Suffering and the Goodness of God

I have decided that the whole purpose of this blog is to teach to myself. I have lessons that I teach to myself but I have a tendency to forget those lessons and then I have to re-teach myself. (I guess that says something about the kind of teacher AND the kind of learner that I am!) Really, they are the lessons that the Holy Spirit is teaching me but I have a short memory and therefore, I end up having to learn again the things that I thought I had down! Sound familiar? However, there are some lessons over time that should stick and that I just want to learn and get on with it! (I think that is what we affectionately refer to as "sanctification" but hard-headed seems like a more appropriate term!) Toiling on....

I am certain that even though I aspire to write about suffering and the goodness of God, I will not even scratch the surface in this one blog post. Truly, I could not scratch the surface in a thousand blog posts but I am so captivated by the paradox of suffering and the goodness of God that I had to spend a little time teaching it to myself.

Yesterday I finished a brief book by John Piper on the book of Ruth. He talked about Naomi and her suffering and bitterness toward God for her circumstances after the death of her husband and two sons. When she returns to her hometown of Bethlehem she is openly resentful of the Lord and what calamity has come upon her. What Piper points out is that all of this is working for Naomi's good and God's glory even before she can see it. How? First, Naomi would not have gone home to Bethlehem had a famine not occurred in Moab. Second, Ruth would not have married Boaz had her first husband not died. Third, Naomi would not have been included in the lineage of Jesus Christ without the move to Bethlehem and the death of her husband and children. All of these three things tragic but all necessary for the good to come! Of course, like most of us, when we cannot see what God is doing in the midst of our suffering we assume that He is far from us or that He is punishing us or that He does not love us. On the contrary, He is moving, as Piper says,"In a thousand different ways that we cannot know or see." God had Naomi's good planned out all the way into eternity future even before she lost her husband or her sons. Indeed even before she was born.

For us, we cannot see past the minute that we are in right now, we lack the ability to be able to see into the future and how God is moving on our behalf. Take for instance Job. In the first chapter of Job when he has just lost everything, Job has no way of knowing how the book will end. He doesn't know that God will restore to him all that he has lost and then some. The bible tells us that "in spite of all this Job did not sin nor did he blame God." Job 1:22 So, what does this call for in us as children of God?

First, to believe, regardless of circumstances (which is believing in FAITH) that God is good! His word tells us repeatedly that He is and His word is truth so we start here. Second, we look behind us to see how God has been good to us in the past. History plays a part in our future. Call out and praise the blessings, the mercies and the graciousness of our God to us from eternity past. His word says that "He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world that we would be holy and blameless before Him." Ephesians 1:4 Literally, that means before He created the world He knew you and chose you for His purpose, to be the recipient of His lavish love. What a God!

Lastly, we seek to understand what is the "goodness of God". This is the stumbling block! God's goodness is not a human goodness, a "Western-society" version of goodness although at times His goodness is material it is not the only way that He shows His goodness. God's goodness is ultimately wrapped up in the gospel of Jesus Christ. That is His overwhelming goodness to us. Although He can and does show goodness to us in other ways, which is part of the overflow of His abundant love, His greatest expression of goodness was to redeem us from sin. Something we cannot do for ourselves. Something that all of the material possessions or "other goodnesses" could not do for us. Even if God is good to us in a thousand other ways, if He doesn't give us His Son then we will perish along with all of the other "goodnesses" that we so desire. Yet, more often than not we want the others above the ultimate.

Let's call those other "goodnesses" blessings. We so often associate God's love with material possessions, good health and success in life, to name a few. When those things are taken away we assume that God is no longer pleased with us and we cry out "Why me God, why me?" We are so ingrained in our culture to believe that love is pampering but James MacDonald has said,"God's love is not a pampering love, it is a perfecting love." He doesn't love like us, think like us or act like us even though we keep expecting Him to. He is FAR ABOVE us. God says in Isaiah 55:9, "My ways are higher than your ways and My thoughts than your thoughts." We think that if we suffer that God is punishing us or angry with us even though we don't abide under His wrath as His children (Romans 5:9). This is an oppressive tactic from the enemy - making us question God's goodness and ultimately His love. The point? God's goodness is wrapped up in our suffering! God's goodness is wrapped up in the whole of our lives, in the good AND the bad. If God only controlled the good then He wouldn't be God. He controls it all and in the end we can say, "He has worked ALL things to the GOOD of those who LOVE HIM and are called according to HIS purpose." Romans 8:28

I pray for us, namely myself, that we would be patient and wait to see the goodness of God in the land of the living. That we would know and understand what is the goodness of God toward us, first in Jesus Christ and then in a thousand other ways that we can't fathom. And that we would seek to exalt His goodness for what it really is in the way that we display our lives to a lost and dying world looking for the "goodness of God".