From theologian Dallas Willard:
We should, to begin with, think that God leads a very interesting life, and that he is full of joy. Undoubtedly he is the most joyous being in the universe. The abundance of his love and generosity is inseparable from his infinite joy.
. . . We are enraptured by a well-done movie sequence or by a few bars from an opera or lines from a poem. We treasure our great experiences for a lifetime, and we may have very few of them. But he [God] is simply one great inexhaustible and eternal experience of all that is good and true and beautiful and right. [1]
In the words above, Willard gets as close as I’ve ever seen anyone get to explaining the joy that God has promised us. To be in the direct presence of God in the life to come will be to stand in this experience of all that is good and true and beautiful and right. We will be in a place where the sorrows and pains of this world will fall away in the presence of the perfect being, the God we sometimes refer to by the name of Love Divine.
[1] Dallas Willard, The Divine Conspiracy: Rediscovering Our Hidden Life In God (New York: Harper One, 1997), Kindle Edition, 72-73.