Is God Good All the Time?
It’s typically the first question that a person must come to terms with in their pursuit of the eternal: Is God good? In wrestling with that issue, other questions usually comes to mind and they usually surround our circumstances, the good, the bad, and the ugly. It’s easy to proclaim God’s goodness when things are going well in our lives and in the lives of those we love, but what about those seasons in our lives when things seemingly fall apart? Who is God in those moments of our lives?
Over the last two years, the scripture that I’ve struggled and wrestled with the most is found in the book of James. In chapter 1 verse 2, James writes, “Count it all joy, when you fall into various trials….” The warning here is clear: we will have trials and struggles, we will face pain, disappointment, and grief.
Wait! That doesn’t sound very “good” to me.
Everyone reading this post has stories of difficulties, pain, and suffering. We all have them. For some of us it’s relationship issues, for others it may be financial, and for yet others, it’s loss of some sort, or, for many, it’s a combination of all of the above. However, every day we face new problems, terrible circumstances, and difficult decisions.
Consequently, it’s hard not to measure God’s goodness based on our personal experience and perception of His faithfulness. This is the tricky part of focusing on the “hand of God.” We need to recognize His faithfulness in our lives, but our humanity tends to be a foggy lens and a dirty filter.
When I stop to take account of my life, I can easily see the MANY moments where He has been faithful in my life and I’m rightly encouraged to focus on these things. He has been faithful to me. But there have been many seasons and moments where I’ve questioned where God was in my pain. Unfortunately, the good and the bad tend to become convoluted in our attempts to understand these questions. When that happens, our faith can, many times, be what suffers.
When God’s faithfulness becomes our measure of His goodness we are in jeopardy of losing the truth. As significant as His faithfulness is, it is not the basis or the foundation of His goodness. We should never equate His goodness with His hand, His goodness is only truly seen when we seek His face. His hand represents the outpouring, the overflow of His goodness, but His face is who He is! His goodness, therefore, is not represented by what He has done for us, but, rather, by who He is. He IS good. Apart from God, goodness does not exist. When we come to that realization in our lives, we can then say, “God is good, but this is not.”
This perspective then puts our “joy” as James wrote, squarely on our decision to believe in who HE IS. That’s why James chose the word “Count it” (or “consider it” in some translations). In the Greek, it’s the word “hegiomai” which means “to lead or govern.” We lead ourselves into joy WHEN we have moments that make us question God’s faithfulness, knowing that He is good, all the time, regardless of our circumstances.
Why is this important? For the past two years as our family has struggled through loss and grief, we have also struggled to hold on to our faith. We’ve had to answer the questions of “why?” and “how could You let this happen?” If our faith was not grounded in the understanding that He IS good, our walk with the Lord would have been overtaken by our grief, anger, and disappointment. This is why it’s called faith – “Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the assurance of things not seen.” (Hebrews 11)
Martin Luther once wrote, “This is true faith, a living confidence in the goodness of God.” When we are constantly associating God’s goodness with the things we see, we are not walking in faith – we’re looking for God to prove Himself to us through our circumstances. It’s when we choose to believe, have faith, that God IS good, that we can push through the storms in life and lay down next to Jesus in the stern of the boat and rest, knowing that He is good and He will get us to where we are supposed to go – in the midst of the pain, the disappointment, and the grief. It’s important to note that Jesus did not calm the seas when Peter stepped out onto the water. Peter didn’t just walk on water, he walked on water IN THE STORM and IN THE MIDST OF THE WAVES!
God has called us to walk on water – even when the storms are raging – I would go as far as to say, ESPECIALLY in the storms. As Myles Munroe wrote, “Your faith is only as strong as the crisis it survives.” These are testing moments to see if we will trust in who HE IS and not just in what He does.
It comes down to what we are pursuing. If we are pursuing His hand, we will find His goodness difficult to hold on to, but when we seek his face, we come to KNOW Him and His goodness. It’s in those moments of pursuit that we begin to understand, even in our darkest days, that, “We don’t have the capacity to exaggerate God’s goodness. We can distort it or misrepresent it, but we can never exaggerate it.” (Bill Johnson)
Peace.
