Better Joy

I’ve been reading through John’s Gospel in my personal devotions these last few weeks. John is a treasure that I cherish being able to read every time I enter into it, and this time of working through it has been no exception. Today I actually got so bogged down (in a good way) in Christ’s wonderful prayer of John 17 that I forgot to pick my fiancée up to drive her to a class! Perhaps the best part about John (and Bible reading in general I suppose), is that I continually discover new truths within it. This post comes out of one of those truths I stumbled upon in John 16 this week. This post will be the attempt of a 20 year old non Greek knowing wanna be Theologian and Pastor trying to exegete as faithfully as possible a wonderful text, I hope that some find it encouraging and helpful and that above all Christ will be glorified.

Jesus in John 16:

“Truly, truly I say to you, you will weep and lament, but the world will rejoice. You will be sorrowful, but your sorrow will turn into joy. When a woman is giving birth, she has sorrow because her hour has come, but when she has delivered the baby, she no longer remembers the anguish, for joy that a human being has been born into the world. So also you have sorrow now, but I will see you again, and your hearts will rejoice, and no one will take your joy from you.” (John 16:20-22, emphasis mine)

John Piper’s ministry has taught me to not just skim over sections of Scripture talking about joy, treasure, happiness, etc. As I’ve learned more and more from Piper I’ve seen that one of the biggest emphases of Scripture is our joy. As Piper is fond of pointing out we are actually commanded to be joyful throughout Scripture. I’ve always loved Anglican clergyman Jeremy Taylor’s observation of Scripture, that in it, “God threatens terrible things if we will not be happy [in Him].” I mention all this because even with eyes that are always looking for these sections on Scripture that deal with the wonderful nature of the joy we can have in Christ I had never thought too deeply on this particular passage before.

What got me thinking about the passage was the uniqueness of the child birthing metaphor and the fact that John just throws it out there and then moves on. When I first read the passage I didn’t realize that John was making a connection between the joy that the new mother has and the joy that we should have as Christians. After reading the passage a few more times though I realized that it’s painfully obvious that John intends to connect the two joys, after all he introduces the discussion of our joy in Christ with the phrase, “So also.” That phrase makes it clear that John intends to connect the joy of the new mother with our Christian joy, the question then to consider is how is John connecting the two joys?

It would be easy to read John’s use of the “So also” to mean that John is trying to equivocally compare our Christian joy to the mother’s joy. In other words it seems like the use of the “So also” shows that John is intending to make a direct comparison between the joy of the mother and our joy. Although I could see how one would come to that conclusion I think that the rest of verse 22 keeps us from going there because in verse 22, although he doesn’t do it explicitly, John is contrasting our Christian joy with the new mother’s joy.

Why the Contrast?

To recap, so far I have argued that in this passage John is:

1)      Trying to draw a connection between the new mother’s joy and our joy AND

2)      That he does not see that connection as being equivocal (the same joy) AND

3)      That he intends to contrast our joy with the new mother’s joy

If you agree with me on those three premises than there are still two critical questions that we have to ask of the text, we have to ask how John contrasts our joy with the mother’s joy, and we have to ask why John contrasts our joy (or what John is trying to communicate through the contrast.) The rest of this post will be an attempt to answer those two questions through the text.

                I think that the reason that John contrasts our joy with the new mother’s joy is that he wants to show that we, as Christians have a better joy than the new mother has. I have no idea what the joy of motherhood feels like. I will hopefully one day know the joy of fatherhood, but I will never know the joy of motherhood, for obvious biological reasons, I imagine that the joy is pretty amazing though. Nine months of waiting, countless hours and days spent preparing for the new life, and the pain leading up to the bringing of the life into the world, I can’t even fathom what a joyful experience this must be for the mother. So why would John not want to just say “So also you will have joy like that mother.” Why does he instead say, “So also…your hearts will rejoice. And no one will take your joy from you.” John doesn’t equivocally compare our joy to the mother’s because he believes that our joy is infinitely greater than the greatest human joy. Again, John believes that we have a better joy than the new mother does. But why is our joy better? If John is contrasting our joy with the new mother’s what does that contrast reveal about our joy?

                What John reveals to us about our joy is that our joy is better because it is unchanging. Unlike the mother’s joy, “no one will take your joy from you.” John is showing us that what makes our joy in Christ better than the mother’s joy in her new son is that our joy is eternal while the mother’s joy is temporal. A new child is certainly a blessing. But that new child can get sick and die, that new child can be kidnapped, that new child can run away from home and never come back, that new child can grow more and more rebellious against his mother and eventually renounce his family, you get the picture. In all those situations we see the problem with earthly joy, it can, and eventually always will be, taken from us. Jesus said it way better than I can (I’m sensing a trend here…) in His Sermon on the Mount Christ proclaims, “Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy, and where thieves break in and steal. But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where moth and rust do not destroy, and where thieves do not break in or steal.” John was taking his cues from Christ in contrasting the passing pleasure of our earthly joy with the eternal and unstealable heavenly joy that God offers us through His resurrected Son.  
                I like how Sam Storms, pastor of Bridgeway Church in Oklahoma City, talks about this better joy we have in Christ. Storms reflects,

"Contrary to what the world may say, there is more joy in Jesus than all fleshly pleasures combined! My aim...is to hammer home with unrelenting zeal that the joys of knowing Jesus are simply incomparable. His capacity to please knows no rival. We must preach from our pulpits and model in our lives...to make this truth known: in the presence of our great God and Savior there is joy that is full, not partial, half baked, measured, or parceled out; at His right hand there are eternal pleasures, not the fleeting, transient, toxic sort that promise so much and deliver so little."

                John doesn’t just point to the eternal nature of our joy as the reason it’s better than earthly joy. Instead he explicitly links that eternal nature of our joy to our resurrected Savior. We can’t miss that this whole narrative takes place in the context of Jesus saying, “You have sorrow now, but I will see you again…” Our joy is better joy than earthly joy because it is joy that proceeds directly from the resurrected and exalted Christ. Christ’s work on the cross was a complete work on our behalf, that’s why His last cry from that cross was the triumphant “It is finished!” The Biblical narrative tells us that because He has completed His sin satisfying work on the Cross He is now seated at the right hand of His Father making intercession (praying) for us. As Paul writes, “Who is he that condemns? Christ Jesus, who died—more than that, who was raised to life—is at the right hand of God and is also interceding for us.” Christ has completed His earthly work, He will not return again until He returns in His glory in the last days. Because He has completed His work and because He is unchanging if we find our joy in Him, if we get our joy through our relationship with Him, we can know without a doubt that that joy will never be taken from us. That joy will never get sick or die. That joy will never reject us. That joy will never leave us. And it’s when we embrace that joy, that indescribable heavenly joy that we see how beautiful it is. It’s when we embrace this joy that we come to see how marvelous it is that in this world of fleeting pleasures, false joys, and tarnished treasures we are offered an unchanging, all satisfying, unstealable true joy. The joy is ours to have if we will only see our earthly joy as infinitely less worthy than the amazing joy that we are offered in Christ.

                I’ll close with a quote from C.S. Lewis and John Piper’s commentary on the quote. The quote is taken from Lewis’ Screwtape Letters which is a dialogue between demons, so bear in mind that when he talks about the “Enemy” he is talking about God.

                “Never forget that when we are dealing with any pleasure in its healthy and normal and satisfying form, we are, in a sense, on the Enemy’s ground. I know we have won many a soul through pleasure. All the same, it is His invention, not ours. He made the pleasures: all our research so far has not enabled us to produce one. All we can do is to encourage the humans to take the pleasures which our Enemy has produced, at times, or in ways, or in degrees, which He has forbidden. . . . An ever increasing craving for an ever diminishing pleasure is the formula. . . . To get a man's soul and give him nothing in return--that's what really gladdens Our Father's heart."

            Reflecting on the quote Piper remarks,

“This means that all the debased enjoyments of the world are echoes of the joys of heaven.” 

I really could have just posted that sentence and called this blog post a wrap. All the joys of this world are as nothing when compared to the joys of heaven. That’s all I’ve got for tonight.