What is Good?

If God is all powerful and all good why does he allow people to suffer?

Pain and suffering doesn’t prove there is no God or that God is not powerful and good, it only proves that God allows painful things to happen.

The question here is what is good? God the Father looked upon the day his son would hang on a cross, nailed there bleeding, and dying said “good.” “The Lord God was pleased to crush him putting him to grief; if he would render himself a guilt offering.” Isaiah 53:10

People suffer because God is just and good, and he cannot allow people to enjoy the pleasures of sin while not the consequences. God kicked Adam out of paradise because He is good. Rather than permit Adam to live forever eternally in the swamp of sin and death he sent him out and began his rescue plan blueprints. But the goodness of God was not confined to that moment, the goodness of God stretches out across the cords of time and can be best understood over time.

So how does God define good verse how man defines good? God foreseeing the entire world and its history, from beginning to end created all the things and said it is very good. From our vantage point we question that goodness on earth daily, starvation, death, disease, accidents, violence, yet God said very good. We cannot understand fully what was in the mind of God when he said that, it could have been the life that would sprout forth, it could have been his own work, it could have been love. it could have been the light that wins out over darkness. God’s kingdom is not created nor defined by mankind’s ideas and pleasures. We are limited in our understanding.

We eat cake and say, mmm good, does that mean it really is good? Its not good for you. A child would eat cake all day until he was vomiting. SO can we truly trust our own instincts and preferences to determine what is “good?” we smoke, we lie, we cheat, we shoot people, we hate, we kill ourselves, we overdose, we speed, we drink and drive, we start wars, we build nuclear weapons, we overeat…can we really trust that humanity has a good handle on what is good?

Jesus said you don’t know the things which make for peace. His thoughts and ways are infinitely above from ours. We see through a glass dimly. God’s Ways and words are vastly different than ours. So in the end who is right? Who gets to determine what is true? Let God be true and every man a liar.

WE make decisions and write dictionaries based upon fleeting knowledge, partial understanding, and changing trends and yet God spans the universe and history to make his perfect judgments. He reads the hearts and minds of men, he goes before us into the future and visits the past to gain knowledge. He doesn’t need our permission , cooperation or input to figure things out. If God is all good why does he allow bad things to happen? What is good?

God’s kingdom is the upside down kingdom he proclaims there is a day where men will call good evil and evil good. He says the way to life is death and the way to death is to seek your own good will. He says that those who are blind can see better then those who have sight, he said those who are humbled will be exalted and those who are exalted will be humbled.

What does it mean that God is a good? its doesn’t mean we get what we want or what we think is good. What does it mean that a judge is good? It means that he punishes the wicked and releases the righteous, and who knows better who is wicked than the one who creates the world and knows the hearts and minds of men.

Most people don’t have a gripe with God they have a gripe with how God operates, his definitions of good and evil. Most men have a god of sorts, but it tends to be the god who cooperates with their preferences and judgments, submitting to their determinations and descriptions. Since the beginning man wants to determine what is good and evil and live according to his resolve. But God in his infinite wisdom and knowledge and like any loving father said, “no son, that’s not good for you, and he held out his hand and said let me show you what is good.”

Now we have the choice, we can continue trying to disprove that God is good because bad things happen, or we can redefine our meaning of good, knowing that the truth that God permits pain ultimately leads us into Life.

^{Hebrews 12:11}No discipline seems pleasant at the time, but painful. Later on, however, it produces a harvest of righteousness and peace for those who have been trained by it.