I should have known better. I arrived at the art museum at Penn State University hoping to find images of smiling people, to augment these thoughts on the joy of God. But I had forgotten how glum art usually is.

There is hardly a happy visage in the building. Why is it we feel we need our paintings to be so somber? Why do we equate angst with authenticity? I suppose, as an aside, this is why I consider my drawings to be below the standard of “real art.” They’re just too darn whimsical.

But I digress. I am here to contemplate God, not the melancholy nature of art.

I don’t often think of God as joyful. I tend to frame him up as serious with an occasional moment of pleasure. But joy? I am surprised by the thought. In fact, this topic came to mind only after I prayed recently, asking God what he would like me to highlight about himself.

When we turn to Scripture, however, there is ample evidence of God’s rejoicing.

John Gill (1697-1771) in his treatise “Of the Joy of God,” lists three things that bring God joy: himself, his works and his people. It’s easy to see the delight of God in the world he fashioned – an extension of his beauty and abundance.

But his works also include his loving actions toward his people.

The LORD your God is in your midst, a mighty one who will save; he will rejoice over you with gladness; he will quiet you by his love; he will exult over you with loud singing. (Zephaniah 3:17)

I will rejoice in Jerusalem
       and be glad in my people. (Isaiah 65:19)

Gill elaborates:

and this joy over them… is to do them good… to bestow benefits upon them, grace here, and glory hereafter; to beautify them with salvation; to make them prosperous, especially in spiritual things, in which prosperity he takes pleasure; and in making all things work together for their good, which joy is full; there is a redundancy, an overflow of it; it is hearty and sincere, is the strength and security of the saints, and will remain for ever.

God rejoices in his people as an extension of his rejoicing in his Son. At Jesus’s baptism, God declared his pleasure in him. And Christ’s delight was to reconcile fallen humans to his Father. The Puritan preacher, John Owen calls this “the joy of (Christ’s) soul,” adding that “he rejoiced in the thoughts of this from eternity.”

I shouldn’t be surprised, then, that the only smiling face I find today is on a sculpture of a mother with a child. Likewise, our heavenly Father exults in his children when they experience more of him. This is the “joy of the master” we can enter into (Mt. 25:23).

What an invitation! This is no bloodless legal transaction we’re called to. Nor some spiritual graduate level course with a final to pass. This is a full-on, full-hearted wedding feast with laughter, dancing and the singing led by God himself.

It’s time for me to repaint my mental image of him with brighter colors.

Lord, you are the God of joy. We see this in our heads, please press it into our hearts. How we want to enter that joy!

Reader: when have you felt “the joy of the master”?

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