Choosing Faith In A World Of WorrySample

God Is Good

Do you really believe God is good? Do you understand that the presence of unspeakable evil in this world doesn’t mean God isn’t good? Look around you and see all the goodness he sustains. In his mercy and his unfathomable love, he hasn’t destroyed us despite our corruption (and for all our potential and our good intentions, human corruption is hard to deny). He is executing a brilliantly good plan to rescue us from ourselves and restore the world as it should be. He is good, and we can trust that his plans are always good—even if they don’t match what we want. 

We often think like young children who equate goodness with pleasure, sweetness, and comfort. From this point of view, parents might seem evil for depriving their kids of pleasure, sweetness, and comfort by limiting sugar intake, making them go to school, and requiring them to go to bed at night and get up in the morning. But good parents have another definition of goodness, and our plans for our children are good, even if they don’t understand and they don’t always get to live the kind of life they want to. 

This is even more true for us in relationship to God: not getting what we want is not a legitimate reason to question whether God is good. Neither is reaping the consequences of our own choices.

As our Creator, God knows us better than we know ourselves. All the mysteries of our minds, our genetic makeup, the causes and cures for diseases, our emotional lives, our senses, and our motivations are no mystery to him. In fact, Jesus said God knows every single hair on our heads (Luke 12:7). He knows what we need and gives us good gifts (Matthew 7:11). He does not withhold good things from his children (Psalm 84:11).

But God’s definition of “good” and his understanding of what we need do not always match our own perspective. Sometimes when we worry over what we think we need, we’re really trying to force the hand of the God who said, “Do you question what I do for my children? Do you give me orders about the work of my hands? I am the one who made the earth and created people to live on it. With my hands I stretched out the heavens. All the stars are at my command” (Isaiah 45:11-12).

From Anxious by Amy Simpson