The Hedonist At Heart

“The Enemy is a hedonist at heart,” writes a famous Christian apologist. Hedonist: a fancy, five-dollar term to describe someone who is an inveterate pleasure seeker; one who stalks satisfaction like a fox seeks meat.

For Christians, to be told that the Enemy is a hedonist comes as little surprise. The Evil One constantly leverages our human lusts to pry us away from the One who alone is the wellspring of life. “For all that is in the world,” writes St. John, “the desires of the flesh and the desires of the eyes and pride of life—is not from the Father but is from the world” (1 John 2:16). The land of hedonism is familiar territory for the prince of the power of the air.

There’s just one problem: The Christian apologist isn’t speaking of Satan. He’s speaking of God.

The quotation in question comes from C.S. Lewis in The Screwtape Letters—his famous, fantastical record of the correspondence between a veteran demon and its younger counterpart, Wormwood. Written from the diabolical perspective, Screwtape turns the biblical worldview on its head. Screwtape lauds “Our Father Below,” prefers miserification to beatification, and gnashes its teeth at Almighty God—“the Enemy,” in diabolical parlance.

In Letter 22, Screwtape laments his handicaps. “Everything has to be twisted before it’s any use to us,” Screwtape writes. “We fight under cruel disadvantages.” The elder demon bemoans, by contrast, how the Lord seems not only to permit pleasures but positively to endorse them, encourage them, delight in dispensing them.

Surely in painting this picture of God, Lewis overstates the case, right? The Lord is not averse to a good time now and then—okay. And He does seem to appreciate the things that he has made; there is such a thing as sea otters, after all. But a hedonist? You have to think that it’s a far cry from admiring a raft of cuddly critters to relishing in pleasure like an otter with its clam.

And then you come across a passage of Scripture like Psalm 16.

Psalm 16 is a defiant confession of faith in the face of trial. King David begins by pleading, “Preserve me, O God, for in you I take refuge” (v. 1). He insists that “because the LORD is at my right hand, I shall not be shaken” (v. 8). Then, with words that resound through the New Testament, David professes, “For you will not abandon my soul to Sheol, nor let your holy one see corruption” (v. 10). Death wants no truck with God’s chosen.

So this is what won’t happen; David aptly describes what he is delivered from. But what is he delivered for? This is the vision of the psalm’s final verse:

You make known to me the path of life;

in your presence there is fullness of joy;

at your right hand are pleasures forevermore. (v. 11)

Path of life. Fullness of joy. Pleasures forevermore. Such are the astounding, abounding promises made by a God who, if not exactly a “hedonist” at heart, is nevertheless positively intent on sharing the overflowing delight of His being with His children.

Let’s just linger for a moment on each of those phrases.

First, “path of life.” The Scriptures commonly consider life as a journey, a way. What strikes me here is that this path is not only the way to Life (as I-55 north is the way to Chicago from St. Louis), but that walking the path is itself Life.

There is the cliche about “the journey being the destination.” As anyone who has had a roadtrip across Kansas can attest, however, it’s simply not always the case (I say it with the greatest respect for the Sunflower State). More often than not, the destination is the destination.

In the case of our relationship with the Lord, however, journey and destination are indeed coterminous. Faith isn’t merely a means to an end. The Way is the Life. To put it that way, we can’t help but the think of our Lord Jesus: the One who is himself “the Way, and the Truth, and the Life” (John 14:6). He not only ferries us to the Father on the Last Day; in union with Him, He delivers to us now, in this present time, “life to the full” (John 10:10).

Faith isn’t merely a means to an end. The Way is the Life.

Secondly, “fullness of joy.” Joy isn’t periphery to God’s design; it’s front and center. “I have spoken these words to you that my joy might be in you,” Jesus says, “and that your joy might be made full” (John 15:11). In the list of the fruit of the Spirit (Galatians 5), only love precedes joy.

The Hebrew word for joy here, śimcḥoth, is in its plural form, which my colleague Tim Saleska (an expert on the Psalms) suggests is an “intensifying” plural. Infinite joy, the most joyous of joys—that’s the fullness we seek.

What’s more, note well the location of this joy: “In [the LORD’s] presence.” The Hebrew literally reads “before your face.” It calls to mind Paul’s words in 1 Corinthians “For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known” (13:12).

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Finally, David speaks of “pleasures forevermore.” Here is where the “hedonism” of God’s heart comes out most vividly. It calls to mind the arresting opening line of the hymn: “Jesus has come and brings pleasures eternal, / Alpha, Omega, beginning, and end.”1

But note once again the locatedness of these pleasures: “at your right hand.” This isn’t some saccharine assurance of unlimited Sour Patch Kids in heaven. The point is that eternal pleasures are wrapped up in the divine Presence—what theologians of old dubbed “the beatific vision.”

I opened with C.S. Lewis, and I can’t resist the urge to close with him by quoting from one of my favorite passages:

“If we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.”2

God is, in his own divine way, a hedonist at heart. He will, at the last, welcome us into the eternal “holiday at the sea” in the new creation. In the present age, sorrows invariably persist. Ultimately, though, infinite joy is ours in Christ. Seek and settle for nothing less.