. But a large part of that is through finding joy in what he has graciously provided for us, then consciously praising him for it.

Father God, thank you for our bodies, our senses, our emotions, and every other marvelous gift you’ve created. Give us wisdom to use these gifts for your glory and to fully appreciate and celebrate them—every day.