God in a bowl.
When told that nature reveals the glory of God, Woody Allen replied that he only saw a giant restaurant. Fair enough. If someone can’t see God in the grandeur, try the granular. Rather than scraping the heavens, suggest that God can be found in a bowl of Cocoa Krispies.
Really. When I was 16, I ate seven bowls of Cocoa Krispies at summer camp one evening. If anyone had asked me why, the answer was simple. I wanted to. And that is exactly how God originally made us to live. Everyday in every way. I didn’t appreciate it then, but doing what we take pleasure in is a pointer toward God.
Psalm 115:3 says, “Our God is in the heavens; he does whatever pleases him.”1 At the core of God’s character is this central idea: he does whatever makes him happy. At the core of human character is this central idea: we’re made in God’s image.2 So we do whatever makes us happy. Right here, right now. All day, everyday. Psalm 115:16 says: “The highest heavens belong to the Lord, but the earth he has given to man.” Given our present limitations of finances, freedom and physical abilities, we do as we please. In the ancient “four-chapter” gospel, we’re designed this way. It’s Chapter One, creation.
Doing whatever we please spooks many Christians. Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) said if we do something for pleasure or enjoyment, the action becomes impure. Ayn Rand interpreted Kant to mean this: “An action is moral only if one has no desire to perform it, but performs it out of a sense of duty and derives no benefit from it of any sort, neither material nor spiritual.”3 Kant sounds pious, but he’s actually impractical. He denies the very way we act – day in and day out.
“It is a Christian duty, as you know, for everyone to be as happy as he can,” wrote C.S. Lewis.4 Blaise Pascal (1623-1662) believed, “All men seek happiness without exception. They all aim at this goal however different the means they use to attain it. They will never make the smallest move but with this as its goal.”5 We do what we please because God does as he pleases. Those who stifle this core characteristic deny their humanness and holiness.
I’m walking us to the rim of the canyon so that we get a broader view. Too many well-meaning Christians subscribe to Kant and are fairly joyless souls. They remind me of H.L. Mencken’s critique of Puritanism: “the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.” God made us to be happy. He made us to do what we want to do. Of course, we can drop over the edge. We have to remember, as Paul Harvey put it, the rest of the story.
If we’re designed to do as we please, our default follows the same path: we sin because we like it. Remember, Moses forsook the “passing pleasures of sin.”6 This is Chapter Two (the fall). Chapter Three (redemption) tells us what we can do: “Delight yourself in the Lord and he will give you the desires of your heart.”7 Martin Luther understood this verse to mean love God and do what you want to do. If we love the things God loves in the order that he loves them, we can pretty much do what our heart desires – as long as we keep in mind: “Your word I have treasured in my heart that I may not sin against you.”8
It is the destiny of those who follow God to spend eternity indulging the desires of our hearts. This is Chapter Four, when we love what God loves and do what we want to do… forever. “God will let everyone into heaven who, in his considered opinion, can stand it,” writes Dallas Willard.9
Woody Allen once asked God to give him some clear sign – “like making a large deposit in my name at a Swiss bank.” While an extraordinary dollop of dollars might convince many that God exists, a better case can be made pointing to the ordinary decisions we make everyday. Like eating seven bowls of Cocoa Krispies at summer camp… for the sheer pleasure of it. I wasn’t too far from the way God acts – and made us to live. So the next time friends object to the evidence for God in nature, invite them out for breakfast instead and watch what they select. I’ll bet they’ll choose what they enjoy eating.
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1 The same point is made in Psalm 135:6: “Whatever the Lord pleases, he does.”
2 Genesis 1:26-28
3 Ayn Rand, For the Intellectual (New York: Signet, 1961), p.32
4 From a letter to Sheldon Vanauken in Vanauken’s book, A Severe Mercy (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), p. 189
5 Blaise Pascal, Pascal’s Pensées, trans. by W. F. Trotter (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1958), p. 113 (thought #425)
6 “By faith Moses, when he had grown up, refused to be called the son of Pharaoh’s daughter, choosing rather to endure ill-treatment with the people of God than to enjoy the passing pleasures of sin” (Hebrews 11:24-25).
7 Psalm 37:4
8 Psalm 119:11
9 Dallas Willard, The Divine Conspiracy: Rediscovering Our Hidden Life in God, (San Francisco: HarperCollins Publishers, 1998), p.302
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