God is good.
No, no; wait—stay with me a moment. You nod and manage a pathetic smile as your attention shifts somewhere else. But do you understand what I just said? He is good.
Okay, now you heard me. But now that I have your attention, you give me a guarded look, barely concealing a lifetime of hurt and disillusionment in your eyes. I know; too many of us can relate to you. We have heard it all before. We grew up singing ‘God is so good…’ with all the other little Sunday school pupils. But now we have seen too much pain, too much heartache. We struggle to put that together with the idea of a good God.
For some of us, this means backing away from this God, heart bleeding with the sting of betrayal. You said you loved us, we force out in a hoarse whisper. You promised peace and joy and protection. So what is this? How could You punish anyone, if You are good? So we decide He isn’t, and refuse to let Him near.
What a small picture of God we hang on the wall of our mind! It is as if we have a picture of a pine forest, and cannot bring ourselves to believe that the picture of a rock cliff could actually be part of the same mountain. Oh, but if we only knew how far He exceeds our greatest imagination, we would throw away our little picture frame and stop trying to fit Him into it.
He is not a tame lion, as C.S. Lewis so beautifully put it; but He is good. Ps. 145:9 says, “The LORD is good to all: and his tender mercies are over all his works.” Everything He does, even the things that seem harsh or cruel from our puny vantage point, are done out of His goodness and governed by His tender mercies. And when we begin to see ourselves—how dirty and deserving of punishment we are because we have rebelled against the Almighty, Holy, Righteous Judge who created us and told us how to live and promised all His good to us if we would obey—we see that He is not cruel or unjust at all, and we marvel at the great lengths He took in order to save us from what we deserve. Over and over throughout history, God has given us another chance; but over and over, we have disobeyed and refused the blessing that He offers. Because of our sin, we are separated from this Good God.
But He yearns for us, longs to have compassion on us. He chose to pay Himself the extravagant price for our ransom, and so broke down that wall of separation. If we doubt His goodness, we need only to look at the cross to be silenced. Jesus is not a contradiction of justice and mercy; He is the fullness of both, the essence of beauty, and the embodiment of love. Incredible freedom comes when we simply give Him our confusion and disillusionment and let Him define Himself.
“O taste and see that the LORD is good; How blessed is the man who takes refuge in Him!” (Ps. 34:8) Lift up your eyes and dare to look on His face, and you will soon join the chorus of praise that the whole earth and universe has been shouting, singing, whispering, and proclaiming since the beginning of time:
God is good!
