God of All Goodness

From Gospel Translations

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Revision as of 01:40, 5 May 2025

You are good and do good. (Psalm 119:68)

The living God, the only God, the God who always was and always will be, the God in whose presence we live and move and have our being, is an utterly, wonderfully, unchangeably good God.

He is, the Psalms tell us, “abundant” in goodness (Psalm 31:19), a waterfall of tumbling generosity whose roar knows no beginning and no end. Taste and see such goodness as much as you want (Psalm 34:8) — your portion will never grow smaller; the vista will always stretch farther. God satisfies the weary with good (Psalm 103:5), fills the hungry with good (Psalm 107:9), and sends good chasing after us like a hound dog until we arrive at the home where perfect Goodness dwells (Psalm 23:6; 65:4).

Sometimes, however, such descriptions seem to clash with our experience. God’s goodness feels hard to grasp. Maybe you know the sorrow of good gifts lost or never had. The words “God is good” make sense when God gives; they can bewilder when he takes or withholds. Maybe right now, saying, “God is good” feels a bit like saying, “The earth orbits the sun.” You believe it because trustworthy others have told you so. But you believe it against your perceptions.

The Psalms can help us. At times, when these singers said, “God is good,” life felt sickeningly bad. What then did “God is good” mean to them? We can capture the cry of their heart in three ways.

‘God Gives Me Good’

First, when the psalmists said, “God is good,” they meant, “God gives me good.” Father of lights, fountain of beauties, storehouse of treasures, inventor of pleasures, God gives good, and he does so richly.

The singers of Israel lived in a God-entranced, God-governed world, a world where nothing good arrived by accident, and so, even the smallest, most ordinary provisions of life spoke of a large and extraordinary goodness. Bread, oil, and wine (Psalm 104:14–15), gentle rains and good harvests (Psalm 85:12), the whole tasteable, seeable world (Psalm 34:8, 10) — these were all, to them, the gifts of a very good God.

Who but a good God would craft a world of such prodigal beauty? Who else would create bellies and then continually fill them morning, noon, and night, day after day after day? Who else would furnish the human body with five ways to be endlessly fascinated? A cruel God, says C.S. Lewis, might “set traps and try to bait them. But he’d never have thought of baits like love, or laughter, or daffodils, or a frosty sunset” (A Grief Observed, 31). A world as wildly wonderful as ours proclaims a God more wildly wonderful still.

Set aside for a moment the gifts you yet long to have. Can you see — in your morning coffee and stocked pantry and spring leaves and garden plot — that “the Lord is good to all, and his mercy is over all that he has made” (Psalm 145:9)?

‘God Works My Good’

Even still, God knows that his general goodness, the goodness he scatters across all our days, does not remove the pain of particular goods not given. A woman longing for life in her womb, a father diagnosed too young, a lonely one wanting a friend — each can recognize the goodness God has given while still pining for more. And so, we find in the Psalms the conviction that God not only gives me good but also works my good through everything bad.

We see God’s commitment to work our best most starkly in his commitment to forgive our worst. Indeed, when the psalmists celebrate God’s goodness, they often have the goodness of his grace in mind. “You, O Lord, are good and forgiving” (Psalm 86:5). Through Jesus, God crowns our guilty heads with grace and rescues us from messes of our own making (Psalm 103:4; 107:1–3). He redeems us from the worst we’ve ever done.

And if God worked our good even at our worst, then he certainly will work it everywhere else, even in those places where his goodness seems gone. In Psalm 23, David pictures the goodness of God following him, pursuing him, not just sometimes but “all the days of my life” (Psalm 23:6). On some days, God’s goodness chased him toward green pastures and still waters; on other days, it drove him into the valley of death’s shadow; on all his days, it led him toward “the house of the Lord” where he now dwells forever. And thus God’s goodness does with us.

When we get to that house and look back upon our twisting way, we will no doubt see more clearly how not only the pastures but also the valleys carried us closer to heaven — how goodness laced both the giving and the taking. But for now, God bids us to believe what we may not be able to see: The hand that leads us into the land of deep darkness is none other than the hand of God’s goodness leading us home.

‘God Is My Good’

When we say that God works our good, we look by faith to the day when the goodness present in our pain will be revealed. But in the meantime, the same God who gives me good and works my good is my good. “I say to the Lord, ‘You are my Lord; I have no good apart from you” (Psalm 16:2).

One of the most piercing, most beautiful affirmations of the goodness God is comes near the end of Psalm 73. The path to that place was a torturous one for Asaph the psalmist: For many bitter days, he could see only the good things others had that he didn’t — good things he imagined that God reserved only for righteous men like him. God did not seem good.

But then Asaph “went into the sanctuary of God” and saw what he had missed (Psalm 73:17). His hands, which held so few gifts, were nevertheless held by God: “I am continually with you; you hold my right hand; you guide me with your counsel, and afterward you will receive me to glory” (Psalm 73:23–24). In a moment, heaven became inhabited again by the God of surprising, surpassing goodness (Psalm 73:25).

And in the same moment, his idea of good underwent a radical change: “For me it is good to be near God” (Psalm 73:28). Before, he would have finished that sentence in any number of ways: “For me it is good to have comfort and plenty, respect and good prospects.” And so our own hearts have found a thousand ways to finish that sentence without reference to God. But when we see the hand that holds ours — a hand now bearing scars — and when we hear the counsel he gives and sense the glory he is, we cannot finish the sentence except as Asaph does: “For me it is good to be near God.”

God, the good Father, good Son, and good Spirit. God, the fountain from whom every gift flows. God, the one who created us to commune with him and redeemed us to rejoice in him. God, the definition of good and the one without whom nothing is good. Come valley, come darkness, come lack, come loss — if we get more of God, we have more good than all the earth has to offer besides (Psalm 73:25).

The day is coming when we will enjoy every good gift in a world made new. But for now, God alone knows which good gifts will lead us toward him and which will take us from him. And so he arranges, good God that he is, the perfect amount of pleasure and pain to keep us near him, show us more of him, and chase us home to him.