The Goodness of God and Conditional Belief
Do we believe God is good only when He does what we want? Lately I’ve been pondering this question and the concept of conditional belief. How often my lips whisper, “I know I can trust you,” when my mind conjures, if you give me what I prayed for. In fact, I find the simple trust a child inherently has difficult for me to practice.
I think we can all relate, on some level, to conditional belief, the concept that God is good if He provides, protects, or produces.
Yet what if God doesn’t heal your beloved or the mortgage money never materializes? What if you lose your job, get stuck in one you abhor, or fail to pass that test to qualify for another?
What if you’ve suffered as a child? Was God’s goodness temporarily suspended? No, God is good whether you had a miserable childhood or made cookies with flour-patted hands.
My husband and I have just endured six months of suspended hope as a short sale venture teetered on the brink of crumbling. In fact, we’ve been living out of boxes for a month. During this time of patience stretching, we’ve moved along a gamut of emotions from elation to despair and then frustration to anger. When the second extension deadline loomed, we wrestled with releasing what we wanted so intensely.
So when a dream woke me up in the middle of the night, I paid special attention to the message.
In the dream, two nail-like spikes, aged and rusty like the ones driven through the wrists of Jesus when he was nailed to the cross, were driven into a beam of wood. As I looked at the nails, one fell over to the right and the other fell over to the left, yet neither nail was bent in the process.
The dream jolted me awake, and so I jotted the it down and then fell back to sleep.
The next morning, I shared the dream with my husband, “Here’s something for you to chew on today.”
After I explained the imagery, he said, “Maybe our house is going to fall through.”
Then, to my surprise, I found these words tumbling out of my mouth, “Maybe the only sure thing in this life is the Lord.”
We both sighed and mustered the grace to let our dream die. Ironically, that’s when the call came: “The house closed escrow.”
It was as if God handed our dream back to us. And yet, we realized there would be a whole lot of other times when the dream would not return.
So this morning I remember this truth, God is good, and His goodness doesn’t depend upon Him giving us what we think we want or need.
He’s good whether marriages crumble or children perish.
He’s good when pastors are unethical and parishioners cruel.
He’s good when bills don’t get paid or job offers fall through.
He’s good when cupboards are bare and students shuffle to school in threadbare clothes.
God’s goodness is inherent, and I’ve been thinking a lot about God’s inherent goodness, a goodness that stands impenetrable, unfathomable, untouched by our human condition. A goodness that exists even though we may end up like Job with nothing, a goodness that endures beyond the temporal and beyond our disappointments, suffering or sadness. Our faith need not rest on whether or not we get His gifts. What a relief!
Yes, God’s goodness existed back before we were in our mothers’ bellies and will continue after our earthly bodies become dust. His goodness is eternal and the very foundation for our belief…a belief that can be unconditional because He is unconditionally good.
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