God is good, all the time. All the time, God is good!
Is that true? What about when “bad things happen to good people?” Or even when “good things happen to bad people?”
Only God is truly good
In Luke 18, Jesus has an encounter with the “rich young ruler.” This young man refers to Jesus as “good Teacher.” Jesus responded, “Why do you call me good? No one is good except God alone.” God does not just do good things. He IS good. In every way, God is good. When it comes to our goodness or our doing good deeds, we are good sometimes but not all of the time, like God. Also, we have to consider our motive for being or doing good. In other words, “Why am I doing this “good” thing?” It’s true that we can do good things for the wrong reasons. We can do good in order to be praised or to be promoted. However, God does good things simply because He IS good. God is not good because He does good things; He does good things because He is good.
As Psalm 119:68 states, “You are good and do good.” Because God’s way are higher than ours, we might not understand how God is good in the midst of our bad circumstances, but we can be know that…
- God is working all things for our good (Romans 8:28). Somehow God can take even the worst of circumstances and work them for a believer’s good.
- God is good because He is there and He cares
In his commentary on Psalm 46, Charles Spurgeon wrote that God is good — not because he causes things that seem or feel “good” to happen in our lives, but because in the midst of the storm, God comes closer to us than the storm could ever be. God is not good just when we feel good, or when we think good is happening to us.
As Sarah Thebarge noted,
- God is just as good to the people who died in the car accident as he is to the people who avoided it.
- God is just as good to the parents of obedient children as he is to parents of children who have rebelled.
- God is just as good to infertile women as he is to women who have as many biological children as they want.
- God is just as good to the single person as he is to the person who gets married.
- God is just as good to the people who lose their jobs in corporate downsizing as he is to the people who earn a promotion.
- God is just as good to the people who drown in a tsunami as he is to the people who are rescued.
Church, rest assured that God is good. He IS good. And if you’re going through a difficult time, remember that He is working for your good and He is there and He cares!