The Man of Joy
August 23, 2012
If creation provides the basic mold filled by redemptive re-creation (Is 45:18; Rev 7:9; 1 Cor 15:45), and if human fathers with their children, however finitely or imperfectly, image God as the Father of His children (Matt 7:11; Heb 12:7), then many who have welcomed a new life into the world--as I had the tremendous joy of doing last week--have perhaps experienced a faint replica of the joy of heaven as countless chosen sons are reborn and brought to glory (Luke 15:7; Is 62:5).
Of course, even the highest earthly joys can hang by a thread. The same hospital delivery room has seen many tears of heartache, too. But the Christian's joy, present by faith now (2 Cor 5:7; 1 Pet 1:8) but one day destined to be full by sight (Ps 16:11; Matt 25:21), is everlasting. Bound up with our eternal inheritance, the joy that flows from the exalted Christ to the saved sinner is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading (1 Pet 1:4). It is the kind of joy that the Spirit infused into Christ's human soul when He contemplated His Father's saving wisdom (Luke 10:21). And it is the kind of joy that sustained Christ's earthly pilgrimage precisely because, as Warfield writes, "He came as a conqueror with the gladness of the imminent victory in his heart." This joy of the Savior, he goes on to say,
"was not the shallow joy of mere pagan delight in living, nor the delusive joy of a hope destined to failure; but the deep exultation of a conqueror setting captives free. This joy underlay all his sufferings and shed its light along the whole thorn-beset path which was trodden by his torn feet. We hear but little of it, however, as we hear but little of his sorrows: the narratives are not given to descriptions of the mental states of the great actor whose work they illustrate. We hear just enough of it to assure us of its presence underlying and giving its color to all his life. If our Lord was 'the Man of Sorrows,' he was more profoundly still 'the Man of Joy.'" (Warfield, The Emotional Life of our Lord)
Speaking of sorrow and joy, which dimension of Christian living is the more profound among the Christians you know?
