God is Good

Some consider the idea that “God is” to be the ultimate leap of faith. Others say that it’s the death and resurrection of Jesus or that they can’t get past the idea that God created and governs the entire universe. These all require faith, but the ultimate leap of faith, to my mind, is that God is good.

Consider the following passage,

See now that I, even I, am he, And there is no god beside me: I kill, and I make alive; I wound, and I heal; And there is none that can deliver out of my hand. (Deuteronomy 32:39)

Whatever struggle we may have with “There is only one God” (1 Corinthians 8:6), it pales in comparison to the struggle we are likely to have with the declaration above.

We like to soften the blow of this monumental reality by saying, God allows this or that. But Hannah makes no such allowances.

The Lord kills and makes alive; He brings down to Sheol and He raises up. The Lord makes poor and He makes rich; He brings low and He exalts. (1 Samuel 2:6-7)

And neither did Jesus,

Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? And not one of them will fall to the ground apart from your Father. (Matthew 10:29)

How can a good God kill, or wound, or bring down to poverty? Yet the Bible affirms that God does all these things and that He is good—and we are called to believe it.

Everyone has reasons not to believe this.

Sparrows often meet their death in horrible circumstances. People experience unimaginable brutality at the hands of wicked men. They are impoverished, destitute, grieving and suffering in a multitude of ways.

Many things come along to test our faith, but let’s be honest. This truth, that God is good, can make or break that faith.

The interesting thing is that it’s often those who have suffered the worst who come out of that suffering deciding at that same time that this was the hand of God, and that God is good. Job is an example of this (Job 2:10).

Job chose to believe in the goodness of God and act in the service of that good, despite the evidence and despite his experience. He could have come out of this a bitter man and decided to act in the service of hate, revenge and despair, but he came out of it a wiser and happier man.

If you believe this world is a self-regulating machine and that life is merely an accident of time and chance, then bitterness and despair are totally understandable. But if all of life is regulated by a good God, then we have hope. We have hope because we have an Advocate. We have somewhere to go to make our appeal (Job 16:19).

Job was not alone in this. We have stories from the Gulag Archipelago and the death camps of World War II of those who came out of the experience with faith in a good God despite the horror.

Viktor Frankl, writing on the Nazi death camps, noted that the same proportion of those who went into the death camps as either atheists or believers came out as atheists or believers. Some atheists became believers, and some believers became atheists, but the proportions remain the same. Why?

The difference, it would seem to me, is not what they experienced, for they all experienced the same horror. The difference appears to be in the way they responded to the horror. Notably, those who adopted a quiet defiance to the tyranny (they refused to compromise their moral compass) coupled with humility (they believed in the goodness of God, despite the circumstances. cf. Job 42:1-3).

The preeminent example of this is Jesus of Nazareth.

Jesus is what you get when you take the best, the purest, the most innocent, the most humble of men, and do to Him the worst that man could possibly do. More than that, what God had Himself determined to do (Isaiah 53:10).

Without adjusting His compass or His conscience, Jesus submitted to the worst brutality and yet entered the grave believing that God is good. And He came out of the grave believing that God is good.

And perhaps, as far as is humanly possible for us to understand, this is the key. Were it not for the hope of the resurrection (Job 19:25) and the hope of eternal life, we might well wonder whether God is good. But the resurrection of Jesus through suffering teaches us that God is not only good but is taking us through the suffering in order to land us someplace good.

Some place so unimaginably good that it is worth the suffering He might call us to endure in order that we might receive the mercy and inherit the life everlasting He promises.