Laughter comes in many forms, but the "Laughter of Sadness" is no laughing matter as we will see today. There are Tears of Joy and Tears of utter sadness as well.
I. GOD’S SENSE OF HUMOR
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God has a great sense of humor and He laughs too! As we can see when the Lord God told Abraham that he and Sarah would have a child in their old age; Sarah even thought it to be ridiculous. So much so that she laughed. Look at Sarah’s reaction upon being told this from Gensis 21:6:
"And Sarah said, God hath made me to laugh, so that all that hear will laugh with me."
I think I would have laughed too, if I was their age and thought it impossible. It reminds me of the time when the Lord told me not to do something that I had done many times before. This one particular day,
the curtain in my dining room decided to fall down, as it had done on one or two other occassions before. I always had a particular chair that I used to put it back up, because it was the most solid of chairs I had.
As I went to get up on the chair to fix the curtain, my daughter says, "Mom, don’t do that, you will fall." I told her she was being ridiculous and over protective. I once again went to get on the chair and I heard the voice of the Lord say, "Don’t do that! Listen to your daughter." I thought "this is silly" and the curtain needed fixing and that was all I
had to stand on. So I did. No sooner had I done that, when the entire chair collapsed and went over and boy, did I get bruised ! I heard the Lord laugh and my daughter laugh and say, "I told you so!" in unison! As
painful as the fall was, I found myself laughing too! I was laughing at myself for not listening to them, as I am sure they were; but also at the sight of me sitting on the floor in a heap! That is when I learned
of God’s great humor and that I should listen to him better than I had.
There are other reasons the Lord laughs as well and some are on the more serious side. Let’s take a look at Psalms 2:4: "He that sitteth in the heavens shall laugh; the Lord shall have them in derision." What does this mean? What the verse is saying is that all those who mock, ridicule and deny the Lord and repent not,it is the Lord will have the last laugh on them. Why. Because the Lord, your God has extended His
Grace and Mercy to the end of days and they will, for the most part, receive it not. When the Antichrist shows up on the scene, which is very soon, God will confound the people of the earth and they will will
believe that the antichrist is their "Savior". I suppose if you look at it from the human perspective, it is God who will have the "last laugh" on man and satan. After all the warnings, all the miracles and all the extensions of His grace and mercy and people still refusing to repent; it is God who will laugh and say "I warned you, I told you so and I Showed you, yet you refused to listen and obey. As we look in the next verse from Psalms 37:13 this coincides with what
has been said above.
"The LORD shall laugh at him: for he seeth that his day is coming." The Lord knows that his day is coming and coming very soon, indeed. We are in the end-times and those who choose to remain blind to it are the
ones who are going to pay the penalty for it. He is laughing at the pride, self-love, boastfulness and the lust of the world in the hearts of man because thay have chosen the world and all it’s content over Him.
They have continiously denied Him, called Him and His Word a myth and yet have chosen the world and/or satan over Him. Why is it the can believe in satan, yet find God so hard to believe in? If you believe in Satan and he is an unseen force, then why not God, for He is unseen as well? When I say unseen, I mean in their own form. God can be seen in the Light and form of His true Children and faithful followers by how they radiate His Light and Love. Much the same can be said of satan, but only in the reverse. Satan and his followers walk in darkness and only radiate Hate and Darkness. When The Lord returns, the sheer look upon
those who denied and doubted Him will be one that will cause the Lord to laugh, because those who rejected Him will have a look of total amazement and shock upon their faces.In Psalms 59:8 we are reminded again of this and how the Lord will laugh at all the unbelievers. "But thou, O LORD, shalt laugh at them; thou shalt have all the heathen in derision." I think that we can surely count on the Lord to laugh and have a great sense of humor in all kinds of situations, that even we often find ourselves in.
The Laughter of Sadness & Sorrow
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God’s laugh is not always one of joy or happiness or even humor; sometimes it is a laugh of sadness. What do I man by that? Imagine yourself in a bad or tragic situation - you can’t cry or get angry and you, for some strange reason burst out in laughter. This is true of the Lord. There are times that he has cried so much over his children, that the only thing left in him is laughter. This is the laughter of pain, sorrow and heartbreak. It is the "Laughter of Sadness". The laughter of sadness comes when you have cried all you can cry, have been as mad as you can be and as frustrated as you can get and there is no other
emotion that can act as a release valve for what you are feeling. This is also true in other emotions and it can be the "frustration of sadness or pain" being the only emotion that you haven’t used up, thus causing
you to express what you feel thru frustration in the form of laughter rather than tears.
Don’t you think that even God can get "all cried out" over how His children behave and how They treat His Great Sacrifice of Love, still after all these Eons? If anyone should be all cried out..it is He who
sits upon the Throne in Heaven. His laughter of sadness is more of pain and sorrow and love. What I mean by that is simply this, The Lord hurts as much, if not more than we do, when child after child that he created out of Love and for a purpose, denies Him, curses Him and Blasphemes Him. No Loving parent should have to cry over His/Her child like that - Especially the Lord and His Father. He greated all things in Love and what has that love which was created in - done? It has slapped God in the Face, Caused the Sacrifice of His beloved Son, Jesus,cursed, denied and been unrepentant. He is our Parent. Would you do that to your earthly parents? Have you done that to your earthly parents? Are you a Parent that has cried over your child? Then you should know and understand that God does too and so does His son. The "Laughter of
Sadness" is no laughing matter. The Lord hurts bigger than we do because we are all His children and we number in the millions. He needs to be loved as well. We need to Stop hurting Him and His Father and just start loving him and obeying His commandments. He needs our Worship. He needs our Worship and Praise! He needs our obedience and He needs to Know that we love Him!
GOD’S GIFT OF LAUGHTER TO US
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God’s Gift of Laughter give us an ability to help us over come adversity and scorn. Let us look at Job 41:29 - "Darts are counted as stubble: he laugheth at the shaking of a spear." And again at:Psalms 22:7 - "All they that see me laugh me to scorn: they shoot out the lip, they shake the head," Here The Lord points out that even though we are scorned, mocked and
ridiculed, we can take it with a "grain of salt" and laugh about it and go on. The Verbal darts they throw at us become nothing more than the stubble of a beard upon a man’s face and cause no harm. When spears of
hate and contempt are tossed our way and we do not retaliate they give up and we can only laugh at their foolishness and vain attempts to cause us harm or pain.
In the next verse we see that as the Children of God and his true followers we have been endowed with an ability to laugh at our enemies for their feeble attempts at inflicting injury or harm to us. PSALMS 52:6 - "The righteous also shall see, and fear, and shall laugh at him:" The laughter of Gladness is another gift of laughter that we have been given. This gift of laughter comes in the forms of joy. Why? Because of all the great things He hath done for us. Jesus doesn’ want us to be always sad or unhappy or even serious. Sometimes we laugh and the tears come with it because we laugh so hard. The Lord wants us to be Filled with joy and happiness, that can only be found in our relationshsip with Him. Take a look at this verse: PSALMS 126:2 - "Then was our mouth filled with laughter, and our tongue with singing: then said they among the heathen, The LORD hath done great things for them. When we have our complete faith and trust in the Lord, we can overcome anything. We can laugh at a calamity or fear. When we do that it helps
us to avoid the pitfalls of being depressed and here again we have the ability to take whatever comes along with a "grain of salt". In Proverbs 1:26, it says:
"I also will laugh at your calamity; I will mock when your fear cometh;" My grandmother used to say that
"laughter was the medicine for the soul." She was Right!
Sometimes Sorrow is Better
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Sometimes sorrow is better than laughter, because we need to cry. "Tears or crying is sometimes good for the soul." It is a release valve for what we feel as I explained above. When we lose someone we love, we cry
out of grief. We realize that we will never see them come thru our door again on this earth; but somewhere in all that sorrow and all those tears we realize that the one remaining hope we have is that we shall "see them in Heaven" one day. Let us look at Proverbs 14:13:
"Even in laughter the heart is sorrowful; and the end of that mirth is heaviness." Here we see that sometimes when we laugh it covers the sorrow that we
feel. This is a reaction that as the verse says will end in heaviness.
That heaviness will show up in us and in our hearts, when we can’t cry. Until we do finally cry,and that heaviness is finally released with all the sorrow with it only then we can begin to heal and get past our
grief. In the next verse from Ecclesiastes 7:3, we see the end result of shedding tears in our sorrow. Tears are one of the healers of the spirit, mind and body.
"Sorrow is better than laughter: for by the sadness of the countenance the heart is made better." If we couldn’t cry all that pain and sorrow, grief and emotional hurt we feel would stay "bottled up" inside us and eventually express it outwardly in a negative way that may very well harm us or others. The tears we shed is the "Healer of the Heart (Spirit)".
UNDERSTANDING LAUGHTER
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Next, let us take a look at Eccelesiastes 2:2,"I said of laughter, It is mad: and of mirth, What doeth it?"
Laughter can sometimes be the best medicine for what ails us, but so can the tears. Laughter can bring us joy and make the heart merry. What laughter does is make light of life and give us a better perspective of
things when we have calmed down from it. Laughter brings a light in what seeminly is a "dark moment" in our lives and laughter teaches us how to laugh at the unexpected things that come into our lives so we can deal with them or take them with a "grain of salt". Sometimes we can laugh so hard at ourselves we see the problem that we were facing really isn’t so bad. If we can laugh at our own folly we can deal with anything.
THE FOLLY OF SOME LAUGHTER
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There is another kind of laughter. It is called the "folly of laughter". In Ecclesiastes 7:6 we see that the laughter of the fool is vanity. These are the gloaters and vain lovers of themselves and their
possessions that cruely laugh and mock others who may not be as "fortunate" as they seem to be. In the end they will repa what they sow and when the tables are turned on them and they are laught at or mocked, it will not be so funny anymore. "For as the crackling of thorns under a pot, so is the laughter of the fool: this also is vanity."
When Laughter Turns to Sorrow
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Finally. let us look at the "laughter that will turn to Sorrow" In the final days before the second coming of Jesus to reign and rule for a thousand years, much of the fool-hardy laughter of mocking God and His
children will turn to mourning and weeping. The rapture will turn families left behind from ones who laugh into one who will morn.The tribulation and Great Tribulation will turn the ones who are laughing now and saying "God is a myth, He doesn’t exist" into mourners and weepers. When they are afllicted by the Plagues of God’s wrath, they will no longer laugh but shed the tears of pain and beg for a death that will not come. Look at Luke 6:25 and James 4:9: (6:25)"Woe unto you that are full! for ye shall hunger. Woe unto you that laugh now! for ye shall mourn and weep." (4:9) "Be afflicted, and mourn, and weep: let your laughter be turned to mourning, and your joy to heaviness." Unless you repent of your sinful ways this will be your fate. No more will you laugh. No more will you mock God and His children, for all you will have is suffering of great proportion until you change and realize that there is only One God of us all and finally accept His gift of Salvation. The Decision is yours and I pray that you will not wait until it is too late.
