And possibly my biggest risk. There was an older Christian song that I used to have burned onto my “Sacred Music” CDs (I told you I’m old) that would intro with some spoken words by dc Talk
“The greatest single cause of atheism in the world today is Christians who acknowledge Jesus with their lips, then walk out the door and deny Him by their lifestyle/That is what an unbelieving world simply finds unbelievable.”
Song “What if I Stumble”
A couple of months ago, I was driving when the unthinkable thought hit me. I wrote it down on the back of receipt, it was so strange. And I thought about it, and thought about it. Why do so many non-Christians NOT believe Christians? Why does anyone not believe someone else. It’s because they feel lied to. I thought Christian’s weren’t supposed to lie? But what if they don’t KNOW that they ARE lying???
What is this lie? Possibly the Biggest Lie? Ready?
God is Good!
What?! Then, what was this unthinkable thought?
“God is NOT good.”
What?! I have have dared to voice this thought to a few people…and the responses were definitely mixed, but hedged on negative. It doesn’t hurt my feelings. The goal of this Blog is to share and to allow you to think possibly in a different direction, always pointing toward God.
So why would God have ever put this thought in my mind? One of my favorite movies “God’s not Dead” this is the key line “God is good…all the time…”. This line is as Christian as apple pie is American.
Why would I doubt the validity of this statement? Because there are a lot of things that God does that are not considered ‘good’. Answer these questions.
Who is more powerful, God or the Devil?
We know this answer, God of course. Then why do people get sick?
Is God everywhere?
Then why do horrific accidents happen?
Who controls the weather?
God absolutely does, if you read the Bible. ** (This was actually one of the biggest grievances that God had against His chosen people Israel; they chose to worship Baal, the god of the secular neighboring kingdoms who supposedly was the god of rain/weather and fertility.) Then why do deadly hurricanes and tornados come?
One of my most excellent classes in school was “God and Human Suffering” and my professor introduced his class with “Some people have come to me at the end of the semester saying this class strengthened their faith immeasurably, and others have said the class destroyed their faith.” Christians and non-Christians alike struggle with the phrase “God is Good” because they see and experience too much ‘bad’ and if God is truly “good” then God either has favorites or He’s not what we say He is.
We are told to test thoughts/teachings with the Bible. So, is ‘God is good’ Biblical? I looked. I Googled. Actually, not once does that phrase show up in the Bible. That actually surprised me. What DOES the Bible say? Psalms 62:11-12 King David writes “One thing God has spoken, two things have I heard; that you, O God, are strong, and that you, O Lord, are loving. Surely you will reward each person according to what he has done.” Psalms 62:12 written in the English Standard Version says “and that to you, O Lord, belongs steadfast love.’ “God is LOVE” is written countless times in the Bible.
So what is the difference between “love” and “good.” In a heavenly sense, NOTHING. Love IS good. So if God is Love then God should also be good. However, in a human, earthly thinking, love does not always equal ‘good’. Think about it. When you discipline a child because they were being disrespectful, are you being loving? Are you being good? When your child is gleefully running towards a busy street and you grab them forcibly and stop them, are you being loving? Are you being good? When you catch your child lying about hanging out with dangerous friends and you ground them, take their phone away, are you being loving? Are you being good? As parents we’d say yes to both. What does the child say? It is doubtful they’d agree to either of those statements. In fact, they may say something like “you don’t love me!!!” and “I hate you!!!” and “you’re the meanest parent in the world!!!!” So when bad things are happening, is God (who is referenced as “our Father” many times in the Bible) being loving? Is He being good? The answer is and must be ‘yes’ if we believe God to be God and we call ourselves Christians. But even we discredit God with both to our fellow non-believers because we have implied by our catch phrases that “God only does good” and “the Devil only does bad.” And it sets us up to a failure of arguments and confusion because 1) those statements are not Biblical, 2) it places doubts of God’s absolute power and 3) it confuses us about the meaning of ‘love’.
What is Love? If we present a God to the world that is “good” by our definitions then, like children, we are angry when we do not get what we prayed about/asked for. We are confused when pandemics hit. We question when tornados rip through neighborhoods in our sleep. We doubt when our children are arrested for drug possession. We get defensive when we get caught being “smarter than ‘the system’.” We shake our fist at this God, we start coming up with blame that sounds very much like “the Devil made me do it.” We say things like “if He really loved me….” Do these lines sound familiar? But this is where we’re confusing ‘good’ for ‘love’. God IS Love. Love doesn’t always look good.
Go back to the Psalms. I said that “God is good” does not exist in the Bible anywhere, right? But what does King David write over and over…. “The LORD is good”. Now you’re wondering why you read this whole (long) post when it’s clear that I was wrong. It IS in the Bible. I pondered this for some time. Why the difference in use of wording for God? I asked a pastor friend. The answer…well, even I couldn’t understand it. I Googled it. No answer. So I prayerfully continued to ponder. And the answer I believe, is when we go back to the Bible verse in Acts 13:22 “After removing Saul, he made David their king. God testified concerning him: ‘I have found David son of Jesse, a man after my own heart; he will do everything I want him to do.’” (this could be and may be a whole other post, for those of us who know the story of King David). Bear with me a minute. Do you reference your parents with different names, tones of voice? Even a loved one, you use different names and inferences. I can talk about my parents, “my mom and my dad”…but when I am speaking of them in love or pride, it may become ‘my Daddy’ or ‘Mother.’ I believe that Biblically “God” or “Yaweh” or “Most High” is the all powerful and even terrible reference to the Almighty God Psalm 47:2 (King James Version) “For the LORD most high is terrible, he is a great King over all the earth.” (NIV says “awesome.”). He makes unfathomable decisions to destroy cities (Sodom and Gomorrah, Nineveh) and send a flood to destroy the world he had created, he killed people who promised to give their proceeds to the church but kept back some for themselves (Acts 5:1-11). And there are so many examples from around us, today. But David says “The LORD” is good” and I read it as his special name for God, the ‘father’ or ‘Abba’ side of God. When a teenager has a broken heart and needs the comfort of ‘mommy.” When an adult-child looks back at the decisions their parents made and say ‘my momma was strict, but now I see how it made me a better person.’ When we are away in college and mutter “I wish daddy was here” because our car is making a funny noise.
Now, for the record, I’m not correcting people who say ‘God is Good’…this isn’t about being right or wrong….but if asked I say ‘God is Love’, believing that often He does things that I cannot understand, in His Love. Frequently David, in the Psalms, follows the phrase “The LORD is good” with “His mercies endure forever.” Our Father is good, BECAUSE His mercies endure forever. Mercy is being given grace when you don’t deserve it, forgiveness for something you’ve done, life instead of sure death. It means we’ve messed up, but God is (wait for it) GOOD [no matter what He does, no matter how we interpret it, no matter how bad we think His actions may be] because of his LOVE. God is GOD.
Romans 11:33-34, written by the Apostle Paul after the death of Christ, referencing the scriptures in Isaiah.
“Oh, the depth of the riches of the wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable his judgments, and his paths beyond tracing out! ‘Who has known the mind of the Lord? Or who has been his counselor?’”
** This is one of the hardest concepts I still struggle with. God’s sovereignty over the weather, when we blame bad weather on the Devil. Here’s some Bible verses I’ve found to support. Psalm 148:8, Jeremiah 10:13, Proverbs 3:19-20, Job 36:26-33, Job 38:22-30, Leviticus 26:4, Deuteronomy 28:12, Jeremiah 5:24, Matthew 5:45, Acts 14:17, Psalm 68:7-9, Isaiah 30:23, Zechariah 10:1, Jonah 1:4, Exodus 14:21, Psalm 78:26, Jonah 4:8, James 5:17-18, 1 Samuel 12:17-18, 2 Chronicles 6:26-27
