Unshackled Echo ~ July 3, 2019 ~ Happy God

...according to the glorious gospel of the blessed God which was committed to my trust.

- I Timothy 1:11

I read the above verse this morning. It follows a string of offenses that are contrary to the doctrine of God and a statement that the law is not for the righteous or good but for those who are unrighteous. I took a look at the Greek to see exactly what the terms of offenses had been in the original text, and saw something I had never noticed before that completely took me by surprise.

The word that caught me off guard was not in the list of offenses but in verse 11. That word translated as blessed in basically every translation of the Bible is, in the literal Greek, a word that actually means happy. The glorious gospel of our happy God. What an awesome thought! What a novel idea!

I don't know about most people, but when I read blessed God I always thought of the usual definition of blessed, as in sacred and holy. It never occurred to me before that in this particular place it was more the way I would use the word blessed when I look at my beautiful wife, realize how happy I am to be with her and exclaim that I am a blessed man. It's not because she did anything. She may just be sitting there reading, not even thinking about me, but she said yes when I asked her to marry me, and that makes me happy, blessed.

Sometimes we think about wanting to make God happy by pleasing Him. Sometimes we think about making Him unhappy when we step outside of His will. It's all too easy to imagine and picture an angry God full of righteous wrath. But have we ever considered the image of a happy God? Can you see a God who is full of joy and happy because He has a relationship with us and not because of anything we do or don't do other than saying yes? The good news, or gospel, is that God asked us all to be in relationship with Him and sent His Son to make that possible. He is happy because we said yes!

We are told that the joy of the Lord is our strength. It's the Lord's joy, not ours, that makes us strong and helps us endure. We may be aware of that without ever stopping to think about what that really means, In order for the joy of Jesus, the Lord's joy. to give us strength, the Lord must be joyful, happy. Jesus is full of joy, and He shares the heart of the Father. That means Daddy is happy. Daddy is full of joy. We have a happy God. He is happy because we said yes. So let us never fear to approach Him and spend time in His presence. Let us get as close to Him as possible so that we can share His happiness.

Today's Unshackled Echo was previously published on

July 3, 2016.

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