In his book, The Knowledge of the Holy, A. W. Tozer made the following assertion in an insightful chapter entitled, "Why We Must Think Rightly About God."

The most portentous [weighty] fact about any man is not what he at a given time may say or do, but what he in his deep heart conceives God to be like. We tend by a secret law of the soul to move toward our mental image of God. This is true not only of the individual Christian, but of the company of Christians that composes the Church. ¹

Tozer does not mean, of course, that one's words or actions are of little consequence. He means, rather, that one's view of God serves as the control center for one's words and actions (Luke 6:43-45; James 4:1). False views about God will naturally, and inevitably, issue forth in a lifestyle that, despite all pretensions to the contrary, dishonors God (Matthew 23:1-36). Conversely, right beliefs about God have the potential to fuel genuinely righteous deeds.

A proper view of God certainly does not guarantee godliness. Satan himself holds many orthodox views about God (James 2:19). However, false views of God lead inexorably to evil behavior. In fact, as Tozer suggests, evil behavior is always rooted in false beliefs about God.

For instance, moral failure lurks in the shadows for anyone who embraces the notion that God is a soft-hearted deity who characteristically overlooks sin. While God is a God of grace and love, the Bible also reveals him to be a God of wrath, judgment, and holy anger (Deuteronomy 4:24; 9:7; Romans 1:18). When one's worldview precludes the notion of God's severity and holiness, appreciation of the glorious beauty and absolute necessity of God's grace is muted. And where a keen sense of the wonder of God's grace is lacking, moral failure is inevitable, for as Paul reminded Titus, an organic relationship exists between genuinely experiencing God's grace and renouncing ungodliness (Titus 2:11-12).

Striking out in a very different direction from those who hold a low view of the severity of God are those who proclaim his severity quite loudly, yet promote an equally distorted view of God. It is this error the remainder of this article will most specifically address.

In starkest form, some fancy God as a stern killjoy who callously decrees moral laws meticulously calibrated to render life miserable for his creatures. Why else demand that red-blooded human beings not covet what belongs to others, not gossip against their enemies, not twist the truth to protect themselves, not crave sex outside of marriage, and even love their enemies - returning good for evil - and so forth? Such people, it would seem, are content to cast a cursory glance in God's direction and to draw the hasty conclusion that He is little more than a celestial tyrant intent on inflicting misery and squelching joy.

Such a conclusion will not satisfy those committed to constructing a biblically informed worldview. Further, there seem to be vestiges of this distorted view which tend to lurk in the shadows like a disease and attach themselves to the concept of God promoted even by some of the most orthodox Christians.

We must note at the outset that God is not an enemy of human pleasure. Quite to the contrary, the Bible describes him as the "God who gives us all things to enjoy" (1 Timothy 6:17). Further, he holds out the tantalizing promise in Psalms 16:11 that in his "presence is fullness of joy; and at his right hand there are pleasures forevermore." God created the universe for our pleasure and promises eternal pleasures to his people. God is clearly a pleasure-giving, not a pleasure-stealing, God!

How then are we to understand the many pleasure-restricting, pleasure-denying commands of Scripture? Perhaps no author has investigated this question more memorably (and no less accurately) than C. S. Lewis in his insightful book, The Screwtape Letters. This delightful book poses as a series of letters between a demon named Screwtape, and his nephew, Wormwood. Young Wormwood is assigned a "patient" - a young man recently converted to the Enemy (God, from Screwtape's perspective).

Filling the role of mentor, Screwtape admonishes Wormwood in the finer points of human temptation. He hopes his understudy will succeed in luring the new convert away from Christ. For his part, Lewis employs Screwtape's letters to cleverly illustrate the biblical truth that God is a pleasure-giving God. Screwtape instruct Wormwood:

Never forget that when we are dealing with any pleasure in its healthy and normal and satisfying form, we are, in a sense, on the Enemy's [i.e., God's] ground. I know that we have won many a soul through pleasure. All the same, it is His invention, not ours. He made the pleasures: all our research thus far has not enabled us to produce one. All we can do is to encourage the humans to take the pleasures which our Enemy has produced, at times, or in ways, or in degrees, which He has forbidden. Hence, we always try to work away from the natural condition of any pleasure to that in which it is least natural, least redolent of its Maker, and least pleasurable. An ever-increasing craving for an ever-diminishing pleasure is the formula. It is more certain; and it's better style. To get the man's soul and give him nothing in return - that is what really gladdens our Father's [i.e., Satan's] heart (emphasis mine). ²

Bemoaning the goodness of God, Screwtape continues to complain to Wormwood, once again revealing God as a pleasure-giving God:

[God is] a hedonist at heart. All those facts and vigils and stakes and crosses are only a façade. Or only like foam on the seashore. Out at sea, out in His sea, there is pleasure, and more pleasure. He makes no secret of it; at His right hand are "pleasures forevermore" . . . . He's vulgar, Wormwood. He has a bourgeois mind. He has filled His world full of pleasures. There are things for humans to do all day long without His minding in the least - sleeping, washing, eating, drinking, making love, playing, praying, working. Everything has to be twisted before it's any use to us. We fight under cruel disadvantages. Nothing is naturally on our side ³ (emphasis mine).

Screwtape continues his diatribe against God, insightfully stressing a unique aspect of God's pleasure-giving relationship to man:

The horror of the Same Old Thing is one of the most valuable passions we have produced in the human heart - an endless source of heresies in religion, folly in counsel, infidelity in marriage, and inconstancy in friendship. The humans live in time, and experience reality successively. To experience much of it, therefore, they must experience many different things; in other words, they must experience change. And since they need change, the Enemy (being a hedonist at heart) has made change pleasurable to them, just as He has made eating pleasurable. But since He does not wish them to make change, any more than eating, an end in itself, He has balanced the love of change in them by a love of permanence. He has contrived to gratify both tastes together in the very world He has made, by the union of change and permanence which we call Rhythm. He gives them the seasons, each season different yet every year the same, so that spring is always felt as a novelty yet always as the recurrence of an immemorial time . . . Now, just as we pick out and exaggerate the pleasure of eating to produce gluttony, so we pick out this natural pleasantness of change and twist it into a demand for absolute novelty. If we neglect our duty, men will not only be contented but transported by the [mixture] of novelty and familiarity . . . Only by our incessant efforts is the demand for infinite, or unrhythmical, change kept up. This is valuable in various ways. In the first place it diminishes the pleasure while increasing the desire. The pleasure of novelty is by its very nature more subject than any other to the law of diminishing returns . . . ⁴ (emphasis mine).

Genuine pleasure, Lewis rightly suggests by way of Screwtape's rantings, descends as a gift to humanity from the Creator. Pleasure conceived in any other way is a dangerous distortion of reality. Our quest, then, is to enjoy the pleasures of life as God intended them to be enjoyed - not a whit more, and not a trifle less.

For instance, food is created by God for our pleasure, but a man may enjoy this pleasure too passionately, or too often, or too selectively, and suffer for it. God intends for us to enjoy material possessions, but a man may enjoy them too much or seek enjoyment in possessions that do not legitimately belong to him and invite untold misery into his life. Sex is an exquisite pleasure from heaven, but the Creator knows people can experience sex too soon and/or share this pleasure with the wrong person or persons and suffer terribly. Yet Scripture consistently instructs us that legitimate joy can be found in the proper channeling of these very pleasures (Genesis 2:23-25; 9:1-3; 1 Corinthians 6:12-20; 10:31; 1 Timothy 6:17; Hebrews 13:4; Revelation 22:1-3).

There are untold pleasures in God's good world that must be restricted, delayed, shared, or even shelved in order to realize higher purposes. Pleasures that are not properly managed in the interest of these higher purposes tend to create addictions that increase cravings while diminishing satisfaction and introducing unproductive pain.

The quality of one's life, then, depends largely upon experiencing pleasure rightly. This includes knowing when it is time to avoid a pleasure altogether and to thereby choose a path of self-denial or even suffering. Yet, even on a path thus chosen, joy can and should factor profoundly into the equation. That is to say, the immediate pleasure that is sacrificed is offered in the interest of a greater pleasure to come, as when Jesus "for the joy set before him" (future) "endured the cross" (immediate suffering) (Hebrews 12:2).

But how do we fruitfully determine when and how pleasures are to be enjoyed, restricted, delayed, shared, or avoided in the interest of higher purposes? Without ignoring the need for individual Spirit leading in this regard, a general answer is found very early in the pages of Scripture. In Genesis 3, God commands Adam and Eve not to eat from the tree in the center of the Garden. "Every tree in the Garden is a legitimate source of pleasure," God tells Adam, "but not this one. Do not eat its fruit. On the day you do, you will surely die."

Having been duly warned, Adam and Eve nonetheless made the critical decision to ignore God and to secure pleasure on their own terms. Eve saw the forbidden fruit as a source of pleasure in the form of food and increased knowledge - nothing wrong with that (Genesis 2:16; Proverbs 2:1-7). But she ate the fruit, choosing to enjoy a pleasure God had forbidden. Adam followed his wife's sin and, as God had previously warned, the consequences were both forthcoming and disastrous. An immediate pleasure, enjoyed self-autonomously apart from divine favor, proved utterly ruinous.

Genesis 3 establishes that God alone has the authority to arbitrate human ethics. He alone has the right (and capacity) to determine for man what constitutes a legitimate pleasure and what does not. He, as the Creator knows when we are to enjoy a pleasure, how, and to what degree. As with Adam and Eve, the critical issue is whether or not we will believe him and submit to his instruction or venture to grasp pleasure on our terms. The issue, then, is whether we will worship pleasure as a god (self-autonomously) or worship God as a pleasure (submissively).

It is important to note, as we make this choice, that the Lord of heaven and earth presents himself not as the cold law-giver, but as the loving disseminator of our deepest joy as human beings. What is more, much more, is that as we submit to divine regulation in the pursuit of temporal pleasures, we discover that God himself is our highest and only complete pleasure and the one through whom every legitimate earthly pleasure is enlivened.

In his autobiography, The Confessions, the once licentious Augustine (354-430 A.D.) dramatically experienced and insightfully articulated this relationship between enjoying both God and earthly pleasures in harmonious tandem. He discovered that God was not a killjoy but a joy-giving and joy-enhancing God.

There is a joy which is not given to the ungodly but to those who love You for Your own sake, whose joy You Yourself are. And it is the happy life, to rejoice to You, of You, for You; this is it, and there is no other. They who think there is another, pursue something else which is not true joy. ⁵

Once a dutiful slave to the pleasures of sexual promiscuity, Augustine could, after his conversion, look back to his days of moral darkness and pray:

You were ever with me, mercifully rigorous, and sprinkling with most bitter alloy all my unlawful pleasures, so that I might seek pleasures without alloy [i.e., pleasures in God]. I could not discover where to find such pure pleasures, save in You, Lord... You have drawn me out of all my most evil ways so that you might become a delight to me above all the allurements which I once pursued, that I may most entirely love You and clasp Your hand with all my affections... It was my sin that I sought pleasure... in His creatures... and not in Him. Therefore, I fell headlong into sorrows, confusions, and errors. ⁶

After receiving Christ as Savior, Augustine could pray: "You are the fullness and never-failing plenteousness of incorruptible pleasures." ⁷ Thus armed with an accurate view of human pleasure, Augustine could clearly see the true nature of God's restrictive commands: "Your best servant is he who seeks not so much to hear from You what he wants to hear, but rather to want that which he hears from You." ⁸

There remains at this very point, however, a significant problem for the God honoring believer. For although we may rightly acknowledge that God is our soul's deepest and infinite pleasure, and although we may consequently yield to his will as the Governor of our temporal pleasures, we find ourselves very much alive to disobedience. Like Adam and Eve, the temptation to find pleasures outside the strictures of God's gracious regulation is formidable.

First, we must realize that identifying and experiencing legitimate pleasures rightly in a fallen world will ever remain a matter of developing spiritual maturation. Said another way, we will fail. Our flesh will remain susceptible to evil pleasures until we are glorified. We are all a work in progress in this regard.

But secondly, it is here, in our weakness, that God meets us with an unexpected pleasure. In his unmerited grace, he offers to freely supply us with spiritual power to obey his will and thus to enjoy what he intends for us to enjoy as he intends for us to enjoy it. And so, in the end, this power comprises yet another gift of his grace and thus, not ironically, another source of exquisite pleasure (Psalm 16:11; 2 Peter 1:1-4). The joys never end!

In sum, a proper view of God enables the believer to perceive that every good gift - every legitimate pleasure - comes from God's gracious hand (James 1:17). And the happy result of such a realization should be an attitude of submission to the authority of God who determines for us what is good and what is evil - to his glory and for our eternal pleasure.

¹ A. W. Tozer, The Knowledge of the Holy, New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1961, p., 9.
² C. S. Lewis, Screwtape Letters, p., 44.
³ Screwtape, p., 83.
⁴ Screwtape, pp., 91-92.
⁵ Confessions, Book 10 (p., 272).
⁶ Confession, Book 2
⁷ Confessions, p., 276.