Is He Good
Do we need to separate the goodness of God from our situation in order to make sense of His goodness?
When someone gets a full night of sleep with three little kids and wraps it up with, “God blessed me so much” … do the words ring hollow to me because if it’s about God’s blessing and goodness then why am I trapped in an apartment seven hours from home with five kids and cancer treatment? Do I need to separate them in my mind to believe?
God is good always. But my situation is part of a fallen world.
It fits. I compartmentalize to help it make sense. Because if it makes sense, I can believe it.
However, if I separate those two too far, then I separate from my ability to call on the power of God to move in our situation. If God and His goodness is in one box and my broken world situation is in another box, the two don’t touch each other. Well, they do whether I choose to believe it or not because God doesn’t change who He is based on my belief of Him, but stick with me for a moment. Because while what I believe about God doesn’t change who He is, my belief about God changes me.
This wrestling of a good Father is not new to humankind. In our limited time at a counseling training center and in my own time with a counselor we read books diving deep into exploring the difficulty our hearts experience as we find ourselves in places that seem so opposite of what our minds describe as goodness. If learned theologians haven’t fully answered this question, I’m certainly not going to add any insight.
There’s truth in all of it. The evil is not from God. That much I am sure of. People around me growing up used to throw around the phrase permissive will. I really dislike that phrase.
There are forces of evil in the world. Because of human choice, God has stepped back from pulling puppet strings that keep us robotically moving so that everyone and everything stays in sync and we never suffer.
This feels different to me from permissive will because that still sounds as though He sent it. I think it’s more like withholding action to allow choice (which is probably the same thing as permissive will and I just have a problem with certain words) and the ripple effect of sin.
But if I take this too far …. Here is my very good God. Here is my ugly situation that is part of a sin cursed world …. now I’ve removed God from my situation and made Him powerless in my mind.
What does it look like to believe in God’s goodness in my situation, not because of it or in spite of it? How can I demonstrate this in the words I choose both in good times and bad times? I mean, we never say, “I was up three times last night with my chemo child. God is so good!!!”
It’s never wrong for us to say God is so good; but I do wonder if the way we tack it onto the back of places that feel good to our human self reinforce the idea that God’s goodness is couched in things that are earthly blessings? Is it possible that what trips us up when the chips are down is the way we have taught ourselves?
I don’t know the answer to these questions. I do believe that God delights in giving good gifts to His children and that many times those do look like earthly blessings. Maybe it’s not possible to know with your heart without raw suffering. But I’d like to believe that how I choose my words can help my children to understand His goodness in a way that doesn’t bowl them over when they hit the desert in their lives and still allows them to engage with Him on a heart level, not just a mind mantra to power through.
To help them understand the God of redemption. His presence and goodness in the darkness when it doesn’t get taken away and the way He redeems every broken experience to become powerful in His kingdom of light. That our human experience can be like creation — a mass void of form that at His spoken word emerged into a world of day and night, seasons and rhythms, trees and flowers, oceans and lands.
It is not too much for Him to also make this wilderness a beautiful place of light and life.
Maybe the next time something good happens I’ll just express my profound gratitude for the gift without adding, “God is so good.” Or maybe I will. Because I now also find myself adding words about God’s goodness in the middle of this moonless midnight.
It’s odd how some things leave you with fewer answers and more knowing deep in your soul where words don’t fit.