Is Your God Good?

Really?

We want to believe that proclamation, but secretly we're in great pain, our family is crumbling, and the world around us is falling apart. What's good about any of that?

We don't want to lose our faith by worrying that if God is truly sovereign, he must be behind everything that happens. Because then God . . .

• could help but doesn't . . .
• would help but can't . . .
• punishes wrongdoers . . .
• rewards those who are more holy!

However, the sources of those fears goes beyond the demands of our own suffering. We inherit them from ancient pagans, many biblical characters, and even some modern preachers. But they characterize God as so much harsher than Jesus Christ, it's like trying to amalgamate two different deities.

What if there's relief, relief that may not answer every hard question but still provides a "peace that passes understanding"? What if it's not the hard questions but bad theology that eats away our trust in the goodness of God?

Job and his friends were infected by that bad theology. They thought God controlled everything and punished wrongdoing while rewarding holy living. The disciples expressed similar presumptions: "Who sinned, this man or his parents?" they asked about the blind man. Many of us have been taught these ideas all our lives without realizing their implications. But when you're in pain, they always extract their toll and make suffering many times worse.

However, we cannot equate the descriptions of God's character recorded even by the prophets of old with God's immeasurably more perfect self-revelation through the words, actions, and attitudes God exhibited as Immanuel, God with us in Jesus Christ. If any disparity appears, we must embrace the more perfect revelation in Jesus.

And that's what this book is all about: Reconsidering what we've been told about the character of God in light of what Jesus embodied and showed us. It's about adjusting what we subjectively believed with what is objectively revealed in the character of Jesus.