Pain Now, the Land of Happy Later

In his book of children’s poems, Where the Sidewalk Ends, Shel Silverstein has this poem titled “The Land of Happy”: 

Have you been to The Land of Happy,
Where everyone’s happy all day,
Where they joke and they sing
Of the happiest things,
And everything’s jolly and gay?
There’s no one unhappy in Happy,
There’s laughter and smiles galore.
I have been to The Land of Happy—
What a bore!

Growing up, this poem was unsettling to me; to affirm it seemed somehow wrong, and yet I knew it to be true. I much preferred books, movies, and television shows that included bad guys (and more importantly, the people fighting them) over stories about people living happily and somewhat non-eventfully. I couldn’t reconcile my preference with the fact that heaven would have none of this excitement; what was wrong with me that I didn’t prefer the Land of Happy?

It took me years, but I finally saw that there’s no contradiction between 1) loving, honoring, and desiring good and 2) preferring stories with bad guys over the Land of Happy. I was drawn to stories with evil and suffering not because I was attracted to the evil, but because that evil brought out the glory and character of the good that struggled against it; it was the response of goodness that I was tuning in to see. The characters in those stories who rose up against the bad guys revealed the power and beauty of goodness in a way that an unprovoked—though perfectly good—character would not (see here for more on this).

The part of God’s story we find ourselves in now is not the Land of Happy. And for a time, this fallen world is instrumental in demonstrating to us the beauty of God’s character—the fullness of which we would never understand, appreciate, or glorify were we not to see Him interact with a sinful world. A few examples:

• Because of the existence of our sin, we see that God is a righteous judge: “[O]ur unrighteousness demonstrates the righteousness of God [when He judges our unrighteousness]” (Romans 3:5).

• We see God’s holiness and righteousness in the price that was necessary to atone for sin. We see that He’s just and so cannot simply lower His standard and let sin pass: “God displayed [Christ Jesus] publicly as a propitiation in His blood through faith. This was to demonstrate His righteousness, because in the forbearance of God He passed over the sins previously committed; for the demonstration, I say, of His righteousness at the present time, so that He would be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus” (Romans 3:25-26).

• We see that God has a love that seeks out and sacrifices for us, His enemies: “God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us” (Romans 5:8).

• We see and experience the incredible depth of God’s grace: “[We] were by nature children of wrath, even as the rest. But God, being rich in mercy, because of His great love with which He loved us, even when we were dead in our transgressions, made us alive together with Christ (by grace you have been saved), and raised us up with Him, and seated us with Him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, so that in the ages to come He might show the surpassing riches of His grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus” (Ephesians 2:4-7).

The aspects of God’s character we learn about now as a result of living in a fallen world will make our time with Him in eternity even more glorious. But after sin has served its purpose here, we won’t need it to continue. We’ll have all of human history on which to reflect in order to truly know God’s character, and all of eternity to enjoy Him face to face in peace.

He will swallow up death for all time,
And the Lord God will wipe tears away from all faces,
And He will remove the reproach of
His people from all the earth;
For the Lord has spoken.
And it will be said in that day,
“Behold, this is our God for whom we have waited that He might save us.
This is the Lord for whom we have waited;
Let us rejoice and be glad in His salvation” (Isaiah 25:8-9).

And it won’t be boring at all.

Comments

[ToNy]

I had the last line of "The Perfect High" in my head ever since I turned to the dark side of the force.

[Sam]

I like the way you do theodicy.

[RonH]

Amy,

I think you are taking something crucial for granted in your thinking here.

Imagine any finite level of knowledge of God, general intelligence, wisdom, or native insightfulness.

For example, imagine you could do calculations faster than your computer. Or, imagine that you'd always had your current, adult, ability to delay gratification.

The Premise (God) could have given humans that level of any these things or 100 times more. (Instead we are suspiciously close in these things to other animals.)

In particular, the Premise, could easily have given us, at birth, more of these things than our lives here on earth can give us.

It actually appears that, given the Premise, there is no need to 'live in a fallen world'.

RonH

[Carolyn]

Good post, Amy.

Commenters, tiresome.

[Jan D]

I like this Amy. Well said. I will add that the older I become and the more I see, the more I long for the fulfillment of all God's promises and the boredom of perfect happiness. :)

[Challenge everything]

Carolyn

Well done some noting the difference between religion and other ways of thinking

[brianehunt]

RonH,

I agree that God could have given people different attributes. However, I don't see that you have made the case that the God of the bible should have created people with different attributes. This appears to be your presumption. Why do you believe that creatures from the same creator should be more different from one another than we are?

[Amy]

Ron, are you saying God should have implanted this knowledge into us? That’s like saying John Constable shouldn’t have bothered painting. He should have just written the words, “England is pretty. There are hills and trees.”

There’s a big difference between experiential knowledge of a person and data entered into a computer.

[Erkki S.]

This sounds like wanting to have the cake and eating it too. Wanting to have evil, conflict and suffering to give purpose to existence, but also not wanting to have these things affect you personally. Wanting everlasting happiness and no pain for oneself, but without the guilt and banality of such existence.

I of course enjoy fiction too, but reality is real people suffering and losing everything in life, not characters in Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, and Chronicles of Narnia. Personal boredom hardly accounts the horror of others.

[RonH]

Amy,

Ron, are you saying God should have implanted this knowledge into us?

Nope. I'm pointing out how much is possible for an omnipotent being. You seem to be saying God was constrained in how he made us - that this process was necessary. I'm saying that it's only necessary given how we are and that we could have been very, very different - given the Premise.

Rev up your imagination.

...this fallen world is instrumental in demonstrating to us the beauty of God’s character—the fullness of which we would never understand, appreciate, or glorify were we not to see Him interact with a sinful world

Only because we don't see these things out of the box. Could God not make us as he pleased and by means of his choosing?

Aren't those means necessarily good?

Do you consider the native attributes you do have - gifts and faults God gave you - to be like so much data entered into a computer?

RonH

[scbrownlhrm]

There is plenty of writing out there on the Triune and on Eden and we ought to encourage each other to explore and pray over such things. There are constraints to Power when Power declares He means to make the Created Self “In Our Image”. This limits Love, Power, to a world, and a Man, which mirrors Love’s Triune wherein we find both rigid constraint and Actual-Agency among and between Multiple-Distincts. Within the Triune we find both Rigid Constraint and Multiple Perfect Distincts wherein preference and choice and This-But-Not-That and That-But-Not-This all live uncreated as Love’s Triune lives among the I and the You and that I-You which forever Begets the Singular-We. Love is One. Love is Three. We must be careful with Creation and calling certain means necessarily good for “It’s all good” is an error towards pantheism. The Link here. is not so much on Eden and its Two Doors but simply on some more fundamental questions of good and evil. We must also remember that Eden is Innocence, not Moral Perfection. Power, or God, cannot create the uncreated. It is said that the Finite, Man, may one day be one with God, or, in God, or, like God. But such a thing cannot happen in one step, for, there must be something which precedes that step of “in the blink of an eye we will be transformed”. The thing that must precede that act of Power is the movement of the Self into the Other within the embrace of Love’s I-You. That Movement is not an Act which Power can create *if* Power means for that Self to mirror the Image of the Triune. And, it seems, while many worlds are possible for Power, Power has set the limits with “Let Us make Man in Our Image”. That means a world of Love. A Wedding has been announced. A Bride has been chosen. The Groom spreads His arms wide, and pours Himself out, and this for His Beloved. The Infinite cannot create the Infinite-Perfect, for Power cannot create God, but, the Infinite can create the Innocent-Finite, and therein the Uncreated Self and the Created Other embrace, and the Infinite then pours Himself into the Finite, and Word is made Flesh, and there we find a bridge to Revelations 22 where it said there will be no more Death, no more Tears, no more Pain, and the Fruit of that Tree called Life will thus be swallowed whole, finally. And then we will have this final thought: ""There was a real railway accident," said Aslan softly. "Your father and mother and all of you are - as you used to call it in the Shadow-Lands - dead. The term is over: the holidays have begun. The dream is ended: this is the morning." And as He spoke He no longer looked to them like a lion; but the things that began to happen after that were so great and beautiful that I cannot write them. And for us this is the end of all the stories, and we can most truly say that they all lived happily ever after. But for them it was only the beginning of the real story. All their life in this world and all their adventures in Narnia had only been the cover and the title page: now at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story, which no one on earth has read: which goes on forever: in which every chapter is better than the one before." (C.S. Lewis, The Last Battle)

[scbrownlhrm]

It seems my "Link" was entered incorrectly. Apologies.

I'll try again: Link here.