When God Laughs
April 23, 2017
"The wicked plots against the righteous and gnashes his teeth at him, but the Lord laughs at the wicked, for he sees that his day is coming." (Psalm 37:11-13 ESV)
This laughter of God is a paradox.
We do not wish to fashion an anthropomorphic God. We are created in God's image, not His in ours.
He embodies and exudes all emotions that we experience partially. He experiences them perfectly and paradoxically. He is the God in whom love and wrath, laughter and tears, smiles and frowns can coexist and come to completion simultaneously for He dwells in a realm of simultaneous, eternal, "nowness."
And there is tragic humor in the whole business of human plots to disrupt His ultimate purposes.
They are the essence of slapstick. It is not that He enjoys our pain, but that He sees the irony of our arrogance and it stirs that perfect emotion in Him that we experience imperfectly as poetic justice.
And here is another reflection in the matter:
"Deep in my soul I heard the laughter of God ringing in silvery cadences through the timbers of my being, breaking the human bonds and limitation as a strong yet gentle wind in the forest sweeping aside the strands of cobweb. The hard, fast knots that I had tried, slipped loose, and the snarls of beliefs broke free. The river of my human life, frozen by a thousand and one false ideas and teachings, broke joyously into expression and went bounding to the infinite sea of Life, to be lost and found at the same time. One dark cave of fear after another was illuminated by the light of this laughter and swampy areas of sick thoughts were dried up instantly. Parched sands of hopelessness and futile efforts were drenched by the living waters sucked in—absorbed instantly like a wave breaking on the sands. God laughing at me and my puny efforts to make things happen; to make heaven appear; to attain the son-ship.
"Not the laugh of derision, but of infinite compassion—a laughter so deep and sweet, so pure and glorious that every thing in the nature of struggle gave way before it."- Walter Lanyon, "The Laughter of God"