God Is Good

“Golden sunrise” by “Fir0002/Flagstaffotos”

God is great
God is good
And we thank Him
For our food.

Amen!

The quick little pray, repeated most often because of its brevity, nevertheless says a few powerful things. But are they truthful? God is great—definitely. But is God good? Really?

Evil is everywhere. A three-year-old gets cancer, and lives. But her life includes one trip to the hospital after another to treat various aliments brought on by the procedure used to rid her of cancer.

A seventeen-year-old girl, enjoying a summer swim, breaks her neck and is a quadriplegic for the next forty-seven years, and counting.

A missionary family in Afghanistan survive an attack on their compound by five suicide bombers, but three of their colleagues are killed in another incident weeks later.

A prominent Christian pastor’s son commits suicide. A prominent Christian singer’s son dies in an accident in their driveway. The adult son of a prominent Christian evangelist dies in an auto accident on his way to a crusade.

But God is good?

Well, yes, He is. As it happens, He looks at the big picture, the greater, everlasting story. He sees and knows what we cannot know.

Joseph languished in a prison after being sold into slavery by his brothers. His brothers! Then he refused to sin against God by sleeping with his master’s wife and ended up behind bars. Where he sat, year after year. Forgotten by the government official he’d helped. But not forgotten by God.

“And as for you, you meant evil against me,” Joseph later told his brothers, “but God meant it for good, in order to bring about this present result, to preserve many people alive” (Gen. 50:20).

And so God works, out of our view, without our understanding, to bring about results we couldn’t predict, at a price we can’t come to grips with.

Take the early missionaries, for instance, starting with William Carey.

Once Carey’s family and team had evaded and overcome the obstacles before them they endured some crushing trials. Carey’s young son, Peter, died of dysentry, his wife went insane, his co-worker squandered all their money and bankrupted the mission. Sickness afflicted them all. Furthermore, after 7 years of tireless toil in India Carey still did not have a single convert!

However, Carey provides us with an inspiring testimony of steadfast perseverance. Utterly convinced of the sovereignty of God and standing on the promises and prophecies of Scripture, Carey kept on working. The Bengali New Testament was first published in 1801 – within a year of their first convert being baptised. By 1818 there were 600 baptised and discipled church members. (“What Inspired the Greatest Century of Missionary Advance?”)

Or how about the first American missionaries?

The first American missionaries to go overseas, Adoniram and Ann Judson, endured debilitating tropical diseases and vicious opposition and imprisonment under the cruel king of Burma. They also lost children to disease and laboured for 7 years before seeing their first convert from Buddhism. Ann Judson died in the field – only 36 years old. Yet by the time Adoniram Judson had died there were over 100 000 baptised church members amongst the Karen tribe! To this day the (mostly Christian) Karen people remain steadfast in Burma – an island of Christianity in a sea of Buddhism (“What Inspired the Greatest Century of Missionary Advance?”).

Is God good? Every child who died, every husband who labored alone on the mission field, every prisoner who stood faithful to his God, every wife who went to foreign places knowing that she most likely would not see her home again—each is a person God knew from the foundation of the world and loved, so much so that He willingly chose to suffer, taking on the sins of the world, so that we might have life eternal, so that the hardship of this world, the dangers and fears and abuses and cruelties would one day pass away and we would have joy eternal.

God takes crushed reeds and releases fragrant aromas. He uses clay pots to hold water-turned-to-wine. He makes a shepherd boy into a king and a murderous persecutor of His church one of its greatest evangelists.

The truth is, the evil we decry lies at the feet of sin and of humankind’s disobedience. God alone stands before us pointing the way out of the quagmire of our own making. We stumble, but He holds our hand. The waters pour over us, but He is with us. We walk through the valley of the shadow of death, but His rod and staff comfort us.

The death we decry and the ruination we fear simply are not the end of the story. The enemy of our souls seeks to blind our eyes so that we do not see the goodness of our God and the eternal hope He offers.

Thankfully we have God’s sure promise—He is today as He was yesterday and the day before and the day before. In fact, He is as He was when He spoke this world into being and called everything He had made, good.

Only a good God can make good things only and always. Only a good God can redeem and rescue from the dominion of darkness in order to bring us into the kingdom of His beloved Son—that would be Jesus who is the living proof that the resurrection to everlasting life is our sure hope. We will, in fact, one day walk in newness of life, encompassed by the unadulterated goodness of God.