Does God want us to be happy? What does the Bible say about happiness?

“Happiness” may seem like a passing thing, and hardly the ultimate goal in most belief systems. In fact, though, it is the Lord’s greatest goal for us: He wants us to be happy. If we allow it, He will lead and guide us to be as happy as we are able to be.

The whole reason the Lord created us was so that he could love us, and what else but happiness do you wish for someone you love? But the happiness the Lord wants for us is not the passing joy of satisfying our bodily desires but the exquisite eternal joy of conjunction with the Lord and true love of the neighbor, things that are harder to see and harder to attain but ultimately far more delightful.

Swedenborg distinguishes heaven’s happiness from worldly happiness of satisfying our bodily desires. In heaven, all happiness is felt from loving the Lord and being of use, living for the sake of others. Everything the Lord does is part of his attempt to lead us to that state, and in everything that happens to us - even the things that are the most tragic on the natural level - he provides opportunities for us to move toward that state.

In Arcana Coelestia 6392, there's this: "...performing good deeds without thought of recompense is that in which heavenly happiness consists." A couple of sentences later, there's another key statement -- i.e. that this real love of the neighbor has to be rooted in a "new will" in us, a will that can only be implanted by the Lord when we make room for it, and seek it.

In the American Declaration of Independence, the "pursuit of happiness" is one of the 3 enumerated inalienable rights that our Creator endows us with. Certainly, the Lord wants our happiness, and wants us to pursue it. In a way, though, if we pursue it directly, externally, we will probably not get it. If we pursue happiness for others, we will be making our minds open and ready for that new will. (See Arcana Coelestia 454 for more about this.)

The Lord also leaves us in freedom. We can reject his efforts and turn away if we choose to, and while that choice may seem to us to lead toward happiness, it's a passing, low-level happiness that is ultimately only a shadow of the joy he desires for us. However, people in hell are "happy" being there - at least as happy as they CAN be - because the life there matches the self-centered love they cultivated while on earth. If people in hell could be lifted up to heaven, they would feel tormented.

From Psalm 65:9-13:

Thou visitest the earth, and blessest it; thou makest it very plenteous.

The river of God is full of water: thou preparest their corn, for so thou providest for the earth.

Thou waterest her furrows; thou sendest rain into the little valleys thereof; thou makest it soft with the drops of rain, and blessest the increase of it.

Thou crownest the year with thy goodness; and thy clouds drop fatness.

They shall drop upon the dwellings of the wilderness; and the little hills shall rejoice on every side.

The folds shall be full of sheep; the valleys also shall stand so thick with corn, that they shall laugh and sing.

From John 15:11:

I have told you these things so that My joy may be in you and your joy may be complete.

(références: Arcana Coelestia 1153 [2]; Divine Providence 37)

37. 4. The more closely we are united to the Lord, the happier we become. We can say much the same about levels of happiness as was said above (32 and 34) about levels of life and wisdom that depend on our union with the Lord. These times of happiness, bliss, and sheer delight intensify as the higher levels of our minds are opened within us, the levels we call spiritual and heavenly. Once our life on earth is over, these levels keep rising forever.

630. "And worship Him who made heaven and earth, the sea and springs of water." This symbolically means that the Lord alone is to be worshiped, because He alone is the Creator, Savior, and Redeemer, and because the angelic heaven and the church and everything in them originate from Him alone.

To worship means, symbolically, to acknowledge as holy, as may be seen in nos. 579, 580, 588, 603 above. Consequently, when said in reference to the Lord, to worship means, symbolically, to acknowledge as God of heaven and earth and to worship. To make heaven and earth, the sea and springs of water, in the natural sense means to create them, but in the spiritual sense it symbolically means to form the angelic heaven and the church and everything in them. For heaven symbolizes, in the spiritual sense, the angelic heaven; the earth and the sea symbolize in that sense the internal church and the external church (nos. 403, 404, 420, 470); and springs of water symbolize all the Word's truths that serve the church for its doctrine and life (no. 409).

[2] The Creator, Jehovah, is the Lord from eternity, and the Savior and Redeemer is the Lord born in time, thus the Lord in respect to His Divine humanity, as can be seen from beginning to end in The Doctrine of the New Jerusalem Regarding the Lord.

Who cannot understand that one God is the creator of the universe, and that there are not three creators? And that creation has as its goal a heaven and church from the human race? (On which subject see Angelic Wisdom Regarding Divine Providence, nos. 27-45.) So it is that in the spiritual sense to make heaven and the earth means, symbolically, to form the angelic heaven and the church.

This is said for the same reason as in no. 613 above, where we explain what is symbolically meant by having the name of the Father written on their foreheads. And because that was said there, therefore it says here, "worship Him who made heaven and earth, the sea and springs of water."