God’s Goodness

God’s Goodness

How great is your goodness, which you have stored up for those who fear you.

Psalm 31:19

IN WORD It’s a strange enigma: The goodness of God is almost universally recognized and yet rarely trusted. At an intellectual level, we know that God is good. After all, He says He is, and we have plenty of evidence that He has been good to us. At the same time, when we think about our future and the dreams we have, we suspect God might not really give them to us. We have our preferences for career directions, mates, children, friendships, interests, and more. And deep down, we wonder: Will God bless me with these things, or will I have to strive for them myself? We seem certain that obedience will always result in pain.

It’s true that obedience is sometimes painful. But the life that is surrendered to God will experience blessing, and the blessing will be good. Will it be hard? Maybe. But not without ample benefit. The mistrust we have about how God will treat us is a lie. It comes from the hard truth of the cost of discipleship, but it leaves out the amazing promises of a God who is good by His very nature. When He tells us that His plans for us are good, we forget that He might actually know how we define “good.”

Think of this: The God who designed you, interests and passions included—the God who wove you together in your mother’s womb and has sovereignly shaped your personality ever since—is the God who has promised you goodness. Whatever He has planned for you, you will like it. Cast aside your assumptions that He always defines goodness as something terribly hard and painful. His goodness may involve hardship, but it doesn’t center on it. He knows what you need, and He promises it will be good.

IN DEED Is that hard to grasp? For those of us who have long envisioned a hard-to-please, down-to-business God, it is. But God doesn’t portray Himself that way. He knows our definition of good, and He has promised to satisfy us with good things.

God is all that is good, in my sight, and the goodness that everything has is His.

—JULIAN OF NORWICH