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"HOLY" LAUGHTER AND THE BIBLE

The following is from an article "Holy Laughter or Strong Delusion" by Warren Smith of the Spiritual Counterfeits Project:

Last summer, after watching Rodney Howard-Browne on TBN I consulted my concordance to see if there was any biblical precedent for "holy" laughter. Surprisingly, I found only 40 references to laughter in the Bible--34 of them were in the Old Testament, while only six were in the New Testament. Of those 40 references 22 referred to scornful laughter--as in Nehemiah 2:19. Nehemiah said, "They laughed us to scorn."

Of the 18 remaining references to laughter, seven referred exclusively to Abraham and Sarah's initial disbelief and ultimate astonishment that God would give them a child in their old age.

Barely into my study on laughter and I was already down to my last 11 references.

In Job 8:21 Bildad, one of Job's false comforters, wrongly advised Job that if he were in right standing with God he would be prosperous and full of laughter. The Psalmist in Psalm 126:2 recorded that when the captivity of Zion was over, "then was our mouth filled with laughter and our tongue with singing." Proverbs 29:9 says, "If a wise man contendeth with a foolish man, whether he rage or laugh, there is no rest."

With only eight references remaining I had seen nothing in the Bible up to this point that suggested anything even resembling "holy laughter. In Ecclesiastes 2:2 Solomon says, "I said of laughter, it is mad." Ecclesiastes 3:4 says, there is "a time to weep and a time to laugh; a time to mourn and a time to dance." Ecclesiastes 7:3-4 says "sorrow is better than laughter; for by the sadness of the countenance the heart is made better. The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning; but the heart of fools is in the house of mirth." Ecclesiastes 7:6 says, "for as the crackling of thorns under a pot, so is the laughter of a fool; this also is vanity." Ecclesiastes 10:19 says that "a feast is made for laughter, and wine maketh merry."

Interestingly the Bible's last three references to laughter--the only three references to authentic laughter in the New Testament--warn against laughter. These three references actually seemed to underline Solomon's contention in Ecclesiastes that "sorrow is better than laughter" and that now is a time to weep and not to laugh. In Luke 6:21 Jesus says, "blessed are ye that weep now; for ye shall laugh." In Luke 6:25 Jesus says, "woe unto you that laugh now! for ye shall mourn and weep." James 4:9 tells us not to laugh but to "be afflicted, and mourn, and weep: let your laughter be turned to mourning, and your joy to heaviness."

I had searched the scriptures to find any biblical precedent for "holy" laughter and there was none. To my amazement, I had discovered that there were surprisingly few references in the Bible to any kind of laughter, period. Did this mean that God doesn't have a sense of humor or that people in the Bible never laughed? No. It just means that laughter apparently wasn't something that God chose to emphasize very much. And certainly Jesus' last words on laughter--"woe unto you who laugh now!"--were not ones that would seem to give any encouragement to a "laughing revival" (Warren Smith, "Holy Laughter or Strong Delusion").