Reading: Sweet Signals (Dr. Feddes)

It’s a gorgeous summer day, and you’re relaxing on a sunny beach. Your skin soaks up the rays. You lie there without a worry in the world. A bead of sweat trickles down the side of your face. You start to feel a bit overheated, so you hop up and plunge into the water. The refreshing coolness washes over your hot skin. What a feeling! You spend a few minutes in the water. Then you get out and relax in the sun again.

After a while, you again feel a little too hot. This time you deal with it by getting a monster ice cream cone. The ice cream is melting and dripping faster than you can lick it, but you do your best to keep up. Every lick of that delicious coolness tastes better than the last. As you swallow the last of it, you feel incredibly happy and content.

You’ve just had a religious experience.

What? How can that be? Soaking up the sun and splashing in the water and licking an ice cream cone—how can these things be religious experiences? What does ice cream have to do with God? Well, according to the Bible, it’s got everything to do with God. Ice cream is a religious experience, a sweet signal from God.

For a lot of us, summer is a great time of year. Everything seems a little more lively and cheerful. We’re outside more. We enjoy the fresh air. We talk with neighbors we don’t see much in the winter. Children are playing and running and biking and rollerblading. The aroma of neighborhood grills is in the air.

Summer is a good time to get away from work for a while and do something special with friends or family. You can go water skiing, or fishing, or swimming, or rafting. You can roar along on your motorcycle and feel the breeze in your face. And to top it all off, summer is that wonderful, messy time for dribbling watermelon juice down your chin or smearing ice cream on your nose. All of these summertime pleasures are sweet signals from God. They are religious experiences.

If you’re a churchgoer, it might sound sacrilegious to say that ice cream can be a religious experience. If you’re not a churchgoer, it might sound silly. Good food and good times, a religious experience?

But it’s not just my own idea to talk about food and fun this way. It’s God’s. We all have times when we feel great, when life seems good, when our hearts are full of joy. Those times don’t come our way by chance. They are sweet signals from God. They are religious experiences. “The living God who made heaven and earth and sea and everything in them... has not left himself without testimony: He has shown kindness by giving you rain from heaven and crops in their seasons; he provides you with plenty of food and fills your hearts with joy” (Acts 14:15,17). In other words, every refreshing rainfall, every crop and garden, every hearty meal, all good things that fill your heart with happiness—including ice cream—are sweet signals from God himself, displays of his character, proofs of his kindness and care, and invitations to know him better.

Inventor of Happiness

Creation shows us a lot about the Lord who made it. In the first place, it shows that God is real. If the universe isn’t everlasting—and only a tiny minority of scientists claim that it is—then it had to get started somehow, and something doesn’t come from nothing. Somebody had to bring it into being.

And creation doesn’t just show that God is real. It also shows that God is powerful, wise, and splendid. When you gaze up at the sky and think of the countless billions of stars and the vast reaches of space, when you stand before a mighty mountain or a roaring waterfall or a towering tree, you’re overwhelmed by a sense of sheer greatness. When you study the patterns of nature, whether it’s the intricacy of a flower or the order of a colony of ants, whether it’s the unique crystal of each snowflake or the trademark swirls of each unduplicated fingerprint, you can only marvel at the astounding genius that lies behind it all. Who but Someone of unimaginable power, wisdom, and splendor could bring such things into being?

So then, creation testifies to God’s reality, his splendor, his power, and his wisdom. But that’s not all. Creation also testifies to God’s joyfulness and his eagerness to fill our lives with joy. As we recognize the designs in creation as evidence of a Supreme Designer, we should also recognize fun and satisfaction as evidence of a Supreme Fun-Lover.

According to the Bible, God testifies to people, even to many who know little or nothing about him, by filling their stomachs with food and their hearts with joy. Why does the sun feel so good? Why does that ice cream taste so good? Why does that hamburger on the grill smell so good? Why does that lake or mountain look so splendid? Why do birds and brooks make such beautiful music? All these things are signals from a God who isn’t just a genius or an architect or an efficiency expert. He’s a great lover of joy, and his joy spills over into an outpouring of delight and fun for his creatures.

Why is the attraction between boys and girls so powerful and exciting? How can a husband and wife feel such overwhelming love and contentment just sitting next to each other looking out the window? And what about sexual intimacy? Who came up with the idea for that? Who dreamed up something so strange and yet so full of pleasure? Once again, it’s God’s idea. The Bible says, “May you rejoice in the wife of your youth. May her breasts satisfy you always, may you ever be captivated by her love” (Proverbs 5:18-19).

There’s also the joy of children and grandchildren. Why do we have families? Why do we get that feeling of joy and awe when we hold a newborn baby? Why do we feel so excited when we see Mom’s nose and Dad’s brown eyes in that little face? Why do we smile proudly when our little one smiles at us, or starts to walk, or babbles a few words, or hits a home run, or graduates, or gets a worthwhile job? It’s all God’s doing. The joys of home and family come from God (Psalm 127:2, Psalm 113:9).

God gives other forms of enjoyment as well. Who gives a student or scholar or researcher the thrill of discovery? Who gives you that feeling of achievement after you’ve worked all day and you feel like you really got something done? Once again, it’s a gift from God himself. “A man can do nothing better than to eat and drink and find satisfaction in his work. This too, I see, is from the hand of God, for without him, who can eat or find enjoyment?” (Ecclesiastes 2:24-25)

Food, fun, falling in love, enjoying family, feeling a sense of accomplishment—all these pleasures are sweet signals from the Lord about what kind of God he is. “The Lord is good to all… and loving toward all he has made… He gives them their food at the proper time… He satisfies the desires of every living thing… The Lord is faithful in all he does” (Psalm 145:9-16).

A Religious Response

Even if you never step into a church, even if you never open a Bible, even if you don’t believe in God at all, you are having religious experiences all the time. God is continually sending signals and dropping hints and giving you a taste of his kindness and goodness. And here’s something else you might not realize. When you have all these religious experiences, you’re bound to have a religious response. Even if you don’t consider yourself religious, you cannot help but have some sort of religious response to God’s sweet signals. You cannot help but worship something and seek it as your highest good.

Your religion might be to worship happiness itself, instead of worshipping the God who gives you happiness.

Maybe your greatest happiness is physical pleasure. You live for food and sex and excitement. Let the good times roll! Eat, drink, and be merry! To you, pleasure isn’t a gift from God. Pleasure is God. The Bible speaks of people “whose god is their stomach” (Philippians 3:19), who are “lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God” (2 Timothy 3:4). But God didn’t invent pleasure as a replacement for himself. He created it as a signal to draw us to him, as an appetizer to lead us to him and find our greatest pleasure in knowing him.

Or maybe your greatest happiness comes from friends or family. As long as you can be with buddies, or as long as your kids are thriving and making you proud, you’re happy. You can’t think of anything you want more. But God didn’t give you these relationships as a replacement for himself. These relationships are a signal to attract you to the best relationship of all: friendship with God and a place in his family.

Or maybe you’re happiest when you’re working and getting that marvelous feeling of accomplishment and success. What satisfaction when your business succeeds, or when you get that promotion you’ve been wanting! If you’re a workaholic, nothing matters more than feeling like you’ve done something important and moved up in the world. But God didn’t make success as an end in itself. The satisfaction of work is just a taste of the joy we can experience when we work for God and do everything in partnership with our Creator.

God is constantly sending us signals, but we tend to misread the signals. We treat temporary hints of happiness as though they are the ultimate happiness, and we may even base entire religious systems on our misreading of the signals God sends.

In the past, when people wanted food and sex and pleasure more than anything else, they tended to invent gods and goddesses that symbolized these things. Some religions worshipped gods and goddesses of fertility. They put such an emphasis on finding happiness in created things that they ignored the Creator and worshiped idols who represented fun and fertility to them. Today there’s a resurgence of nature worship and goddess worship. And among people who don’t consider themselves religious, the basic principle of pleasure worship is powerful.

Other people come up with a different type of religion. They put less emphasis on pleasure, and they put an enormous emphasis on the family. They exalt the family so high that they’re caught up in ancestor worship. They pray to the spirits of dead parents and grandparents and other ancestors. They also put such emphasis on producing children who see family as sacred that a child who doesn’t meet the parents’ expectations is a disgrace. Around the world, many people still today engage in ancestor worship. But even if you don’t, you might still, in a more secular way, worship your family instead of worshiping the Lord who gives you your family.

Then there are the religions that take work and achievement as the ultimate. The satisfaction we feel at a job well done can be exalted and made the very basis for divine acceptance. Do this! Do that! Follow this road of meditation, or that path of good works, and you can move upward from one level to the next on the ladder of religious greatness, the way a good worker moves up the ladder of success. Many people embrace a religion of working their way up to God. But even if you don’t have any religion of rituals or good deeds, you still might see achievement and excellence and self-reliance as the supreme values.

These are all ways of misreading the signals God sends us. We take God-given clues, and instead of seeing them as evidence pointing to Someone far greater, we idolize the things themselves. No wonder John Calvin described the human heart as a factory for idols!

Some people, seeing how foolish it is to worship things rather than God, have responded by taking a very different approach. They say that the physical world is an illusion, that all pleasure is evil, that everything earthly is bad, and that true religion means rejecting all these things and seeking God in a spiritual realm that has nothing to do with this present world. Perfection is found in refusing all the best-tasting foods and drinks, abstaining from marriage and sex and family, living as uncomfortably as possible, and learning to detach yourself from any kind of happiness in this life and learning to detach yourself from any particular ideas about God. True spirituality, in this approach, means total detachment, emptying the body of pleasures, emptying the mind of thoughts, and experiencing God as an impersonal void. However, that’s a terrible error. If God created all these good things, if he’s the one who fills our stomachs with food and our hearts with happiness, then it’s insulting to God and cruel to people to say that God’s good gifts are bad. Even though we often misuse some of those gifts, that doesn’t mean the gifts themselves are bad. God’s gifts are good (1 Timothy 4:4-5).

Seeking the Source

We shouldn’t worship God’s gifts and become obsessed with them, but we shouldn’t despise those gifts either. They are part of God’s testimony to us. They are sweet signals, clues of his kindness. And they are invitations to find our ultimate happiness in the Source of all happiness. The good things of creation are appetizers for an even better feast in God’s new creation.

The signals God sends us can be very intense and beautiful and enjoyable. Even so, they are limited and temporary. Happiness isn’t something we can grab for ourselves or hold within our grasp. It comes and then it goes. And yet these hints of happiness awaken a deep longing for a greater, more permanent happiness, an infinite, eternal happiness.

God has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the hearts of men; yet they cannot fathom what God has done from beginning to end. I know that there is nothing better for men than to be happy and do good while they live. That everyone may eat and drink and find satisfaction in all his toil—this is the gift of God. (Ecclesiastes 3:11-13).

Beauty, happiness, satisfaction—whether it’s in a sunset or an ice cream cone or a family outing or a sense of achievement—these are gifts from a God who beckons us from the outside with hints of happiness, and who stirs us on the inside with a sense of eternity in our hearts. God has designed us in such a way that we will find his good gifts enjoyable and exciting and inviting but not, ultimately, fulfilling. “God did this so that men would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him ... ‘For in him we live and move and have our being’” (Acts 17:27-28). God’s purpose in sending sweet signals is that we will seek him, the Source of those signals.

When you experience intense happiness, you are having a religious experience, whether you realize it or not. And you will have a religious response, whether you intend to or not. You can’t help it. You can react wrongly in various ways. But why not pursue another possibility? Why not seek God and “perhaps reach out for him and find him”? That’s what God is signaling you to do.