Is God Good?

Any Christian would agree with the statement that “God is good.” In fact, you might even know the mandatory follow-up response of “all the time.”

But when issues hit close to home and are important to us, when we have to stand and use our faith, we sometimes start to question if God is truly good ALL of the time.

God loves me, but maybe He doesn’t want me to get pregnant. 

God is loving, but He why didn’t He save my father from dying?

I’m beloved by God, but maybe He’s not for me to get this promotion.

Sister Bethany was a woman of God, but she didn’t get healed. Maybe God doesn’t always heal.

In our efforts to bring meaning to and explain life, we tend to complicate simple things, such as the knowledge of God’s character. As it says in Psalm 145:

“The Lord is good to all, and His tender mercies are over all His works.”

But it’s always been a tactic of the enemy to get us to question God’s goodness. He started it in the garden by convincing Eve that God was holding something back from her.

We might not understand why we can’t eat from that tree, or why certain circumstances/ events/ problems happen in life (and the reasons can be exhaustive). But we must be rock-solid on one fact:

God is a good Father who wants the very best for us.

When we believe God is holding something back from us—when we don’t trust Him—it’s an accusation against His character. We’re calling the One—who is Love and Righteousness, who said He’d be our source for everything—a liar.

We become like the Pharisees who called Jesus a sinner.

In the passage found in John 9, we see the Pharisees struggling to understand the goodness of God. Jesus healed a blind man on the Sabbath. And like most things Jesus did, this upset the Pharisees.

Jesus didn’t confine to their pre-determined box of how God moved and acted—they didn’t understand Him. With their extensive education, they reasoned, even with all the good He did, that Jesus must be a sinner. After all, He heals people, and only sinners do that.

But for the previously blind man, it was simple to see who Jesus was and where He was from.

“Why, this is a marvelous thing, that you do not know where He is from; yet He has opened my eyes! Now we know that God does not hear sinners; but if anyone is a worshiper of God and does His will, He hears him. Since the world began it has been unheard of that anyone opened the eyes of one who was born blind. If this Man were not from God, He could do nothing.” -John 9:30-33

If God is not good in every aspect toward us and our lives (relationships, jobs, peace, health, rest, etc.), then He isn’t good at all. He’s either all good, or He is evil. There is no in-between.

So, what do you believe? Is your God good to you?

“Woe to those who call evil good, and good evil.” -Isaiah 5:20