God Is Good

God Is Good

Moses had one more request. “Please let me see your glorious presence,” he said. The LORD replied, “I will make all my goodness pass before you, and I will call out my name, ‘the LORD,’ to you. I will show kindness to anyone I choose, and I will show mercy to anyone I choose.” –Exodus 33:18-19

No one can see the face of God and live. But Moses just had to push the envelope. He asked for a glimpse of God. So God put Moses in the cleft of a rock and covered him to protect him from the blazing fire of his glory, only lifting his hand for Moses to catch a brief glimpse of his back. And what was the essence of what Moses saw? God’s goodness. Goodness is the very essence of who God is, and we can’t see God without seeing his goodness. Conversely, if we don’t see his goodness, we haven’t seen God.

But sometimes a voice deep inside us says, Something is wrong with this picture! This is not what goodness looks like! Sometimes our circumstances seem like anything but evidence of God’s goodness. But that is because we tend to define God by what we have deemed as good. We have to turn that around. We have to learn to define goodness by who God is and what he does. God is eternally, intrinsically, abundantly, infinitely, perfectly good. God himself is the standard by which we should compare anything we want to label as “good.” He is the source from which everything that is truly good emanates. God alone is absolutely good. If God ceased to be good, he would cease to be God.

Can God be any less good to you on a dreary and difficult Monday morning than he was on that monumental Friday afternoon when he hung on a cross in your place? Absolutely not! And God will be no less good to you tomorrow either, because God cannot be less than perfectly good. His goodness is not the effect of his disposition but the essence of his character; it is not an attitude but an attribute.

When Moses got a glimpse of God’s goodness, he “immediately fell to the ground and worshiped” (Exodus 34:8). As you get a glimpse of the goodness of God and as you enjoy the blessings of God’s goodness, will you do the same?

You alone are good, my God. Forgive my self-righteous assumptions that you are anything less than infinitely good in all your ways. Show me your goodness in this land of the living and forevermore.

DIGGING DEEPER