“When Christian theology says that God is good,
it is not the same as saying that He is righteous or holy. The holiness of God
is trumpeted from the heavens and re-echoed on earth by saints and sages
wherever God has revealed Himself to men; however, we are not at the time
considering His holiness but His goodness, which is quite another thing.
The goodness of God is that which disposes Him
to be kind, cordial, benevolent, and full of good will toward men. He is
tenderhearted and of quick sympathy, and His unfailing attitude toward all
moral beings is open, frank, and friendly. By His nature He is inclined to
bestow blessedness and He takes holy pleasure in the happiness of His people.
[The reality] that God is good is taught or
implied on every page of the Bible and must be received as an article of faith
as impregnable as the throne of God. It is a foundation stone for all sound
thought about God and is necessary to moral sanity. To allow that God could be
other than good is to deny the validity of all thought and end in the negation
of every moral judgment. If God is not good, then there can be no distinction
between kindness and cruelty, and heaven can be hell and hell, heaven.
The goodness of God is the drive behind all the
blessings He daily bestows upon us. God created us because He felt good in His
heart and He redeemed us for the same reason.” (Tozer, Knowledge of the Holy, p. 82)
The first two years after school for me were some of the most
challenging years of my life. Everything seemed to go wrong: from struggles in
relationships/friendships to personal and family illness to heartache in my
job. It was one of those times where, perpetually, nothing seemed to be going right. I was in a pit of despair, and my
cheeks were frequently tear-stained.
They were two of the darkest years of my life, circumstantially.
They were also two of the most intimate years I’ve had with my
Savior.
I wrestled and I fought and I cried a lot. I was forced to
cry out to God and ask Him where He was and to wrestle with the Truth I was reading in Scripture when it wasn’t
adding up in my life/circumstances. It was so painful, and yet so beautiful.
It’s a longer story than what I can share here, and maybe one day
you and I will be getting coffee and I can tell you of God’s faithfulness in my life - how His hand
was in it all as I was weeping on my living room floor and asking, God, do you see me?
But I’d rather share with you right now the reality of God’s
character. In the trials, in the pain, in the fire, and in the storms of that
year, I learned this to be true: God is Good.
God is Good in spite of my circumstances. God is Good in spite of
what He has given me. God is Good in spite of how good I try to be on my own. In the darkness, in the fog of tears and
frustration, in the pain that was in my heart, I had to cling to what I knew to
be true. Even in my questioning, by God’s grace, I chose to trust His Goodness.
To believe it even when it didn’t feel
true.
I’m so glad I did.
Psalm 62 says, “You only are my rock and my salvation, my fortress,
I will not be shaken.”
In my moments of doubt and unbelief and through open wounds, I
continually chose to believe that verse and to say, God, if You’re who You say You are, I know I can trust you to be Good.
By marrying myself to God’s goodness, my life didn’t magically get
better. In fact, at the deepest point where I was, about a year in, I still had
a challenging climb “out” and a lot of healing that needed to happen ahead. I
say climb, but really, I felt like I
was coasting. I felt like I was drifting among winds of carelessness from God.
But as I’ve grown and as I’ve healed, and now as I’ve spent a year
apart from that time and apart from that heartache, I can see that God was
working. That He really was Good like I had trusted.
And while circumstances now have certainly been “Good” around me, I
have this deep appreciation even more for God’s
Goodness. It would be easy now to claim
how Good God is since things are going so well.
But I’ve
seen the other side, and so it’s deeper.
Yes, God is Good. But God is Good in spite of my circumstances. In
spite of all that is Good around me. God is Good in my sin and my shame. God is
Good in my achievements and in my blessings. God is Good in my fun, and God is
Good in my hurt. God is Good in spite of
it all.
Wherever you are today, will you look to God’s Goodness? Will you
wrestle with Him like I did? Or will you choose to see His Goodness apart from
the good stuff He’s given you? If
you’ve experienced God’s goodness in some area of your life, I’d love to hear! Leave a comment below and let’s join in
being able to praise Him for it.