God Wants You Miserable

This is one extreme of Christian belief. The idea that God wants you to avoid anything that you might enjoy. The cosmic killjoy, averse to fun and pleasure. The God of “Thou shalt not”. Big Brother in the sky, keeping a beady eye on you, ready to pounce if He sees a smile. To be fair, it’s possible to see why some would come up with that idea. There are a lot of rules and regulations in the Old Testament and the punishments can seem draconian. But they’re there for a reason. They’re not arbitrary. They’re boundaries placed for the good of the people of Israel. They’re not meant to squash, but to show how to please God.

Christians are not under that covenant. Yet some of us look to that Old Testament law and, instead of interpreting it as fulfilled by Christ, we try to apply it to ourselves as if we were still subject to it. By doing so, we’re in danger of acting as if Christ never died. We don’t mean to. I firmly believe the intention is honourable – we want to please God; we don’t want to offend Him like the Israelites did. 

This is a huge subject which has occupied greater minds than mine so I’m only going to make one observation. (If you want to get a grip on some of the issues, read Galatians and Hebrews.) Galatians 3:23-25: “Before the coming of this faith, we were held in custody under the law, locked up until the faith that was to come would be revealed.  So the law was our guardian until Christ came that we might be justified by faith.  Now that this faith has come, we are no longer under a guardian.” The old Law was not meant to be forever. It was there to show us how sinful we are and that we need a Saviour. It was to teach us what God is like and what we are like – until Christ came. The Law taught us about God in words. Christ taught us about God in words and in flesh. He showed us what God is like. If we’re in Christ, we’re not under the guardianship of the Law. We’ve grown up. We’ve put away childish things. So we don’t need to work out what it means in our day. We don’t need to tie ourselves up in knots over little things. 

Does this mean we can do what we want, then? That God’s no longer bothered about holiness? That we can sin and be happy? No, it doesn’t! There’s plenty in the New Testament about that. Staying in Galatians, following a list of things which characterise those who will not inherit the kingdom of God, we have this: “But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. Against such things there is no law.” (Galatians 5:22-23) This is one aspect of life under the New Covenant. These are things God wants us to be. They’re not things designed to make us miserable. They’re things which will keep us in step with God. They will make us free.