The leader of the church service intones, “God is good, all the time”, and the congregation responds with, “all the time, God is good”. This may be a stylised church thing, but it is also a profound statement of truth. The older I get, the more I come to understand that this axiom lies at the foundation of so many theological and life-related issues.
There are two parts to the statement:
- God is good: This is the fundamental moral and ethical foundation of human life. God is good, he is not bad. God is love, he is not hate. God is truth, he is not lie. Of course, we will need to define what we mean by ‘good’ and we will need to establish a standard against which we can determine goodness.
- All the time: God is not good just some of the time, but all of the time. He is not both good and bad, successively or simultaneously. God is absolutely and always good.
Right at the outset, let me give a few examples of what this means and the effect it has on our beliefs and lives:
- If God is consistently and absolutely good, then he cannot, in any sense, be bad.
- If something truly bad happens to us then we cannot and must not attribute it to God. “God knows best – His ways are higher than ours” is no real comfort at all to the man or woman whose daughter has recently been raped and then butchered. It besmirches God and leaves the parent hopeless and doubly distraught.
- If God cold-bloodedly killed Ananias and Sapphira (Acts 5:1-11) for lying about how they spent their own money, then why should we expect his goodness to be manifest in our lives? It would be no better than living in fear of the wrath of God or not believing at all.
- If God is not good all the time, then why should WE strive or even expect to be? The old false narrative that God’s standards are different to our standards is just an unethical double standard.
- If God has predetermined who will be saved and who consigned to Hell then how can we equally believe the biblical statement that he wants all to be saved? Either this makes God out to be a disingenuous fraud, or it makes the bible unreliable.
There are many more examples I could set down, but these will do for now. So, now let’s examine the two parts of the axiom I started with and then move on to how we should establish the truth that God is good, all the time.
God is Good
If I were not a bible-honouring Christian then I guess I would have to argue from philosophy, sociology, or reasoning. If you would like to explore the intellectual idea of Godless ethics then HERE is a good place to start. However, I am a bible-honouring follower of the Lord Jesus and so I will instead argue from scripture.
Many Old Testament texts affirm that God is good, but consider Psalm 34:8: ‘Taste and see that the Lord is good; blessed is the man who takes refuge in him.’ The word ‘Lord’ in the Hebrew text is of course ‘Yahweh’, the customary name of the creator God of Israel.
As with the Old Testament, there are many references to the goodness of God in the New Testament. Again, I want to focus on just one. 1 John 1:5 ‘This is the message we have heard from him and proclaim to you, that God is light, and in him is no darkness at all’ It is quite legitimate, therefore, to say ‘God is good, and in him is no badness at all’. God is absolutely, completely ‘light’, and ‘good’ and there is nothing in him that is ‘dark’ and ‘bad’.
All the Time
Not only is God good, but he is consistently and continuously good. Not just sometimes good and sometimes bad and not both good and bad, but always good.
James 1:16-17 reads: ‘Don’t be deceived, my dear brothers. Every good and perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of the heavenly lights, who does not change like shifting shadows’. The picture here is a sundial where the shadow moves over the dial as the hours progress. God is not like that. To use the same word picture, God is like the sun at noon where there is no movement of a shadow on the sundial. He is unchanging in his bright goodness.
So then, God is good, and only good, all the time. Yet I have often read or heard that we need to hold the goodness of God and his ‘dark side’ in dynamic tension, accepting that he is both light and dark, good and bad. He loves all people because he created them in his image to be his eternal children, but he feels free to abuse and obliterate them if he deems that this is ‘necessary’. I have very little tolerance for this line of thought. It is schizophrenic and falls foul of Isaiah’s admonition: ‘Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter’ (Isaiah 5:20).
So, now one more important issue needs addressing, ‘What is our standard for what is good?’
The Standard
How do we know good from bad and truth from error? God is good, but what does that mean in terms of our standards?
An alternative to this wrong thinking is to slip into another form of wrong thinking – to accept that God has double standards. What is good for him is not necessarily good for us. God expects us to live to standards that he does not evidence. There is just so much that is wrong about this line of thought, so best I just say that God does not have double standards, he is absolutely good in all his ways.
So, how then do we determine good from bad? The obvious answer to a Christian is, “well the scriptures of course”. Sure, but that supposes that we are all able to understand the bible correctly, whatever ‘correctly’ actually means. No, the answer must be that our means of determining good from bad is the Lord Jesus Christ as revealed in and through the scriptures. If Jesus is truly God incarnate, then what he said, did, and revealed of the nature and character of the Godhead must be true. I have made the case for this idea many times and you can find an instance of this HERE.
Conclusion
If you find yourself blaming your god for bad things, or accommodating his apparent ‘dark side’, then PLEASE examine your thinking. How can you have a loving relationship with a god who is fickle, disingenuous, or just plain bad? You cannot! If your god might have chosen you or a loved one for eternal damnation, no matter what they do or are, then what kind of a god is that? If your god applies double standards or expects you to disengage your critical faculties then what does it say about his morality and ethics? I have used ‘god’ with a small ‘g’ in this paragraph because the deity we are envisioning here is not God Almighty. He is not the God embodied in Jesus of Nazareth.
God is good and there is no badness in him. God is light and there is no darkness in him. Anything that contradicts this key maxim is a reflection of wrong thinking and incorrect biblical interpretation.
Please do not dismiss what I have written here as either simply interesting or perhaps irrelevant. The nature and character of God is something that affects all doctrine and human life. Rather than moving on to the next thought presented to you, stop and critically evaluate what I have set out before you. Look into the scriptures and question, pray, and seek answers.
This is a vitally important subject, so please comment freely in the section at the foot of this article and I will interact with you as best I can.
5 thoughts on “God Is Good All The Time”
I would like you to please explain to me how the God of the Old Testament seemed to be punishing/killing people like Ananias and Saphirra that you mentioned above/the flood etc and than Jesus in the New Testament seems to be so different than the God portrayed in the Old Testament. You never said how the God who was shown in the Old Testament was actually “good” doing the things he did to those that were not for him/disobeyed/lied etc. Could you please clarify your eg of Ananias and Saphirra that you mentioned and how their death would be seen as a “good thing”? Thank-you for any additional input. I really appreciate it so much!
The short answer (the long answer would take many pages of text) is that the bible is reliable and it is just as God wants it to be, but it records both bad examples and good examples. In addition, it records the understanding of flawed people within the context of history and culture. The death of the two disciples that you cite is an example of this. Peter apparently understood that Ananias and his wife had lied to the Holy Spirit. He then pronounced a death sentence on them. It is clear, at least to me, that the Holy Spirit revealed their ‘lie’ to him (word of knowledge). However, there is no indication in the account that God struck the two down dead. This would contradict the OT revelation of his character and nature as well as Jesus’ examples and teachings, as well as the balance of NT teaching. It is more likely that the two died from shock-induced heart failure or as a direct result of the spiritual power directed by Peter at them.
God’s good is not what we see as good for us at times.God uses these experiences to bring us closer to Him. My husband died of Covid 3 years ago . I went directly to the Lord for His everything surrender my everything to Him and in return He gave me His joy and all His goodness. I had been a Christian all my life but didn’t really know Him. Now He is with me all the time.I thank the Lord all the time for His Goodness . I would not be here without Him. I do miss my husband but God fills my soul. Thank you Lord!
None of that speaks to God allowing unimaginably horrible things to happen to children. God not doing something sounds a lot like a cop out to the truth of God allowing something to happen. This is especially true with corporate horrific things. God allows our individual loves ones to die and that is awful. God also allows millions of children to be sold into slavery and that is inexplicable. Saying God is good All the time seems to floss over that. Especially saying well God didnt do it humans did. God allowed those humans to do that over and over and over…
Aminah, I see distinct differences between ‘allows’ and ‘wills’ or theological concepts like ‘ordains’. One of the differences is that to allow something is usually meant in a passive sense, as in ‘to permit something to happen or to exist’. I think this is what you mean when you say that it is just as bad for God to allow terrible things to happen as it is for him to want or even initiate terrible things. When asked in isolation, the ‘Why does God allow…?’ questions lead nowhere other than to further questions. For example, ‘Why did God allow Adam and Eve to rebel against him and his goodness?’ or even ‘Why did God create at all if some consequences of this would be evil?’ This line of questioning leads right down the black hole of two options – either God does not exist at all or he is not good! If you are interested in exploring this dilemma then a good place to go would be Dr William Lane Craig’s Reasonable Faith site https://www.reasonablefaith.org/
My view is simply this:
1. God has declared himself to be good, and he has manifested this truth in and through the incarnate Jesus Christ of Nazareth.
2. To create a world where humanity could freely choose to love, trust, and obey him, he had to allow for the possibility of the opposite of love, trust, and obedience as well as create a neutral and relatively randomised natural order.
The pivotal issue is free will. Love, trust, and obedience are meaningless concepts unless freely given and freedom to choose necessitates the possibility of evil. Similarly, a randomised natural order yields things that are beneficial as well as destructive.
At a more personal and practical level, the question is, ‘If God is not good, then why should any reasonable person trust, love, and obey him?’ Equally, if God says he is good but isn’t, then he is a liar, a manipulator, and evil. However, as a follower of Jesus, my starting point for attempting to answer the questions of life and eternity is that God is good, all the time. This is the fundamental moral and ethical foundation of my life and theological and philosophical formulations. It is also my source of comfort; when I grieve over what happens in the world,or in my life, I know that God grieves with me.