The goodness of God is an essential theological truth that affects everything we do and everything for which we pray. When we consider the goodness of God, however, it is hard not to keep shifting between the fearful God of the Old Testament and the God of grace revealed in the New Testament. When hardship comes and stays for a while, most of us immediately think that the judgment of God has landed on us because that is what we see in the Old Testament – you know…global flood, fire consuming Sodom and Gomorrah, Lot’s wife being turned into a pillar of salt, Miriam being struck with leprosy, and so on. If we are not careful, we see God as a God of vengeance and wrath rather than a loving father, and when we see him that way, it is almost impossible to reconcile that view with the Heavenly Father that Jesus talks about who knows and cares if even one sparrow falls to the ground. When we see God that way we are uncertain that he always wants to bless us or we redefine blessing so that it can contain hardship, persecution, loss, death, and illness. If we believe that God may visit those kinds of things on us because they are good for us in the long run, we will not be able to pray against those things with much faith. If we are not clear on what constitutes the works of God and the works of the devil, we will not know how to pray. John defined the works of the devil as everything Jesus attacked in his ministry – sickness, premature death, demonic affliction, condemnation, hunger, shame, etc.
What we need to recognize is that the cross has made all the difference and that the cross was in the heart of God from the foundation of the world (Rev.13:8). God’s revelation of himself and kingdom truths has always been a progressive revelation revealing some things now and some things later. Even Jesus told his disciples, “I have many more things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. But when He, the Spirit of truth, comes, He will guide you into all the truth; for He will not speak on His own initiative, but whatever He hears, He will speak; and He will disclose to you what is to come” (Jn.16:12-13).
In our own lives, we hear and understand the truths of the scriptures bit by bit rather than getting a full download the moment we come to faith in Jesus. Even to the apostles, the New Covenant was unlocked bit by bit. On the day of Pentecost when the Holy Spirit fell on the church, the leaders were totally unaware that God was going to open the door to Gentile believers. According to scholars, it was nearly seven to ten years after Pentecost when Peter received a vision that God had accepted Gentiles into the church without the need to become proselyted Jews before they were saved (Acts 10). It was such a hidden part of the gospel that it took a major conference in Jerusalem to affirm that Gentiles were welcome in the church (Acts 15). That truth was embedded in scripture all along but no one read the texts with that understanding until the Holy Spirit granted them that understanding.
Since God works through progressive revelation, we need to understand that certain things were emphasized in the Old Testament in order to prepare God’s people for a the Messiah. It has been said that the Old Testament revealed the power of sin, while the New Testament reveals the power of righteousness. In the Old Testament, if a man touched a leper he became unclean. In the New Testament, when Jesus touched a leper, the leper was made clean.
Another way to view the progressive revelation of scripture is to see that the holiness of God was emphasized before the cross while the mercy and grace of God has been emphasized since the cross. God’s mercy, grace, and goodness were always there but holiness was center stage. His holiness and judgment is still there, but in Jesus his mercy and grace took center stage. As parents, we love our children from day one and go to great lengths to protect and provide for them. However, we also begin to discipline our children at an early age to teach them right from wrong and to instill in them a healthy respect for their parents. As children, we all learned to obey our parents first through fear of punishment and only later through love and trust. Children function best by rules (law), while adults live by principles (spiritual wisdom). In a sense, parents emphasize their holiness first before they begin to emphasize love and trust. Perhaps, that is what God had to do for the whole human race.
You might say that God went to unreasonable extremes to demonstrate his holiness before the cross – a global flood, entire cities or tribes being wiped out, etc. However, we forget that the thread of salvation that runs through the entire Bible includes the preservation of the bloodline what would finally bring the Savior into the world. We have no awareness of the level of spiritual warfare that went on through the cultures that God removed in an effort to insure the arrival of our Savior. All you need to do is to look at the efforts of Hitler and the Nazi’s to totally remove the Jewish nation from the face of the earth to know the extent that Satan would go through to prevent Messiah from being born. The allies had to “carpet bomb” Germany to overcome the demonic evil that drove Hitler. Tens of thousands of civilians, including women and children, died in those raids. It was the cost of overcoming evil and the consequences of Germany’s refusal to surrender. God faced the same evils in the past and was forced to pour out judgment himself on cities and tribes even though he would have preferred peace.
Another reality exists in the Old Testament as well as we consider the goodness of God. We often forget the lengths that God went to in order to avoid bringing judgment on those nations. Noah preached for 120 years before the flood came trying to get the world around him to repent. God agreed to spare Sodom and Gomorrah if he could find just ten righteous men in the city. He sent his prophets time and again to turn not just Israel but other nations (Jonah and Nineveh, for instance) from evil before sending judgment. If you read the Old Testament carefully you will discover that pain and destruction has never been the heart of God for anyone. “Do I take any pleasure in the death of the wicked? declares the Sovereign Lord. Rather, am I not pleased when they turn from their ways and live (Ezek.18:23)?
However, the unrelenting wickedness of some men and nations requires judgment. Is a good that does not resist evil really good? Good must resist evil and if evil will not relent then good must destroy it. No one criticized the allies for standing up against Nazi Germany in World War II because evil, like cancer, has to be opposed. But men have sometimes been quick to judge God for the same opposition to unrelenting evil through the centuries.
Having said all that, the cross has changed the landscape of heaven’s dealing with men. Whereas in the Old Testament, the holiness of God was emphasized, the cross now allows God to highlight his mercy and grace. Jesus came not only to save us but also to point out and demonstrate the goodness of God. Jesus was very clear that he was the revelation of the Father among us. Remember that Jesus is Emmanuel or God with us. Secondly, Jesus said that if we have seen him, we have seen the Father (Jn.14). Whenever we ask God to empower us to do what Jesus did, we don’t have to question whether it is God’s will or not. Whatever Jesus did, the Father wants to do all the time. In order for the church to be the church that God envisions, we must define good and evil as Jesus defined it. Bill Johnson says that our skewed definition of good when we say God is good, keeps us from pushing back against the devil. “Instead of creating doctrines that explain away our weakness and anemic faith, we’ll actually have to find out why ‘the greater works than these’ (Jn.14:12) have not been happening in and around us.”
His point is that our faith for doing the works that Jesus did has been so watered down that we have incorporated unhealed sickness, premature death, birth defects, gender confusion, natural disasters, etc. as part of God’s will that we accept and live with rather than seeing those things as works of the devil that we should triumph over by faith. Jesus said that whoever believed in him would not only do what he did but would do even greater things than he had done. The goodness of God was expressed through the works of Jesus and should still be expressed through those who follow Jesus. The goodness of God and our definition of that goodness guides our prayers and our actions. It is essential that we are clear that God wants to do good to his people and even to the lost and that the good he wants to do is not some strange theological definition that visits suffering on his children to purify the soul.
His love and goodness for us is like that of a loving father who always wants to bless and provide. A loving father never enjoys or is indifferent to the injuries or illnesses of his children. He would never give his child cancer to grow his or her faith. He would never inflict his child with a birth defect to make that child more dependent on him. The heart of a loving and wise parent comes from God. We can know what God wants for us by the things we want for our children. As redeemed people, we know our deepest longings for our children and we can have confidence that those longings reflect the Father’s will for all of his children. So…know today that God is good and he wants to bless you and meet every need in a way that blesses as well. Pray for good things (healing, provision, salvation, reconciled relationships, protection, success, etc.) with confidence because God wants to express his goodness through you and for you today.
