God loves pleasure!
...yes, I said it. God wants you to enjoy life 🙃
Do you remember, as a kid, taking a lot of sweets (candy) or taking a lot of drinks, especially during a festive period, and your parents cautioning you about ‘sugary’ things? Some of our parents even went as far as concocting agbo (herbal medicine) for us to take after such feeding escapades to prevent us from finishing ourselves 😂 with the overconsumption of the said sugary things. You see, growing up, we were conditioned by such experiences and similar ones to think that sweet things are bad and bitter things are good. Of course, it also did not help that most of the drugs we had to take as remedies for our childhood maladies were profusely bitter! Names like ‘Flagyl’ and ‘Coartem’ come to mind, even injections 😑, and the mere mention of these things brings to mind the horror we had to face taking those drugs because they were ‘good’, and not just good, but in fact the best things for us at the time.
I believe that we have subconsciously imported this way of thinking into life in general. There appears to be a subtle assumption within all of us that the things we enjoy or derive pleasure from are bad for us in one way or many ways, and the things we do not quite enjoy and would rather not do are the things that are good for us. Or put in another way:
“The things that are good for us are never enjoyable/pleasant.”
This assumption is further strengthened and strongly advanced within the community of faith. Devotion (prayer and scripture reading), good deeds, obedience, holiness, etc. are painted as moral obligations that, although distasteful and unpleasant, the believer must keep because “they’re good for you”. And the believer must let go of enjoyment and pleasures of this world, deny himself, take up his cross and follow the Lord because “the kingdom of God is not meat and drink…” and this “kingdom suffers violence, and the violent take it by force.”
Now you’re left to either choose a life of enjoyment or a life of endurance, such that if you make it your life’s purpose to love good and pursue it, you have to endure your way through life, and if you love enjoyment and pleasure, your best bet is to be up to no good. So the good guy endures, and the bad guy enjoys eh eh eh 😂. The good guy tends to grow jealous of the bad guy, and the bad guy laughs at the good guy. The good guy uses eternity to comfort and encourage himself (and rightly so) while the bad guy deludes himself that he’d become a good guy in the final moments of his life. Confusion everywhere! 😂😂
You see, there are pieces of truth (scattered) within this line of reasoning, but that is all they are, pieces! Incomplete truth and a lie are cousins, and I promise you, they’re not distant cousins. The truth has to be whole—entire, complete, and lacking nothing.
Well, I think I know the truth. That’s a staggering claim, I know 🙃, but stay with me. I might be on to something.
Was it not David who wrote that:
God will show me the path of life.
In His presence is fullness of joy.
At His right hand there are pleasures forevermore.
I want to show you 3 things:
God is not allergic to pleasure—in fact, He loves it!
Good (things) can, should and ought to be enjoyed,
God-things are not among the things to be endured,
On page two of The Book, we see so many, many fascinating things happen, and we miss out on a tiny detail. (I'll show it to you, but you’ll have to go look up the specific reference yourself 🙃).
And out of the ground the LORD God caused to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight, and good for food; also the tree of life in the middle of the garden, and the tree of knowledge of good and evil.
God, at the very beginning of beginnings, appears to be doing something strange, maybe something wrong in our own eyes. God is providing sources of pleasure! He’s not asking Adam to fast. He’s not asking him to starve his flesh or abstain from meats. He has just legit provided multiple sources of pleasures for him—visionary and savoury pleasures. Aesthetic desires? Met! Culinary desires? Met! Was this bad? Absolutely not! After all, on page 1, scripture keeps repeating the same phrase after every act of creation:
…and God saw that it was good!
Photo credit: news.cgtn.comSo, that means this was good as well. (Now you know where the human love and appreciation for trees, flowers and beautiful plants come from, and I know why, as an Ekiti man, I love pounded yam 🤣). I’d have loved to employ more words, but to avoid being repetitive, I think it suffices to say the point is clear; God created the desire for pleasure(s) in man and sufficiently provided for that desire. Even in meeting the human need for companionship and the divine imperative of procreation, God throws in the exquisite pleasure of knowing each other 😉 into the mix. So, we see He creates man with the desire and makes sufficient provision for it.
Here’s what we have established so far:
God created man, and He put the desire for pleasure in the good man that He created, and it was good.
He provided the resources to satisfy man’s pleasures, and that was good also.
I will dry my ink here for now and continue exactly where I stopped in my next write-up. Till then, stay thinking 😉. Ciao Ciao.