God's Goodness…

Talking to a refugee who just received an answer to prayer, I said, “God is good” and he replied, “All the time.” No matter what the circumstances, no matter if we like what is happening, no matter if we are comfortable, God is good all the time.

Charnock’s section on God's goodness is long and rich. He lays out his reasoning from Scripture and experience. For example, because God is good, we may expect His instruction:

Good and upright is the Lord; therefore he instructs sinners in the way. (Psalm 25:8)
Teach me to do your will, for you are my God! Let your good Spirit lead me on level ground! (Psalm 143:10)

More astonishing is that because God is good, He removes the punishment due our sin, and bestows benefits not due to our merits. Grace always runs downhill.

For you, O Lord, are good and forgiving, abounding in steadfast love to all who call upon you. (Psalm 86:5)

His goodness is more ready to forgive than our necessities make us desire to enjoy it. Job impatient in his suffering cursed the day of his birth, but God's goodness passed that over in silence, extols him for speaking the thing that is right, and then charges his friends for not speaking of him the thing that is right (Job 42:7).

As His Word says, “His eyes are upon the righteous, and his ears are open to their cry” (Psalm 34:15) because He fixes His goodness upon His people, is pleased to behold us, and listen to us as if He has no pleasure in anything else. He loves to pour out goodness to those who seek Him, and the more I do that, the more He pours out His generous goodness.

 I can get tired of those who often want something from me, but God is not like that. His goodness is bottomless while I might discourage others to go elsewhere. With God, I don’t need to fear that I will waste His goodness or that He will get tired of giving it. 

 The startling reality is that the oftener and nearer I come to him, the more of His goodness I experience, just like the nearer the sun, the more I feel its heat. This encourages me to keep coming, to keep praying, to keep experiencing more of Him.

The Lord is good, a stronghold in the day of trouble; he knows those who take refuge in him. (Nahum 1:7)

He extends goodness to all, yet much more to those who take refuge in Him. Not only that, if the whole earth were filled with His goodness, that part in heaven will never be emptied. I’m blessed just thinking of what that tells me about Him, never mind the wonder of experiencing it.

God’s goodness delivers the righteous, and His justice puts the wicked in their place: “The righteous is delivered from trouble, and the wicked walks into it instead.” (Proverbs 11:8) This means that if my enemies (the world, the flesh, and the devil) overpower me, He gives to them the same treatment they tried to give me. Truly the Lord is my Refuge and Deliverer. 

The Lord’s goodness is above any of my efforts to be good. As Charnock says, we are at best shallow streams, whereas God is like a teeming ocean that can fill the largest as well as the narrowest creek. Several creatures answer several necessities, but our one God can answer all our wants. He is a universal fulness to fill our universal emptiness. He has the sweetness of all good while we have a small measure that vanishes when we cease to exist. Nothing or no one can rob God of His goodness. He is the same forever and ever.

PRAY: All this is more motivation to seek You, Lord. There is no other goodness worthy of my supreme love, no other goodness worthy my deepest thirst. How can I express the hunger created in my heart as You reveal to me the wonder of You? Not only are You the greatest good, You desire to grant that goodness to a sinner such as I. What a great blessing to receive Your great goodness and grace.

 

Who is good?

 

I tease people who respond to “How are you?” with “I’m good” because good describes behavior. A better answer is “I am well.” Most chuckle and agree. Last week another person agreed when I added that Jesus said, “There is no one good but God.”

Today, I’m reading Charnock’s section on God’s goodness. Pilate said to Jesus, “What is truth?” Another question could have been, “What is good?” Charnock is just beginning to tell me and I am struck by two verses. The first says:

I say to the Lord, “You are my Lord; I have no good apart from you.” (Psalm 16:2)

How true. He, through the power of the Holy Spirit and the circumstances of life, continually shows me that I’ve no goodness without Him. Yet there is a question in my mind; what is goodness? The dictionary uses words like desired, approved of, morally right, yet the Bible speaks of the sovereign God as good, totally and completely, even though He seems at times to ignore evil, or not answer prayer for desired and morally right things. Does that mean that God has a different definition than Oxford?

Charnock offers thought-provoking ideas. To summarize, he writes that God is no less all-good than He is almighty and all-knowing... He is so good that there is no mixture of anything which can be called not good in him… Nothing can be so evil as God is good… He is only good, without capacity of increase; He is all good, and unmixedly good; none good but God: a goodness, like the sun, that has all light and no darkness… He is the supreme and chief goodness… He can no more act contrary to this goodness in any of His actions, than He can un-God himself. It is not necessary that God should create a world; He was at his own choice whether He would create or no; but when He resolves to make a world, it is necessary that He should make it good, because He is goodness itself, and cannot act against His own nature.

Try to imagine what creation would look like if God were not good. The world would be filled with only  murderous, ravenous, injurious creatures, a bedlam and heap of confusion totally inconsistent to Divine goodness and wisdom. Not only that, any lack of goodness would ruin the possibility of Him being beneficial to His creatures, not that we would merit it, but would not have any hope to receive His grace and mercy or any other beneficial goodness. 

I would have no reason to acknowledge or praise Him if He created me to be a miserable, person even if I was innocent in action. There would be no provision for my needs, only the expectation that such a God could annihilate me and take away my life and any desires I might have.

Charnock’s logic is overwhelming (and much more developed than most who write about God). He offers Scripture as his source and this verse, while it does not define ‘good’ it does tell me what God wants my heart to say: “You are good and do good; teach me your statutes.” (Psalm 119:68) I don’t always see the goodness or understand how He can use ‘all things for my good’ but do know that I’m not good like God is good, and need Him to teach me. 

PRAY: You are often a mystery. The desires of my heart can seem good, yet when You have other ideas that are contrary to what seems good to me, Your Word challenges my ideas of good. This is a trust-test and reminds me of You asking Abraham to sacrifice his son. A good idea? Not in my mind, but the man obeyed and You bailed him out. My faith in Your goodness is being tested in several fronts. What can I say? I have no goodness AND no faith without You.

Not wise enough to discern what is good or not…

Not once but four times yesterday the Lord gave me opportunity to speak with people that were on my heart and I wanted to talk with them. Two were friends who have been on the church prayer list for months and both of them were there for the first time in a long time. Chatting on the phone or with email is not the same as face-to-face, never mind the matter of hugs.

The other two were a surprise as well, consider a crowd of nearly 500 people. I wanted to introduce a teen to a woman whose son is the same age and considering coming to church next week. This boy would make a newcomer feel welcome and be glad to do so. I could not see him, but the next thing I knew, he was giving me a hug and getting the other boy’s name from his mom.

The last surprise involved a couple with a baby bump. I wanted to celebrate with them, but again, the crowd of people makes finding anyone a challenge. However, as we prepared to leave, they were in front of us and we rejoiced with them in anticipation of their first child.

Today’s devotional points out that God is good, and I should be thankful, not because of good things like those four instances, but because He is good. I am not wise enough to judge whether some things are really, in their essence, joys or sorrows; but knowing that He is good means I can be absolutely certain that everything He provides or permits must be good, including my recent illness. I’ve learned that I can be thankful for the trials. The key is being able to see the events of life with His eyes.

That is not always the way life comes to us. This last few weeks were wrapped in “rough coverings” and seemed worthless, even as if this came from the enemy and I did not want to accept what was happening. However, I would have lost something special. As the devotional writer says, be aware that we should not fight against the most unlikely for it may be a blessing from God that is temporarily disguised. As I learned first hand, submission is the route to victory, and very soon adds thanksgiving. As the chorus says, I can…

Enter his gates with thanksgiving, and his courts with praise! Give thanks to him; bless his name! (Psalm 100:4)

Knowing God and realizing the truth about Him is vital to discerning the value of both “coincidental surprises” and unpleasant disasters. He is in charge and because of that, no matter what is happening, I can praise Him.

Let everything that has breath praise the Lord! Praise the Lord! (Psalm 150:6)

And I heard every creature in heaven and on earth and under the earth and in the sea, and all that is in them, saying, “To him who sits on the throne and to the Lamb be blessing and honor and glory and might forever and ever!” (Revelation 5:13)

PRAY: Jesus, of course I prefer the pleasant places, the pleasing surprises. I loved the calls from my adult children this week, their gifts and their thoughtfulness. I love it when my hubby does chores so I can have extra sleep and when my brothers both called the same day. I don’t like the struggle of trying to sleep with a persistent cough, yet am glad to have nights with no coughing at all. But what joy to realize that You use the unpleasant things to bless me also, to teach me that You are not absent but drawing me into a deeper relationship with You and a deeper understanding that love is not coddling me but preparing me for the surprises of how deep and wide is the love You have for this slow-to-learn child. Praise Your name, now and forever.

“Be good” is about far more than behavior . . .

 

As a child, the first prayer I learned was, “God is great, God is good, let us thank Him for this food.” Many years later, an elderly Christian was seen poking a young Bible college student in the chest and saying, “Life is not fair, but never forget that God is good.” Sometimes people use it as a protest against negatives by saying, “Good God” as if appealing to Him to do something about it. What is it about God that brings out the description of Him as being GOOD?

In the OT, the noun is about prosperity. Even today, we tend to associate “good things” with the blessing of God in our lives and His goodness. However, the Bible also reminds me that to enjoy that prosperity requires a faith relationship with Him. Many prosperous people are not happy, always wanting more, because they do not know the One who has blessed them with His goodness.

The adjective GOOD is used hundreds of times to describe goodness, beauty, and moral uprightness. God called all that He made “good” and Rebekah “fair” and David “handsome” using the same word. He also uses the same adjective as a warning, particularly to those who think that God is anything other than GOOD:

Isaiah 5:20. Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter!

God is described as good, especially in the Psalms with the words of Psalm 86:5 repeated in many places: “For you, O Lord, are good and forgiving, abounding in steadfast love to all who call upon you.” King David knew the Lord and declared in the familiar 23^rd Psalm:” Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life, and I shall dwell in the house of the Lord forever.”

The NT uses different words for good, beautiful and kind. Because “good” is about God (Jesus said only God is good) the ideas conveyed with these words often overlap. Jesus is a good teacher and God uses all things together for good in my life. Everything He does is good and as James 1:17 says: “Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change.”

Not only that He finishes what He starts, as Philippians 1:6 affirms: “And I am sure of this, that he who began a good work in you will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ.” He finishes well because along the way He equips me with everything good:

Hebrews 13:20–21. Now may the God of peace who brought again from the dead our Lord Jesus, the great shepherd of the sheep, by the blood of the eternal covenant, equip you with everything good that you may do his will, working in us that which is pleasing in his sight, through Jesus Christ, to whom be glory forever and ever. Amen.

2 Corinthians 9:8. And God is able to make all grace abound to you, so that having all sufficiency in all things at all times, you may abound in every good work.

Philippians 2:13. for it is God who works in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure.

One Greek word, used only in Paul’s letters, describes God as good and kind, notably in the Person of Jesus Christ our Savior.

Titus 3:4–6. “When the goodness and loving kindness of God our Savior appeared, he saved us, not because of works done by us in righteousness, but according to his own mercy, by the washing of regeneration and renewal of the Holy Spirit, whom he poured out on us richly through Jesus Christ our Savior.”

GAZE INTO HIS GLORY. God’s goodness is in Jesus and the Holy Spirit. Both are given to me so I can focus on the goodness of God who saved me and share that goodness as Jesus said. He wants me to “Let my light shine before others, so that they may see my good works and give glory to my Father who is in heaven.” In other words, be aware of the good that God is and the good that He is doing and let it affect who I am and what I do as a reflection of Him.