Is God Vain?

"The Scotch catechism says that man's chief end is 'to glorify God and enjoy Him forever.' But we shall then know that these are the same thing. Fully to enjoy is to glorify. In commanding us to glorify Him, God is inviting us to enjoy Him." -C S Lewis

For years, I have struggled with scriptures and people who speak of God commanding us to praise Him, specifically because I thought they portrayed God as vain. Hopefully, none of you have had the same struggles, and I know that the answer is obvious for some. But for me, I don't think I fully understood these passages until I read C S Lewis' book, Notes on the Psalms.

"Whoever offers praise glorifies Me", Psalm 50:23. As lewis says, "it was hideously like God wanted to be told that He was good and great." For me, it seemed like God's only reason for having anything to do with humanity was so that He would be told that He is good and great. Even worse, the Psalmists bargain with Him worship in exchange for favors. He seemed to punish those who did not worship Him, and reward those who did. In Psalm 31:9, the author is begging God to save his life, but only for the reason that there would be no one to praise Him if he dies. "What profit is there in my blood, when I go down to the pit? Will the dust praise You? Will it declare Your truth?"

Just to be clear, I don't think the issue is a lack of love for God. It is a fair question to look at what we are reading and ask if it is portraying God as vain, frivolous, and manipulative towards humans. That is both a distressing thought and inconsistent with the loving Father who would sacrifice His Son for us. If we love God, then we should be appalled by any accusation against His character and goodness.

Most people respond to this question by saying that God has a "right" to be praised. Since He alone is worthy, He has the right to demand worship. Lewis points out that this is correct, but a horrible way of putting it. I think it still gives the impression that His only reason for having anything to do with man is to fill up His praise tank, or to have all His right praise buttons pushed.

The response is twofold. First, God clearly is not vain. He is a God who is jealous of our worship, just as any husband is jealous of his wife's love. But if God wanted to be praised, then do you really think that He would come to US, sinful, tone-deaf, and squeaking human beings, to fill His praise tank? "I will not take a bull from your house, nor goats out of your fields. For every beast of the forest is Mine, And the cattle on a thousand hills.... If I were hungry, I would not tell you; for the world is Mine, and all its fullness." (Psalm 50). The greater the being who is praising, the greater the praise. If some small boy off the street told you that you were a nice person, it wouldn't mean much to you. But if the president of the US came, knocked on your door, and broke into song about how amazing you are, then you would be completely floored. Similarly, if God wanted great and fantastic praise, then He would create some beautifully magnificent and powerful archangel to worship Him. But as Lewis says, "I don't want my dog to bark in approval of my books."

Secondly, why does God command humans to praise Him? Lewis starts with the analogy of a painting. What do we mean when we say that a picture is admirable? We do not mean that it deserves something in the sense that you (hopefully) deserve the wages you earn at your job. Instead, we mean that praise is the appropriate and natural response to a beautiful painting. I hadn't ever fully appreciated this until I moved to the UK. In August, I moved into a smaller English Medieval town called Guildford to take courses at the University of Surrey. Guildford is beautiful, quaint, and full of history. During my first week, I took some time to explore the town, visit the castle, and "appreciate" the beauty of the place where God has brought me. As I stood there under the shadow of a 13th century Norman castle next to a river with beautiful gardens, I wanted so desperately to exclaim to the person next to me how amazing it is. But I was alone. There was no one with me to hear my praise of the castle, or the quant town, or the old-fashioned pubs. Living in Europe is incredible for an American, and yet the worst thing about it is not being able to rejoice in it's beauty and history with other people. The pleasure involved with simply observing something beautiful on your own is nothing compared with the pleasure of praising it to others. "I think we delight to praise what we enjoy because the praise not merely expresses but completes the enjoyment."

Praising true beauty is pleasant because it is the natural (or designed) response. As I pointed out in the last post, we are happiest when we follow the natural design of the human heart. We are designed to praise things that are beautiful, and as a result, "The world rings with praise: lovers praising their mistresses, readers their favorite poet, walkers praising the countryside... I had not noticed how the humblest, and at the same time most balanced and capacious minds praised most, while the cranks, misfits and malcontents praised least."

Now think how great and glorious Our Lord is, who created all these things that we enjoy. Lewis takes the limit as God's greatness goes to infinity: "If it were possible for a created soul fully (I mean, up to the full measure conceivable in a finite being) to appreciate, that is to love and delight in, the worthiest object of all, and simultaneously at every moment to give this delight perfect expression, then that soul would be in supreme beautitude." This is our final destination, our end to which Christ is guiding us. Until then, we are just tuning ourselves as the Body and Bride of Christ in preparation for the Great Praise.

The Pursuit of Happiness

In theology, I have often been told that people cannot seek God on their own, and He has to interfere in order to stop us from our own best efforts to go straight to hell. But I had never before seen what it is inside us that makes it impossible for us to truly love Him without Him first loving us. Ever since I came to the UK, God's been showing me several of these mechanisms within our hearts that make it impossible for depraved man to find Him on his own. The most striking one is The Problem of The Pursuit of Happiness. There are two rival ideas concerning happiness (which I will go over very briefly), one of which is correct and the other isn't, but neither are effective without Christ. I apologize for this background information which I am sure most of you are well aware of already, but I think the background information is worthwhile on its own merits for those who have not heard it.

"All men seek happiness. There are no exceptions. However different the means they may employ, they all strive towards this goal. The reason why some go to war and some do not is the same desire in both, but interpreted in different ways. The will never takes the least step except to that end. This is the motive of every act of every man, including those who go and hang themselves." - Blaise Pascal, Penses

There is nothing which anyone desires more than happiness, nothing else which any man can help but to desire. There is nothing that we do that is not ultimately motivated by our own pursuit of happiness, and that is how we decide what kind of person we are going to be. But what we ultimately decide depends on what we think happiness is, and what we think will make us happy. That is why it is extremely important to understand The Pursuit of Happiness.

Happiness is not easy to define, because the definition has recently changed in the West. Today, most people believe that happiness is being satisfied with pleasures. They believe that it is a feeling that depends on outside circumstances. People become gluttons for entertainment, food, houses, and other temporary things of this world. It is a theory called hedonism, where the goal of life is to increase pleasure as much as possible with as little pain as possible. For the mathematicians out there, a hedonistically happy life is defined as one where the integral of the pleasure versus time curve is large. The result is that we will use anything in life to serve our own appetites, including their friends, family, or even God. (There is a psychologist named Martin Seligman who has written some good papers on the topic, and he argues that this increasingly popular mindset is partially the result of today’s age of consumerism and general prosperity. He also says that the loss of faith in God and family has left individuals with nothing else to live for other than themselves. If you would like to read some papers on the subject, then feel free to send me an email.)

There is a second way of thinking about happiness that Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Christ, and other ancient philosophers held in common, and is therefore called the "classical definition of happiness." Aristotle argued that true happiness comes from living out the purpose of life for human beings. Aristotle believed that this purpose, or function of humans, was reason in accordance with virtue. He referred to this kind of life as eudaimonia, which literally means, “to be living in a way that is well-favored by a god”. As Christians, we know that our ultimate purpose and function is to love and glorify God through a relationship with Him. Hence, true happiness is a life lived for something outside one’s self, namely God and His glory. It is not dependent on external circumstances, nor is it short lived like pleasurable satisfaction. Christ says in Matthew 16:25, “For whoever will save his life shall lose it: and whoever will lose his life for my sake shall find it. For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? Or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul?”

Assuming that God exists and has created us with a specific purpose and intended us to be happy in that purpose, then it would be folly for us to think we will find happiness outside of His plan. It would be like putting water in your gas tank and still expecting your car to run properly. Our hearts were designed to not be at rest until we rest in Him. If you live entirely for yourself, then your life will have no meaning, purpose or significance outside of your own little existence. Essentially, you will have no reason to live, and you will ultimately decide to “Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die.” Suicide is now among the highest causes of death among young people today.

This is what I had understood from the time when I was in high school, and I was quite proud of my "higher understanding" of happiness. But throughout high school, and my first year at NCSU, I still found myself dry and depressed. I had all the right ideas about happiness, and yet I found that I could not apply them. I wanted to be happy, and that is why I wanted to live for God and others. It took over two years for me to discover (or as I realized later, for God to show me) what was wrong with all my grand and proud theories about classical happiness.

Eventually, God made me realize that even though happiness does come from living for something greater than yourself and from living the way I was designed to live, I was powerless to put it into effect. It is true that living for something greater than ourselves is the only way that we can be happy, yet we are powerless to do that. And the reason is actually quite simple. Anytime you choose based on your own will and out of your own strength to live for something greater than yourself, you are doing it for the only reason you ever do anything: for the sake of your own happiness. It becomes self defeating. If you are trying to be happy by living for something greater than yourself, then you will never succeed because your own happiness is your only motive. I was trying my hardest to live for Christ, but my only motivation was my own happiness, so I was ultimately living for myself. I was powerless to defeat the cycle. There is nothing that anyone can do to seek happiness on their own, because any attempt to become non-narcissistic is going to be inherently narcissistic.

The only hope for us is for some other power outside of ourselves to lovingly step in and change our hearts. It must be natural, in the sense that it cannot be a conscious decision we make for ourselves. If the we did it ourselves, it would be an inherently selfish decision and therefore powerless. Furthermore, no being weaker than us would be able change us, and no being that did not love us already would choose to rescue us from our own misery. Fortunately for us, there is One who knows and has power over the most inner-workings of our hearts, and loves us with a depth and intensity that makes the most passionate marriage seem trifling. There is also a mechanism that God uses to change a man's mind, motives, and heart in a natural way. That mechanism is His love manifested to us in action: the cross. God woos our hearts with His love and thereby transforms us. When we realize God's love and simultaneous justice and strength, it changes our hearts naturally so that we love Him in return and love Him before all things. "We love Him because He first loved Us. And by this we know love: that He laid down his Life for us." The choice isn't even ours to make for our own happiness, and it cannot be. All we do is fall in love with Him as He steps in and rescues us from our helpless state of The Pursuit of Happiness.

For skeptics, I am not offering this as an argument for God's existence. I assume that the readers of this particular post believe in Him already. I am not a pragmatist, and I don't believe that you should ever choose to believe in God just because you think it will make you happy. Pragmatism fails for the same reason that classical happiness fails: if God doesn't actually exist, but you seek happiness through religion anyway, then it will fail because you ultimately have selfish motives. Nothing can make a person happy unless there is some being greater than themselves that will change their inescapably selfish hearts, and therefore we will all be miserable unless God exists in objective reality. And hence, religion can only ultimately succeed in satisfying us if God actually exists. Unless of course you believe that you can find happiness in fleeting earthly pleasures and inevitable death.