Is God Good All the Time? Really…

If you've been in the church for a period of time, I'm sure you've heard a pastor say, God is good, and the congregation responds without hesitation, all the time!

But, how can we prove that He really is good all the time from His Word?  After all, there are so many terrible things happening in the world today and we even have a record of countless horrendous things that happened in Bible history.

When you read passages in the Old Testament and take it at face value, one would immediately assume that God is mean sometimes, allowed awful things to continue to happen, and seemed not to care about women and their rights.  But that doesn't line up with the Jesus of the New Testament who is also God. 

So, what can we do here to make sense of the goodness of God throughout the whole Bible? 

When we read these passages, we have to take some time to learn about what was going on culturally and what God actually did.  We also need to understand foundationally that God operates by one system of government that holds true in our world today: seedtime and harvest.

For example, check out what God commands in Deuteronomy 22:28-29, "When a man comes upon a virgin who has never been engaged and grabs and rapes her and they are found out, the man who raped her has to give her father fifty pieces of silver.  He has to marry her because he took advantage of her.  And he can never divorce her."

Well, goodness gracious!  At first glance, this looks like God is saying the woman who was not only violated one time has to be married to this dimwit and be violated over and over again in wedlock.  That's not at all what's happening here. 

Culturally, men were raping women all the time without any consequences to their terrible actions.  Women who were raped were seen as damaged goods and no man would ever want them, so how could they support themselves?  God put in place this law of marriage to protect a woman financially and personally, too.  The dude had to set up a bank account with her father and guarantee that she would be provided for by the legal binding of marriage.

Now, in some cases that we read in the Bible it absolutely looks like God is punishing people and bringing natural disasters to destroy people.  What I'm about to teach you next will totally change how you read the Bible if you let it- it did for me!

If you look closely at your Bible, you will see that God's name appears in the three ways: God, GOD, and the LORD.  Capital "G", lowercase "o" and lowercase "d" means Elohim, which is God in His fullness: God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit as one.  All caps, G, O, and D and also in the case of L, O, R, and D is God acting in His system of government, which is seedtime and harvest as briefly mentioned earlier.

Every word we speak, every action we take is a seed and that seed is immediately planted.  When we speak more and act more in the same way, the seed is watered, grows, and develops into a mature plant so to speak, which is the harvest.  In scripture, when we see GOD or the LORD, we are seeing God delivering the harvest from seeds that people planted- it's not God acting on His own.

That simple but profound truth completely changed the way I read the Bible and saw God in different situations.  He really is absolutely good and wants nothing to do with the darkness.

I love questions!  Please comment or email (cara@caragibson.co) any of your questions.  I want to help you understand the Bible more clearly!