We need hardly turn to the dictionary to find the meaning of the word “joy”. It is an emotion we all experience from time to time.
To those who have no knowledge of God’s truth, life is a succession of problems, doubts and disappointments. There is a tendency to seek relief from these in various ways. As long ago as the days when Ecclesiastes was written, philosophers (i.e. lovers of wisdom) saw that too often expression of joy came as a reaction to periods of strain, and were too often artificial. “Then I commanded mirth, because a man hath no better thing under the sun than to eat and drink and be merry”,1 said the wise preacher. He spoke, of course, of those who are not acquainted with “the Spirit”.
Isaiah saw it in his day2—the same empty philosophy of life. Jesus3 made use of this useless ambition of humans in his parable of the rich man whose barns were overflowing. No wonder the writer of Ecclesiastes comments that the life of such a person—the “average man” we would describe him today—is vain, profitless, empty –literally (to use a common phrase) there is no future in it!
Paul, on the other hand, uses this vacuum to contrast with the man whose hope is in a risen Christ: “If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all men most miserable”. . . . What advantage is it to me, if the dead rise not? Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die!4
God made human nature a complex thing and joy is the natural (i.e. God-made) reaction to the relief from sadness or worry previously experienced.
The Old Testament has much to say of the natural exuberance of the people when they lived a joyful life under God’s protection.
Joy is a stimulant. It stirs us up to action. The younger we are, the more vigorous this action will be. If it is tending towards excess, we call it “high spirits”. “Letting off steam”, as we sometimes call it, must be guided into suitable channels.
In Old Testament days, dancing was a recognized form of exhibiting one’s joy to God. “Let them praise his name in the dance”;5 “Praise him with the timbrel and the dance;6 and, conversely, abstention from dancing resulted from sorrow”.7
The Puritans professed to be great Bible readers, yet strangely enough they appear to have completely missed the fact that joy was a scriptural phenomenon. They developed the theory that all forms of pleasure, all outward expressions of joy, were to some extent forms of sin. It was sinful (for example) to smile on Sunday. Dancing (of the scriptural type) was held to be sheer wickedness.
Puritanism has left its mark to this day. There is still a moderately widespread impression that religious people are of necessity sad and long-faced, that outward expression of joy is worldly. This, of course, is not so; but nevertheless it does not justify us in going to the other extreme. We have mentioned the scriptural type of dance; modern ballroom dancing is a different matter; we would consider this a most unsuitable way of expressing joy towards God.
In considering this matter we must maintain a proper balance. We must avoid extreme Puritanism on the one hand, and yet the “eat, drink and be merry” philosophy on the other.
We are warned, “Be not righteous overmuch”8—that is, we are not to think that because we pick on the weaknesses of others, we have thereby proclaimed ourselves to be righteous individuals (“I wouldn’t do a thing like that”, we smugly say, but get very hurt when other people point the finger at our weaknesses). Let us be careful not to follow the example of the Puritans, who were too ready to condemn all outward show of joy and pleasure as sinful.
Scripture speaks of many ways in which we can express our joy, not merely by just saying so, but by giving vent to our emotions in physical action.
When we are pleased with the actions of others, it is right and proper that we should express our appreciation of the fact. The clapping of hands as a sign of joy has some measure of scriptural backing. “For you shall go out in joy, and be led forth in peace; the mountains and the hills before you shall break forth into singing and all the trees of the field shall clap their hands.”9
The outward expression of joy is a spontaneous, natural consequence of the inward thought. We have mentioned the physical movements of dancing and hand-clapping; singing is another scripturally mentioned way of giving vent to our inner feelings of joy. “Sing thankfully in your hearts to God, with psalms and by spiritual songs”.” Incidentally, the word psalm is not limited to the “Psalms of David”.
Psalm is a Greek word, derived from the word meaning an archer’s bow, its “twong” being the origin of the harp. Literally, a psalm is a song, sung to the accompaniment of a stringed instrument. (The “over righteous” might claim that it is therefore unscriptural to sing them to an organ accompaniment.) We should understand the word to mean essentially a song of praise, sung to a musical accompaniment, without which it would be more correctly described as a hymn or “spiritual song”.
By the way, a note concerning the word “selah” might not be out of place. In the Greek Septuagint, it is translated by the word “dia-psalma”. “Dia” means “through” —the idea appears to be that the music plays on while the voices pause.
Joy, therefore, is an emotion that should inevitably be10 exhibited by the true believer in Christ.
The writer sometimes wonders whether our memorial meetings are lacking too much in the expression of joy. We have come to consider that our breaking of bread meeting is purely and solely an obedience to the command, “Do this in remembrance of me”. How often the stress is laid on the sadness of the event—”sad Gethsemane” and the other mournful associations. We once commented on the slow singing of the hymns at one meeting, and received the reply, “After all, it is a death that we are remembering”.
But, brethren and sisters, is this all? Our memorial meetings are not patterned on that meeting in the “upper room”. As we have pointed out, Paul emphasized that if Christ is still dead, we are of all men most miserable. Surely, the purpose of our memorial meeting is not that we should be sad because our sins led to the death of Jesus, but rather to rejoice that God in his mercy arranged this plan—as a part of which he raised Jesus from the grave.
I always understood that the death of Jesus was a preliminary to his resurrection, of which we should make an important feature in our memorial. As we have said, our memorial service is not patterned on the meeting in the upper room—no exhortation, men only present—even the hymn they sang being one of the Psalms traditionally sung at the Passover.
The basic thought should be a rejoicing in the fact that, through the death and resurrection of Jesus, the truth has made us free, and a rejoicing in our fellowship together in the sharing of Christ with each other, as Paul ‘has told us, “When we bless the cup of blessing, ‘is it not a means of sharing in the blood of Christ? When we break the bread, is it not a means of sharing in the body of Christ? Because there is one loaf, we many as we are, are one body; for it is one loaf of which we all partake”11
Some of the early Christians carried this rejoicing to an extreme — especially at Corinth—so that Paul had to rebuke them. I suppose we could easily do the same; but let us repeat once more, we do not have to go to the other extreme. Let us not be like the hypocrites12 whose mournful appearance was supposed to be evidence of righteousness!
Our “after-supper” hymns should be sung cheerfully. We cannot help thinking that Jesus, with the knowledge of the wonderful mission which lay before ‘him and which ‘he knew would by God’s guidance unfailingly come to pass, must have shown outwardly a joyful nature.
He was certainly not devoid of a sense of humor. We must remember that the “man of sorrows and acquainted with grief” aspect ‘represented only one facet of his character, covering a few days only.
We should not need to look up a concordance to find out that the scripture so often tells us to “rejoice always”, “rejoice greatly”, etc.
Apostolic instruction to be “sober” does not mean to be gloomy and unsmiling as it is sometimes supposed. One word that is used means sober in the sense of not intoxicated. Elsewhere it means to be of sound mind—balanced—or, as we sometimes say, ” leve l-headed”—self-control led.
There are no scriptural grounds for the idea that joy should not be outwardly expressed, but that it should be subdued, repressed. On the contrary, scripture teaches that the knowledge of the truth—and a genuine belief in it—inevitably results in a happy or joyful frame of mind, because we above all others know that the cares of this life (and we have plenty) become so much less significant when we have the hope of that ultimate gift of the Spirit—”Eternal Life”.
REFERENCES
1-Eccles. 8. 15.
2-lsa, 22, 13,
3-Luke 12. 18.
4-1 Cor. 15. 19, 32.
5-Psm. 149. 3.
6-Psm. 150. 4.
7-Lam. 5. 15.
8-Eccles. 7. 1 6.
9-lsa. 55. 12 (R.S.V.).
l 0-1 Col. 3. 16 (N.E.B.).
11-1 Cor. 10. 16 (N.E.B.) .
12-Matt. 6. 16.
Being Compassionate