“God is too good to be unkind and He is too wise to be mistaken. And when we cannot trace His hand, we must trust His heart.”
He Is Good. Even When Life Is Not
This is the week some of you have been waiting for, or perhaps dreading.
Because saying God is good is simple enough when life is going well. But what about when the diagnosis comes back and it isn’t what you hoped? What about when the relationship ends, the job disappears, the grief won’t lift? What about when you prayed, really prayed, and the answer was silence, or no?
Is God still good then?
The psalmist who wrote “You are good, and what you do is good” was not writing from a mountaintop experience. The Psalms, taken as a whole, are breathtakingly honest about suffering. They include raw lament, confusion, accusation even. And yet, threaded through all of it, is this stubborn, tested confession: God is good.
The goodness of God is not a cheerful slogan for easy days. It is a bedrock conviction that holds when nothing else does. But let’s be honest about what it does and does not mean.
The goodness of God does not mean everything that happens is good. Scripture is too clear-eyed about the reality of suffering to pretend otherwise. Famine, injustice, grief, loss, the Bible never papers over these things with easy reassurances. God is good. The world, under the weight of its brokenness, is not always good. Those two things can both be true.
The goodness of God means that he himself is without moral defect. His intentions toward his creation are good. His plans, even when they pass through pain, are moving toward redemption. He wastes nothing. He abandons no one.
There is a difference between trusting God’s goodness and understanding God’s methods. You can be completely honest that you do not understand why something has happened, that it hurts, that you wish it were different and simultaneously hold onto the character of a God who has proven himself good. Not because you can explain his ways, but because you know his heart.
Job never got the explanation he asked for. But in the end, he got something better, an encounter with the God who was with him in it all. Even through the pain and the rejections , the no’s that the world throws at you, sometimes at important junctures of your life, it is easy to curl back into your shell of doubt and questions but your answer lies in the walk towards his presence.
That is what the goodness of God looks like when life is not.
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