Real Joy

Let me hear joy and gladness; let the bones that you have broken rejoice. (Psalm 51:8 )

“Joy” and “Gladness” refer to more than just a delighted spirit or an internal yet calm satisfaction. These Hebrew terms are used in connection with singing, festive eating and drinking, playing instruments, dancing, frolicking, stamping the feet, clapping hands, etc. It is quite a raucous kind of joy. The kind that bubbles up and overflows into jubilant outward expressions. It’s the kind of joy at a wedding reception, or when you see your son hit his first home run. The psalmist wants more than just a warm feeling, or a sense of calm content. He wants a party. He wants singing, dancing, shouting, clapping. He is now morose and melancholy. Perhaps, even desperate and despairing. But he calls for foot-stomping joy.

Why are we so reserved in our joy? Why do we not seek to make our hearts, minds, bodies overflow in boundless enthusiasm and jubilance? Why do we not have a raucous, hooting, and hollering joy flooding our souls and spreading to our mouths, and feet, and hands? I think we feel it irreverent and ridiculous. But what is more irreverent or more ridiculous than knowing the God of the universe, feeling the power of his salvation, knowing the freedom of his cleansing from the bondage of sin, and not hoot and dance? Irreverent is the polite, shallow smiles of our Sunday mourning services. Ridiculous is hollow slap-stick remarks so characteristic of Christian entertainment. Fake joy or shallow goof-offs are the respectable forms of raucous joy. But this is not that kind of joy, because it’s based on something real. Joy for joy’s sake is no joy at all. Joy that arises in order to have joy in and of itself is empty. That’s why modern Christian joy is so emaciated. We want to be happy, and so we are happy, or at least we try to make ourselves such, just to say that we are happy. But real joy has a real object. It rejoices in a thing. Like a man rejoices in his lover, or a boy over his ice cream cone. We have the grandest of all objects, God. No amount of physical display is too much. You just can’t make too much of God. But you can make far too little.