The Goodness of God
We sometimes hear Christians say, “God is good!” And another Christian responds, “All the time, God is good!” Is that just a cliché or do we really believe that?
The apostle Paul seemed to believe that. I was reading his second letter to Timothy this past week and thought that it was strange when I read what he wrote in chapter 4 and verse 18: “The Lord will rescue me from every evil deed and bring me safely into his heavenly kingdom.” Paul actually ended up being beheaded because of his faith in Jesus. How is that being rescued from every evil deed? And then I realized that the key is found in Paul’s definition of evil. We naturally look at beheading as evil. But Paul saw death, even in a gruesome way like this, not as evil but as graduating to his eternal home. In other words, suffering isn’t necessarily evil. There are many people who can testify to how suffering brought that which was good into their lives. Because this was God’s will for Paul in how he was to pass from this life into the next, he could genuinely reflect that God rescued him from every
evil. Paul understood that goodness is the absence of evil, and even in his death, God in His goodness was there.
You’ve probably heard people ask: “How can God be good all the time when He sends people to hell? (Answers in Genesis has a response worth considering.) Perhaps the issue is not so much that good things aren’t happening in our life, as much as that our definition of goodness is faulty… our premise for defining goodness is wrong. Let’s start with how we measure goodness. The Bible tells us that God is the standard of goodness (Luke 18:19). GotQuestions.org describes God's goodness in this way: "God is good because He always acts in accordance to what is right and true... The fact that God is good means that He has no evil in Him, His intentions and motivations are always good, He always does what is right, and the outcome of His plan is always good (Gen. 50:20)."
To really understand the goodness of God, one starts by accepting the good news about Jesus Christ. Only when we have a personal relationship with God can we begin to truly appreciate the goodness of God. “Oh, give thanks to the Lord, for He is good!” 1 Chronicles 16:34