We wake up every morning, and as sure as the sun will rise, we can know that we are loved by One more magnificent than that sunrise and more generous than we can fathom, One who is good and who wants good things for us. If we start with this foundation, everything else we do carries more meaning and makes more sense. And why wouldn’t we start here? The Bible does.
Creation’s undeniable evidence of goodness
What may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities – his eternal power and divine nature – have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse.
– Romans 1:19-20 (NIV)
In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth … but not just for himself. God entrusted his glorious creation to the care of the human beings he’d created in his image. We know that the whole of creation declares the glory of God (Psalm 19:1). But it also demonstrates something else about him – his goodness and incredible kindness to us.
Our perfect Creator crafted a world which sustains our human lives. But he didn’t stop at life and breath or even sustainability. Beyond our survival, the Bible says he considered our delight (1 Timothy 6:17). He made seas, mountains, and rushing waterfalls. He made 2 million species of animals, 400,000 kinds of flowers, 200,000 types of edible plants, and stars too numerous to count. Every good thing a person enjoys in life is a gift from the good and giving God (James 1:17).
He created our world with perfect elegance and complexity, designed it with superfluous creativity. Then he gave it to us – a gift because it’s God’s nature to give. He gave us senses of sight and sound and touch, taste, and smell, so we could experience the richness of these gifts. That’s why King David could say, “taste and see that the Lord is good” (Psalm 34:8). Have you tried this? He’s not only the provider of our needs but also our source of never-ending pleasure (Psalm 16:11).
After God created a perfect human habitat, he called his people to work in, interact with, and enjoy it. (Work did not become labor until after the Fall.) Then he gave the people each other. The only thing in creation God says wasn’t good was for the man to be alone (Genesis 2:18). So, he made them two. Then God gave them the best gift – his own presence. The Bible says that Adam and Eve knew him so well that they recognized the sound of his feet as he walked in the garden (Genesis 3:8).
God’s giving in creation alone is overwhelming evidence of his goodness (Romans 1:20), but it is not all we know if his generosity.
As we often do with good things, over time, the people God created to live in his perfect world grew less grateful. Of all the good things God had given them, only one had been a rule (Genesis 2:17). And they broke it. They fell for the lie that maybe God was withholding some good from them and destroyed the community within their perfect garden.
So God disciplined them(which was also good) and extended forgiveness, making a sacrifice to cover their shame. This would not be the only time God would make a sacrifice, himself, to cover and heal his people from their sin. More generosity was still to come.
A defining attribute of God
Life, beauty, and the capacity he gave us to enjoy them – all this God still gives and sustains, because he is still good and always giving. He is not like a human, who might be good one day and another not. As with each of his attributes, what God is, he is always and completely. God’s goodness is behind all his actions, alive in every one of his other attributes. His lovingkindness is everlasting (Psalm 107:1).
In Exodus, Moses asks God, “Show me your glory” (Exodus 33:18). God answers, instead, that he’ll show Moses his goodness (Exodus 33:19). In the moment that he does, God proclaims:
The Lord, the Lord God, merciful and gracious, longsuffering, and abounding in goodness and truth, keeping mercy for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin …
– Exodus 34:6-7 (KJV)
The same Hebrew word is used twice in God’s description of himself above – once for goodness and once for mercy, the same word, “hesed.” It’s the most-used word to describe God in the Bible, and many scholars say the word is almost untranslatable. But shouldn’t we expect that could be the case, since God’s ways are so much higher than ours? (There’s an exhaustive look at this word in the book, Inexpressible by Michael Card, and as of this writing, it is free on Audible.com. And here’s a great video from The Bible Project about the same word.)
This goodness of God, his hesed, is central to who God is and who we are in him. It’s connected to his character, his covenant, and his compassion (Isaiah 54:10). More psalms and songs than we can count testify to this goodness and never-ending lovingkindness (Psalm 31:19, 73:1, 28, 100:5, 118:1, 136:1, 143:10). Even through some of the darkest parts of the history of God’s people, he sends the prophets with promises of discipline … followed by hope and hesed (Isaiah 54:7-10; Hosea 2:19).
The New Testament gives us four different accounts of the good that God did through Jesus. And the apostle John rejoices: “Behold what manner of love the Father has given to us in Jesus. We have become God’s children” (1 John 3:1). In Jesus, all of God’s good promises are kept (2 Corinthians 1:18-20). In the goodness of the most loving Father, God brings us into his own family.
The ultimate goodness
But the greatest promise God kept was his promise to redeem his people from sin and forgive them (Psalm 130:8, 103:3). We could daily contemplate the goodness involved in the act of giving that happened on the cross and still only begin to fathom it. The gift is beyond measure, unarguably the greatest expression of love and generosity … and his goodness, ever.
Daniel M. Bell, Jr., author and professor of theology and ethics at Lutheran Theological Seminary, writes:
Christ’s work on the cross is a display of the plenitude of divine charity … of God’s giving and giving again. The atonement is not a settling of accounts, an exaction of payment, or the calling in of a debt. Rather it is a matter of God’s ceaseless generosity, of God’s graceful prodigality. It is a matter of … divine donation for our sake. Thus, Christ is not our offering to God but God’s offering to us.*
One day, Jesus will return for us. But even the waiting for it is due to his goodness (2 Peter 3:9). He is patiently waiting for more people to come to a knowledge of his goodness that leads them to repentance and saving faith in him.
If God hadn’t already proven himself so good and faithful, it would be very difficult to wait when the most joyful and generous of his good gifts – Christ’s return – was still yet to come. But we don’t wait alone. Our good God left his Spirit, and at the end of each day on earth, we can remember God’s goodness and say with the psalmist, “It is good for me to be near God.”
*Bell, Daniel M., The Economy of Desire: Christianity and Capitalism in a Postmodern World, (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Publishing, 2012), p. 150.
