JustDad.Blog

“Are you really that good God?!”

I had just gotten done watching an episode of The Chosen. This is a show I highly recommend. The show seeks to bring to life to the experience of Jesus and His disciples when He walked this earth.1 In it, there are many compassionate portrayals of Jesus words and actions towards his fellow humans.

I’ve long struggled to believe in God’s goodness towards me. Much of this comes from feelings of abandonment I have from losing my Mom and Dad (from birth) and from my adopted parents divorce.

Or rather I should say from my reaction to these events…

You see… I know that God has been with me the whole time… and I don’t just mean because of something I read in the Bible.

Watching “The Chosen” has been an answer to a long time prayer of mine to “see” Jesus.

Though I LOVE reading (and writing, clearly) I learn in a variety of different ways… one of them is through embodied story.. such as in movies and plays.

So….. you know how God sometimes answers your prayers before you ask? (If you don’t I highly recommend you ask Him and Thank Him more. (This is something I learned from my wife.)

Immediately, as I got done asking God “Are you really that good, God?”

He FLOODED my mind with reminders of all the small and large blessings that had entered my life recently.

– my wife has expressed a desire for Chickens. I told her we should pray about it. Within weeks, while at a volunteer meeting at church, someone walked in and asked if anyone wanted free chickens. These chickens became a source of joy during the following season

– God answered a prayer my wife has had since childhood for a black standard puppy to be named Sebastian… then I saw this picture of Sebastian with his brother. I fell in love with Bono.

– God gave me Bono, by answering my prayer to reduce His price from the breeder to the specific amount asked for.

I could go on….. but these are the ones that come to mind immediately because they were the biggest blessings.

God is Soooo good. So good.

The longest chapter in the Bible puts it this way:

“You are good, and You do what is good.”
‭‭Psalms‬ ‭119‬:‭68‬ ‭HCSB‬‬

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Addressing Objections to the Goodness of God

It’s been a year since that moment when God answered my question.

Since that time my wife quit her full time job so she could be home with the kids… in part because of this revelation of Gods goodness towards us.

This turned out to be the biggest blessing of them all… because the next season was hard. After my third child was born things got difficult. Lizzie got sick frequently2 and so Jordan really needed to be home to take care of her.

This was one of many trials that came in that season…Among other things our beloved puppies actually ate our beloved chickens… that was hard.

Some people would see these events as counting against God’s goodness. But I don’t think so.

One of the most common questions asked about God is this:

If God is so good, why do bad things happen to good people?

A FULL treatment of “The Problem of evil” would take too long for one post. I will leave some recommendations in the footnotes below (if you want to do further research).3

I will try to address a couple of thoughts though…

There is a logical argument that goes something like this:

1. If God is all powerful

2. And bad things happen

3. Then God can not be all good.

It sounds like a good argument… and a great many people rest their faith in this.4

There is a VERY good answer to both this question and this argument. It just doesn’t boil itself down to a logical syllogism.5

The problem with the argument is it lies on faulty assumptions, sometimes based in deterministic logic (where no one really has any choices)

There are multiple potential assumptions… I’ll highlight two of them.

One assumption seems to be: that we live in a particular kind of simple world: Where if there is a God he has complete control over everything and exercises that control with total force.

Responding to Assumptions

To this assumption: That if there is a God who is all powerful: then he should control everything …. I will say this: Do you really want to live in a world where we have no choices? No? Neither does God.

While the absence of suffering seems ideal… and God DOES want that too… it’s part of his long term plan.6

The Bible says that “God is love”. We know from the entirety of scripture that God is relational… While He may be all powerful: He is by definition Love… He is in his very nature relational… Father, Son, and Holy Spirit love one another and love one another well. They choose this with a unified will. When we were created in his image… that same drive for love was encoded into our being…. He wants us to choose this same kind of love. We don’t always. We have a choice. Enter in evil by choice.

In Genesis 1 and 2 God creates a good world…. In Genesis 3 we find out that our parents of origin rebelled against God… causing sin to enter the world resulting in murder, jealousy, and death.7

It wasn’t always this way… and it’s no doubt our hearts longing for this original state of affairs that tends to make us angry at God for allowing evil in the first place.

One More Assumption

When I asked my wife about this particular argument…she agreed the argument was flawed and brought up one more perceived faulty assumption. My wife has her bachelor in Behavior Sciences: Social work Track and her Juris Doctorate in Law. Beyond those details, I adore her, so I thought bringing this one to the front would be a good idea.

My wife highlighted that the person making this argument assumes they know what Good is. That they, rather then letting God define what good and evil is.

In my mind there are two problems that come to mind with this particular assumption

1. A Biblical one: God is so much bigger than we can possibly comprehend. Understanding goodness and the problem of evil are actually deeply complex things… This is one of main themes of the book of Job. When God finally shows up in the final Act: Job, who had been suffering horrendously, ends up on his face before God… not because God made a good argument, but because he realizes God is so much bigger than he had imagined.8

2. A Logical one: Defining good and evil… assumes that there is a definition of good and evil. Defining good and evil is generally hard to do when your belief system relies on a series of probabilities and chances as the naturalist view does.

I believe there is an objective good and evil… however as human beings we have generally disagreed on its definition across time. Despite the complexities this is actually consistent with the biblical worldview which recognizes that sin has actually skewed our sense of right and wrong.

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So what DO we do with evil… what do we do with difficult things?

1. As followers of Jesus: We acknowledge there is evil in the world. In fact we believe that there are spiritual manifestations of evil (normally called demons) Jesus HAS authority even over there… and one part of his ministry was casting them out of people. As followers of Jesus we are called to push back darkness wherever we go through living out the life of Jesus through our own.

2. As followers of Jesus: We recognize that difficult things and even evil are being used to grow us as followers of him. The Book of James says it like this:

“Consider it a great joy, my brothers, whenever you experience various trials, knowing that the testing of your faith produces endurance. But endurance must do its complete work, so that you may be mature and complete, lacking nothing.”
‭‭James‬ ‭1‬:‭2‬-‭4‬ ‭HCSB‬‬

Not only are followers told to endure trials… we are told to consider them joy because of the good the produce in us.

Paul put it this way: “We know that all things work together for the good of those who love God: those who are called according to His purpose.”
‭‭Romans‬ ‭8‬:‭28‬ ‭HCSB‬‬

Footnotes

1. See the Trailer:

2. See prior post: (Daddies’): Tales of an Infant Asthmatic

3. I will leave two recommendations here:

The Doors of the Sea: Where Was God in the Tsunami? David Bentley Hart (2011)

The Case for Faith Lee Strobel (2021, updated and expanded

4. The most well known form of the argument was made by a philosopher David Hume (1711-1776 CE). The argument in its formal form dates back as far as back as the 2nd century BCE.

5. Syllogism: an instance of a form of reasoning in which a conclusion is drawn (whether validly or not) from two given or assumed propositions (premises), each of which shares a term with the conclusion, and shares a common or middle term not present in the conclusion (e.g., all dogs are animals; all animals have four legs; therefore all dogs have four legs ).

6. See Revelation 21:4

7. Genesis 4 sees one the worlds first people literally murder his brother because he is jealous.

8. Job 38-42