God’s goodness exercised toward us is evident in His love for us, His mercy toward us when we suffer, His longsuffering when we disobey, and in His grace toward us. His ultimate expression of goodness through grace, is, of course, His provision of salvation through Christ. All of this emanates from Him, and Him alone, who is the chiefest good. Sounds pretty clear, doesn’t it? Should it not be easy to rest in such precious truth?

God is so good
God is so good
God is so good
He’s so good to me

Such a simple song. It’s easy to learn, simple enough to teach a child, and very useful for humming while you rock a baby to sleep.  The goodness of God, however, extends to heights and depths that we can spend a lifetime pursuing.

The original Saxon meaning of our English word “God,” is “The Good.” God, in his very nature is good. Louis Berkhof refers to it as “benevolent interest.”

His goodness is underived. He, unlike human beings, does not need anything to make Him good. He is goodness itself, and there is no limit to his goodness. A.W. Pink says:

God has in Himself an infinite and inexhaustible treasure of all blessedness enough to fill all things.

Not only is He Himself good, he does good. The exercise of His goodness is first seen in His creation of this world, (Genesis 1:31) and then in His provision to us (Psalm 145:9;Psalm 84:11) as His children and image bearers. God is the source of all good (James 1:17) to everyone.

God’s goodness exercised toward us is evident in His love for us, His mercy toward us when we suffer, His longsuffering when we disobey, and in His grace toward us. His ultimate expression of goodness through grace, is, of course, His provision of salvation through Christ. All of this emanates from Him, and Him alone, who is the chiefest good.

Sounds pretty clear, doesn’t it? Should it not be easy to rest in such precious truth? Despite it being such a simple thing to say that God is good, we will experience difficulty with recognizing and accepting God’s goodness toward us.

As Rebecca said in an earlier post, God is self-existent; this extends to all of His attributes, including His goodness.  He does not need anything to make Himself good. We are not self-existent, therefore any goodness we have must come from an outside source, namely God. Because we cannot see good as He does, when inevitable trials come our way, His goodness may not feel good at all. Often, our idea of good means “trouble-free.” Often, our idea of good is that we receive whatever we want. We think of goodness in our own human terms, not in the eternal purposes of God.  This is where anger toward God begins, when we don’t see His good as good at all.  Part of understanding God’s goodness to us is realizing that His good works toward eternal purposes, not our momentary comfort and satisfaction.  If God’s good happens to result in a good we would choose for ourselves, is entirely because He wants it to be so.

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