The Goodness of God
The Attributes of God • Sermon • Submitted
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· 58 viewsGod is good is too cheap of a description of his goodness
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The Goodness of God
The Goodness of God
7 The Lord is good, a stronghold in the day of trouble; he knows those who take refuge in him.
1 Truly God is good to Israel, to those who are pure in heart.
68 You are good and do good; teach me your statutes.
8 Oh, taste and see that the Lord is good! Blessed is the man who takes refuge in him!
Is God good?
Have we been conditioned to say, YES! Or to repeat a trite phrase of, “God is good - All the time; And all the time - God is good”, without so much as a moment to stop and think deeply about its truth or whether we believe this or not?
Much of our problem as Christians and even more broadly, as the larger Church, is that we do not know who God is and so we do not know who we are. My objective in this one sermon is to look at an aspect of God and not allow it to be tainted by circumstances or difficulties in our lives, but see God for who he is. He is Good. And the goodness of God is one of the most overlooked and under appreciated aspects of his attributes that we have.
If the Bible is a special revelation of who God is to us, then we must see him for how he reveals himself to us. And make no mistake about it, he shows himself to be good at all times, even in his wrath and judgement, he is good.
To summarize what pastor Tait said last week in his sermon on the Glory of God, The glory of God is the sparkling brilliance of his goodness that is seen.
God’s goodness is his nature at all times. He is the essence of Good, there is no good without him. In fact anything that we could possibly enjoy as being good, is only possible because of God. He created us and gave us senses in which we enjoy everything and describe them as good. Good doesn’t make sense without God. The problem is that some people worship good rather than God.
Today we need to think deeply about the goodness of God and look into his word to readjust our thinking about his goodness. And as we do that I want to remind you of the question I said we should ask ourselves this summer as we think abut the Attributes of God. “Are our thoughts of God too human?”
Why is that an important question to ask? Because we tend to think of of goodness as a binary subject… What I mean is that we as humans who can experience goodness tend to think of goodness as only a pleasure we get through our senses, and we cannot fathom of goodness being seen as something that would cause us displeasure or even suffering in our senses, and yet I want to be clear that we cannot think this way about God.
Sometimes the goodness of God can only be seen or experienced in deep brokenness, and often times the goodness of God can only be understood after much perspective readjusts our thoughts about what good accomplishes.
Now, do I say these things as some sort of deep thought meaning to trivialize our human suffering? No way, but instead I desire us to go to his word and see what God says about himself.
The bible gives us many pictures of the goodness of God and many ways to explain it, but we need to be looking for it in the pictures it sometimes uses to describe who God is in order to understand it. here is what I mean.
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.
This verse tells us a truth about God, he is light. But also goes on to say much more. “In him there is no darkness at all.”
This means he is perfect, absolute light. A concept we can hardly understand, but not just that, rather something we can understand, no darkness at all. we may not know what it is like to live in a world with no darkness at all, but we can certainly understand the word picture here. Light and dark are meant to show contrast between good and evil. When we studied through 1 John we talked about this contrast and it made reference to our behavior as Christians who know truth. If we know truth we should live and walk in truth or light.
Light vs darkness is good vs evil. If God is light and there is no darkness at all, it means that he is only good and not evil at all. His very essence is good and only always good, never any darkness or evil, period.
So where can we see his goodness?
The goodness of God is first seen in creation...
31 And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good. And there was evening and there was morning, the sixth day.
That means that all of creation and especially those who he made in his image and likeness are all very good.